Decay And Redemption

Modern city is a product of the extensive transformation from traditional agricultural civilization to modern industrial civilization. Marked by the industrial revolution, cities began to take shape in the late18th century in England and then began to develop also in Europe and America. By the late19th century, the urbanization had reached its climax in nearly all European countries. From then on, the city has become an independent aesthetic subject and written object in literature, expressing the responses of writers to social problems and cultural phenomena in different stages of modernization.Under the colonial rule of Britain and the spiritual suppression of the Roman Catholic, Dublin, the capital of Ireland, witnessed a series of social problems produced by modern city in the late19th and early20th century, like the chaos of the society, the unlimited expansion of man’s desires, the polarization of the rich and the poor, the disappearance of morality, the corruption of humanity, the emptiness of man’s spirit and so on. James Joyce, a master of modernist fiction, was born in Dublin and had accumulated abundant city experience by wandering from city to city in continental Europe during his entire life. From Dubliners, his anthology of short stories, Joyce had always pointed his pen to the deformed and paralytic modern city—Dublin, and Dubliners’state of being.The author of this thesis holds that though the city in literature is to some degree a faithful representation of the city in reality, it is also a reconstruction and remodeling of the real city, therefore, the writer’s outlook of world, literature and city as well as his literary practices and rhetoric devices all have an effect on the representation of a city. In the fifteen seemingly prosaic short stories, Joyce actually places Dublin in the background of urban development and urban culture. Through the study of the spatial form and the way of life which are closely related to modern city, this thesis reinterprets the main theme "decay" of Dubliners; besides, through the analysis of Joyce’s feelings towards Dublin intentionally or unintentionally shown in the stories, this thesis tends to explore Joyce’s assumption of the city’s "redemption". By applying a combined method of cultural studies, social-historical criticism and textual analysis, this thesis conducts a study of the city writing in Joyce’s Dubliners in a given context of the macroscopic religious, colonial and social background of Dublin at Joyce’s time. First, this thesis will carry a microcosmic yet overall research on Joyce’s city experience and its influence on his city writing. During Joyce’s wandering life from Dublin to the Continent, all those people he met and all those ups and downs he experienced not only offered inexhaustible materials for his literary creation, but also influenced his view of modern city and modern people’s way of life. Second, it sketches the decayed spatial form of Joyce’s "literary city" by choosing four most typical spaces of Dublin—street, house, bar and church. By emphasizing the narrative function of city space as certain modes of social relations and social psychology, Joyce presented the integral image of a lifeless city. Third, it discusses the urbanism of the citizens living in it in order to present the influence of urbanization on people’s life. In the Dublin city of that time, people’s material life was commercialized and money-oriented while people’s spiritual state was in alienation due to lack of communication and solicitude. And in the last chapter, the thesis analyses Joyce’s tentative assumption of the redemption of Dublin city.In conclusion, the city writing in Joyce’s Dubliners demonstrates his worries about the decayed and alienated city living conditions as well as his doubts and introspection of urbanization, which redefines the relationship between the writer and the city and reveals his profound value concerns for modern society.