From Egocentrism to Geocriticism: Attempting to Explore James Joyce’s Dubliners

المؤلف

جامعة الاسکندرية - کلية الآداب- قسم اللغة الانجليزية وآدابها

المستخلص

Geocriticism designates a wide range of critical practices that focus on the study of geographical space. Its aim is primarily to explore real and imagined places. This paper adopts a geocentric/geocritical rather than an egocentric approach in an attempt to explore the diverse discourses that underpin James Joyce’s depiction of Dublin’s paralysis in Dubliners (1914). While the former refers to an eclectic study of a city, a region, or a territory, the latter is limited only to studying a given author’s treatment of that place. A recourse to the geocritical emphasis on what the French critic Bertrand Westphal calls “multifocalization”, which implies moving beyond a single author’s perspective, can thus be an apt conduit for reading Joyce’s text. From the lens of geocriticism the stories included in the collection prove to be riven by heterogeneity and multifocalization, thereby offering a less subjective and a more dynamic perception of space.

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