Short Story Collections, Part 1: James Joyce’s Dubliners

About this course:

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. In this course, we read its fifteen stories that together are a themed short story collection that includes such stories as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” all of which take readers into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying their outer and inner lives. As a work of literary realism, Joyce’s intentionally themed collection grounds its realism in sudden recognitions—epiphanies— through which protagonists experience a change in their view of themselves, their social conditions, and their spiritual awareness. Suggested book: Dubliners.