Joyce’s Dubliners
This research paper will primarily employ the close reading and analytic writing skills you’ve employed
(and perfected!) in prior essays, and that we’ve discussed throughout the semester. Focusing on two stories
from Joyce’s Dubliners, address one of the questions below. Remember, that in answering these questions
you will want to develop your arguments through close readings of certain key passages in the text. When
you introduce textual evidence, be sure to cite it correctly, and explicate the text you’ve brought in to
discuss.
Your paper must employ 1 critical source. I highly recommend the essays in the Norton Critical Edition.
Your use of the critical sources is to help enhance and develop your interpretation of the text—but not to
overwhelm it. Be sure to develop your own thoughts and voice, and let the critical sources you use to enter
your thoughts into a conversation with these articles. You may do this by finding support for your own
reading in the critical essay, or for arguing against the position or observation made in a critical essay.
1. Dubliners, we can see specific experiences that are determined by gender, class, and race. We see a
variety of people with anxiety and concern over their social experiences: from shifting hierarchies
between men and women, to varying class positions from poor laborers and swindlers to wealthier
upper classes. How are these experiences of gender OR class OR race (of course, pick one) important
for the developing identity of the characters?
2. Joyce saw Dubliners as being divided into childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. How can
we see Dubliners as experiences of coming of age? How do the stories present versions of childhood
and maturity? How are the lives of different generations intertwined?
3. Joyce’s stories often incorporate what appear as epiphanies—sudden revelations into their lives,
characters, or their situation. Often times what incites these epiphanies, or what the characters learn
from their epiphany is vague or ambiguous. Discuss in detail what you take to be experiences of
epiphany in the stories you’ve picked. How are they related? What brings them about? How is the
presentation of the epiphany clear or unclear? What does this tell us about the nature of the epiphany?
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