Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce’s tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.

The stories

• The Sisters – After the priest Father Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him and his family deal with it only superficially.
• An Encounter – Two schoolboys playing truant encounter an elderly man.
• Araby – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby bazaar.
• Eveline – A young woman abandons her plans to leave Ireland with a sailor.
• After the Race – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
• Two Gallants – Two con men, Lenehan and Corley, find a maid who is willing to steal from her employer.
• The Boarding House – Mrs. Mooney successfully manoeuvres her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with her lodger Mr. Doran.
• A Little Cloud – Little Chandler’s dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher casts fresh light on his own failed literary dreams. The story reflects also on Chandler’s mood upon realizing his baby son has replaced him as the centre of his wife’s affections.
• Counterparts – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.
• Clay – The old maid Maria, a laundress, celebrates Halloween with her former foster child Joe Donnelly and his family.
• A Painful Case – Mr. Duffy rebuffs Mrs. Sinico, then four years later realizes he has condemned her to loneliness and death.
• Ivy Day in the Committee Room – Minor politicians fail to live up to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.
• A Mother – Mrs. Kearney tries to win a place of pride for her daughter, Kathleen, in the Irish cultural movement, by starring her in a series of concerts, but ultimately fails.
• Grace – After Mr. Kernan injures himself falling down the stairs in a bar, his friends try to reform him through Catholicism.
• The Dead – Gabriel Conroy attends a party, and later, as he speaks with his wife, has an epiphany about the nature of life and death. At 15–16,000 words this story has also been classified as a novella. The Dead was adapted into a film by John Huston, written for the screen by his son Tony and starring his daughter Anjelica as Mrs. Conroy.

Style

In Dubliners Joyce rarely uses hyperbole or emotive language, relying on simplicity and close detail to create a realistic setting. This ties the reader’s understanding of people to their environments. He does not tell readers what to think, rather they are left to come to their own conclusions; this is evident when contrasted with the moral judgements displayed by earlier writers such as Charles Dickens. This frequently leads to a lack of traditional dramatic resolution within the stories.

It has been argued (by Hugh Kenner in Joyce’s Voices, among others)^[3] that Joyce often allows his narrative voice to gravitate towards the voice of a textual character. For example, the opening line of ‘The Dead’ reads “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” She is not, in this instance, “literally” run off her feet, and neither would Joyce have thought so; rather, the narrative lends itself to a misuse of language typical of the character being described.

Joyce often uses descriptions from the characters’ point of view, although he very rarely writes in the first person. This can be seen in Eveline, when Joyce writes, “Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne”. Here, Joyce employs an empirical perspective in his description of characters and events; an understanding of characters’ personalities is often gained through an analysis of their possessions. The first paragraph of A Painful Case is an example of this style, as well as Joyce’s use of global to local description of the character’s possessions. Joyce also employs parodies of other writing styles; part of A Painful Case is written as a newspaper story, and part of Grace is written as a sermon. This stylistic motif may also be seen in Ulysses (for example, in the Aeolus episode, which is written in a newspaper style), and is indicative of a sort of blending of narrative with textual circumstances.

The collection as a whole displays an overall plan, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in The Dead. Great emphasis is laid upon the specific geographic details of Dublin, details to which a reader with a knowledge of the area would be able to directly relate. The multiple perspectives presented throughout the collection serve to contrast the characters in Dublin at thistime.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, born 8 November 1954 is a Japanese–British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor’s degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master’s from the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 prize for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945″. Recently, his novel Never Let Me Go has been adapted to film.

        A number of his novels are set in the past. His latest novel, Never Let Me Go, has science fiction qualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.

An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan’s surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan’s misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson. Ishiguro said of his choice of time period, “I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I’m interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the test came.”

The novels are written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro’s technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator’s flaws while being drawn to sympathize with the narrator as well. This pathos is often derived from the narrator’s actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward the housekeeper Miss Kenton because he cannot reconcile his sense of service with his personal life.

Ishiguro’s novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.

mono no aware (物の哀れ ), literally “the pathos of things”, also translated as “an empathy toward things”, or “a sensitivity to ephemera”, is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of impermanence , or the transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing.

(Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuo_Ishiguro)

The Help

 The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. A USA Today article called it one of 2009’s “summer sleeper hits“. An early review in The New York Times notes Stockett’s “affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections” and says the book is a “button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel”. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said of the book, “This heartbreaking story is a stunning début from a gifted talent”.

The novel is Stockett’s first. It took her five years to complete and was rejected by 60 literary agents before agent Susan Ramer agreed to represent Stockett. The Help has since been published in 35 countries and three languages.^[6] As of August 2011, it has sold five million copies and has spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Plot Summary

The Help is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Aibileen is an African-American maid who cleans houses and cares for the young children of various white families. Her first job since her own 24-year-old son died from an accident on his job is tending the Leefolt household and caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Minny is Aibileen’s confrontational friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them, resulting in having being fired from nineteen jobs. Minny’s most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Hilly is the social leader of the community, and head of the Junior League. She is the nemesis of all three main characters.

Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family whose cotton farm employs many African-Americans in the fields, as well as in the household. Skeeter has just finished college and comes home with dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother’s dream is for Skeeter to get married. Skeeter frequently wonders about the sudden disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her. She had been writing to Skeeter while she was away at college and her last letter promised a surprise upon her homecoming. Skeeter’s family tells her that Constantine abruptly quit, then went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe that Constantine would just leave and continually pursues anyone she thinks has information about her to come forth, but no one will discuss the former maid.

The life that Constantine led while being the help to the Phelan family leads Skeeter to the realization that her friends’ maids are treated very differently from how the white employers are treated. She decides (with the assistance of a publisher) that she wants to reveal the truth about being a colored maid in Mississippi. Skeeter struggles to communicate with the maids and gain their trust. The dangers of undertaking writing a book about African-Americans speaking out in the South during the early ’60s hover constantly over the three women.

Racial issues of overcoming long-standing barriers in customs and laws are experienced by all of the characters. The lives and morals of Southern socialites are also explored.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)       

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator’s father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel’s impact by writing, “In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism.”

As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets. Scholars also note the black characters in the novel are not fully explored, and some black readers receive it ambivalently, although it has an often profound effect on many white readers.

Reception to the novel varied widely upon publication. Literary analysis of it is considerably sparse compared to the number of copies sold and its use in education. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of the book by several authors and public figures, calls To Kill a Mockingbird “an astonishing phenomenon”. In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one “every adult should read before they die”. It was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. To date, it is Lee’s only published novel, and although she continues to respond to the book’s impact, she has refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Literary Women 2: Joyce Carol Oates (1938~)

         This astonishingly prolific writer has published dozens of short stories, novels, poetry collections and essays on topics as far-ranging as the Victorian age and boxing. Born in Upstate New York, she graduated from Syracuse University in 1960 and earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin. She published the first of her books in 1963: By the North Gate, a volume of short stories. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, appeared in 1964 and the novel them (1963) won the National Book Award. Oates has since produced a steady stream of work even while teaching English at various colleges, including Princeton University. Her oeuvre includes The Goddess and Other Women (1974), Bellefleur (1980), Because It Is Better; and Because It Is My heart (1990), and Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993). Often violent or even morbid, her stories probe the dark corners of the human psyche and the underside of contemporary society.

(Excerpted from 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about Women’s History)

Literary Women 1: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

        One of the most fabled figures in American Literature, the “Myth of Amherst” is as famous for her eccentric life as for her matchless poetry. Quirky and engaging as a child, she had an apparently normal upbringing and attended Mount Holyoke for a year. From that point on, however, she became increasingly withdrawn, started dressing entirely in white and ventured off her father’s Amherst, Massachusetts, property less and less often. Finally, she stopped leaving the house altogether, refused to see visitors and spent almost all her time in her room. Even in her final illness, she allowed a doctor to “examine” her only from a distance as she passed once behind a partly open doorway.

        Publishing only eight poems during her lifetime, Dickinson left behind a total of 1776, neatly written out and hand-bound in little books hidden in her room. This verse came to be recognized as some of the most brilliant every produced in the English language. Phrased and metered with tremendous economy and art, Dickinson’s poetry reveals towering intellect, singular wit and searing passion all the more startling for the seemingly confined life she led. She was undeniably agoraphobic, a condition many scholars blamed on a failed love affair with an unidentified man. But hints dropped to friends and family indicated Dickinson viewed her isolation as a form of freedom and consciously used her idiosyncrasies to construct a literary persona that would long outlive her.

(Excerpted from 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about Women’s History)