A Painful Case

Mr. Duffy is a bank cashier and recluse living in Dublin, who purposely avoids contact with other people—until he meets Mrs. Sinico at a concert. While Mr. Sinico believes their relationship to be purely platonic, Mrs. Sinico indicates otherwise. Critically acclaimed author James Joyce’s Dubliners is a collection of short stories depicting middle-class life in Dublin in the early twentieth century. First published in 1914, the stories draw on themes relevant to the time such as nationalism and Ireland’s national identity, and cement Joyce’s reputation for brutally honest and revealing depictions of everyday Irish life. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

»He single-handedly killed the 19th century.« T. S. Eliot »James Joyce revolutionized 20th-century literature.« Time Magazine With Dubliners [1914], James Joyce aimed to cast his hometown, the experiences of his upbringing, in an unforgiving light. Considering how people, especially men, are portrayed here, it's no wonder that it took many years of constant rejections before Dubliners was finally published, in the fateful year of 1914 for Europe. The language in which all events are depicted is so vivid, incessantly so close to the very heart of the events, that James Joyce's first prose work has become one of the immortal classics. JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].

"An eminently insightful and informative study of a single story, as well as a profound exploration of Joyce's position within his own historical moment and its most urgent philosophical and religious questions."--James Joyce Quarterly "One of the more intellectually capacious, wide-ranging studies on Joyce and his work to emerge in some time. . . . Owens's book is among the finest studies of Dubliners ever written as well as among the best--most provocative, revealing, and useful--critical works on Joyce to be published in some time."--Philological Quarterly "While Owens has captured the breadth of subjects that a casebook would offer, he balances his readings with a great deal of focused and specific close reading. . . . This book is an excellent companion for reading 'A Painful Case' and would be essential reading for anyone engaging in an in-depth study of Dubliners."--James Joyce Literary Supplement "Inspires awe, admiration, and wonder. . . . There is something new for every Joyce student and scholar to learn from Owens's thorough research."--English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 In order to demonstrate that one story from the Dubliners is not only a turning point in that book but also a microcosm of a wide range of important Joycean influences and preoccupations, Cóilín Owens examines the dense intertextuality of "A Painful Case." Assuming the position of the ideal contemporary Irish reader that Joyce might have anticipated, Owens argues that the main character, James Duffy, is a "spoiled priest," emotionally arrested by his guilt at having rejected the call to the priesthood. Duffy's intellectual life thereafter progresses through German idealism to eventual nihilism. The contrast of nihilist thought and Christian belief is Owens's main focus, and he demonstrates how this dichotomy is evident at various points in the life of James Duffy. From this springboard, Owens constructs a larger discussion of Joyce's cultural influences, including Schopenhauer, Wagner, Tolstoy, and others. He considers many other complex interrelationships that inform Joyce's text--theology, philosophy, music, opera, literary history, Irish cultural history, and Joyce's own poetry--and offers detailed elucidations informed by historical, geographical, linguistic, and biographical information.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft, 7 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Though James Joyce's talent for words was not fully appreciated in his day, yet he was known for being a gifted writer with excellent narrative abilities. Literature experts agree that these skills were mainly shaped during the creation of "Dubliners", a volume of more comprehensible short stories published in 1914. The genius of this collection revolving round the ill-fated lower middle class life in early 20th century Dublin is the lively description of the individual characters contained therein. Joyce accomplished these detailed characterizations by mainly using actual friends and acquaintances as well as enemies as models for his characters. In "A Painful Case", the "most sophisticated and complex 'Dubliners' story" (Adam Sexton), it is apparent that James Joyce himself serves as a blueprint for the main character of the story, James Duffy. Accordingly, this written work contends that "A Painful Case" is in reality a glimpse at Joyce's own personal life, and more particularly at the relationship to his future wife Nora Barnacle.

Because the stories in James Joyce's 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. Joyce's 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 Norris's 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 Joyce's 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 Joyce's 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 Joyce's writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues than we had thought.

Considered as one of the greatest short stories in the Western Canon, James Joyce's complex narrative "The Dead", explores the intricate issues of identity and power through the lens of language, patriarchy, and imperialism. These issues are directly tied to the longstanding political turmoil of his native Ireland and the social questions of his day. Joyce's story reveals that we often achieve what we tried to avoid by pretending to be what we are not. The Dead is often considered a novella and the best of Joyce's shorter works.

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