Modernism and the Short Story: the case of Joyce's Dubliners

“Labels” are a sort of manifestation of the profoundly human propensity to attempt to categorise reality as a way to understand it. On the one hand, they are bound to reveal certain essential truths about the culture which has spawned them; on the other hand, they may pose a potential threat against the very apprehension of the complexity of the real if one is not mindful of their true nature at all times. Whilst labels may act as helpful lenses through which one may observe reality, we should remember that this is precisely what they are: filters. As such, a labelling operation is never wholly innocent: it presupposes the existence of an underlying agenda, and it is up to us, as critical “readers” of the real (even before literature), to figure out what that looks like. This is the reason why my entire dissertation is ultimately framed as an attempt at defining – as well as contextualising both historically and geographically – with progressive clarity and specificity the contours of the genre of “modernist” short fiction. In my dissertation, I resort to Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce as my primary source to closely examine the repercussions of the attribution of a certain literary term to describe a certain work of literature and how this labelling operation may skew its very perception and reception in significant ways. This paper aims at analysing the intricacies of the dynamic between “modernism” and the short story as a literary genre – with a particular focus on a highly specific “shape” this combination did morph into: the Irish modernist short story. By diving into James Joyce’s 1914 famous collection of short stories, I will attempt to provide the reader with an in-depth study of some of the meanings the expression “modernist” short story may take on.