Suspicious Readings of Joyces Dubliners

Suspicious Readings of Joyces DublinersMargot NorrisA sophisticated, provocative, and thoroughly original approach to Joyces stories, especially to the peculiarities of their narrative style. It is difficult to think of another book on Joyce published over the last fifteen years of comparable significance.--Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of PennsylvaniaBecause the stories in James Joyces Dubliners seem to function as models of fiction, they are able to stand in for fiction in general in their ability to make the operation of texts explicit and visible. Joyces stories do this by provoking skepticism in the face of their storytelling. Their narrative unreliabilities--produced by strange gaps, omitted scenes, and misleading narrative prompts--arouse suspicion and oblige the reader to distrust how and why the story is told.As a result, one is prompted to look into what is concealed, omitted, or left unspoken, a quest that often produces interpretations in conflict with what the narrative surface suggests about characters and events. Margot Norriss strategy in her analysis of the stories in Dubliners is to refuse to take the narrative voice for granted and to assume that every authorial decision to include or exclude, or to represent in a particular way, may be read as motivated. Suspicious Readings of Joyces Dubliners examines the text for counterindictions and draws on the social context of the writing in order to offer readings from diverse theoretical perspectives.Suspicious Readings of Joyces Dubliners devotes a chapter to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners and shows how each confronts the reader with an interpretive challenge and an intellectual adventure. Its readings of An Encounter, Two Gallants, A Painful Case, A Mother, The Boarding House, and Grace reconceive the stories in wholly novel ways--ways that reveal Joyces writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues