Anne Fogarty



Anne Fogarty is Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin and President-elect of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is Director of the UCD James Joyce Research Centre and editor of the Irish University Review, a premier Irish Studies journal. She is co-editor with Timothy Martin of Joyce on the Threshold (University of Florida Press, 2005), with Morris Beja of Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses, and with Fran O'Rourke of James Joyce: Multidisciplinary Approaches. With Luca Crispi she is editor of the newly founded Dublin James Joyce Journal, a co-publication with the National Library of Ireland which will be launched in June 2008. She has edited special issues of the Irish University Review on Spenser and Ireland, Lady Gregory, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and of the Colby Quarterly on Irish Women Novelists . She has published widely on aspects of contemporary Irish fiction. She has co-directed two international Joyce symposia and has been Academic Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School since 1997. She is the recipient of the 2008 Charles Fanning Prize in Irish Studies .




ABSTRACT
“A Chapter of the Moral History of My Country”: Dubliners as Political Critique

James Joyce famously and portentously declared that his intention in composing Dubliners was “to write a chapter of the moral history of my country”. He added that he chose Dublin as the setting for his collection of short stories because it seemed to him “the centre of paralysis”. Yet these apparently satirical objectives combined with the aim to capture the essence of Dublin and to represent hidden but defining aspects of its social and political structures. This paper will examine aspects of the complex narrativity of Dubliners. It will look at the way in which Joyce unsettlingly marries satire and empathy in these stories and will argue that they ultimately prompt us as readers always to reconsider the superficial or overt moralities that they proffer. Above all, the political insights construed by these stories are devastating because of their starkness and their teasing elusiveness.