This seminar begins by putting Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist into their social and literary contexts. We will then spend two meetings on each work. Though in different genres—the short story and the education novel—they are companion pieces in significant ways. Dubliners illustrates the oppression of Irish Catholics by British Protestants and by Irish Catholics themselves through the strictures of the institutionalized Church. A Portrait tells the tale of an individual who refuses to submit to either authority, and who seeks artistic freedom to write. The seminar will explore these themes through an examination of the works’ range of styles and overall narrative structures. The ultimate aim will be to understand how Dubliners and A Portrait provide a “moral history” of Ireland, and how the writer can in Joyce’s words “forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.”
