Reading "Dubliners" Again

Standard approaches to James Joyce's "Dubliners" usually emphasise Joyce's mastery of realism as well as his tight control of tone, character and detail. Most readings of these stories - whether in formal criticism or in classroom discussion - usually result in a celebration of the "completeness" of Joyce's work, the sense of how everything fits together with such seeming inevitability. In "Reading 'Dubliners' Again", Garry Leonard takes a different approach. He abandons the traditional clarity of linear progression, as well as the steady accumulation of meaning in order to explore the gaps, silences, elisions, deferred actions, "self-delusions and false consistencies" in the texts. In short, Leonard uses the full force of Lacanian theory regarding the nature of discourse to free himself - and his readers - from 75 years of conventional interpretation. Leonard begins with an overview of Lacan and proceeds to examine each of the 13 stories in a separate chapter. Lacan's rethinking of human subjectivity plays throughout the book and ultimately unites it.
Not only does Leonard's work preserve the complex interplay between Lacanian theory and Joyce's texts, but also completes another and no less significant project: the rescuing of "Dubliners" from the category of "easy Joyce". All those working in the fields of Joyce studies, Irish literature, and literary criticism should find "Reading 'Dubliners' Again" a useful work of creative scholarship. Students and scholars working in the allied field of literary history, as well as those interested in a creative, new application of the "French Freud", should also appreciate this as a thought-provoking analysis.