Dublin: The City That Affects

Abstract

Surprisingly, there has been little interest in the strong influence the city of Dublin wields over the characters in James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. Until recently, scholars have rarely approached the city as the major cause for the indifference, misfortunes and paralysis haunting the characters. With the recent studies of affect theory it has become easier to view an inanimate source, such as a city, as the main reason behind particular actions, feelings and emotions. The considerably new theoretical framework of affect brings attention to organic and inorganic matter and explores the power of inanimate things to alter and shape the world. This paper applies Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A political Ecology of Things and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects to James Joyce’s Dubliners and discusses Dublin as a force that plays a significant role in the development of Dubliners’ perceptions, in the ways they feel and deal with mundane matters.  I do not only approach Dublin as an assemblage of different operators such as the urban landscape, the houses, the trains, the trams, the shades and colours of despair and many others, but as an assemblage with its own agency that leads to negative influence. The reasons behind the negative impact are traced mainly in Irish history: in the traumatic experiences of British colonialism, in the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution and in the disaster of the Great Irish Potato Famine. The paper contributes to the analytical works of Joycean scholars by offering a new way to approach the short story collection: a way that gives voice to, what Bennett calls, a ‘thing-power’

Keywords

• , affect theory,‘thing-power’,James Joyce,Ireland

References

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