Dubliners Proposal
The Need for a New Critical Edition of James Joyce's Dubliners
Despite enormous volumes of criticism and scholarship, James Joyce remains one of the most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century. His books have caused great controversy in both the literary and political worlds, as scholars and officials alike attempt to come to an understanding of is true intents and meanings. As with any great writer and/or works of literature, such attempts and the resultant debates will never cease; there is no single correct interpretation or understanding of Joyce's works, just as there is no way to come to a full and complete understanding of the author himself. This is precisely what makes literature both exciting and enduring -- it remains alive throughout the ages, no matter how much time has passed between the act of the literature's creation and a reader's discovery of the text. Each individual interpretation brings something new to the work, and these continual additions and emendations create a dynamic and essentially indefinable sense of meaning.
This does not mean, however, that scholarly and critical works that attempt to more rigidly define meaning are without value. On the contrary, despite the inherent incompleteness of specific critical interpretations, they...
It is through continued reinterpretation and reexamination that the mutability of literature is brought to light, and it is in such pursuits and the mutability they make apparent that the true value of a literary work -- and of the society and individual that produced that work, as well as the value of the society and individual that produced a certain understanding and interpretation of the work -- can be found. With an author and text as enigmatic as Joyce and his Dubliners, this is all the more true.
The last critical edition of Joyce's Dubliners was published in 1996 under the Viking imprint, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. The collection of short stories was originally published in 1914, and thus a thirteen-years gap in a collection of critical scholarship might not seem overly long for a book that has been in print for nearly a century. Certainly, the criticism collected in the Viking Critical Library edition remains highly relevant, and represented the most recent available scholarship on the subject at the time of the book's publication. It is also true that no new groundbreaking discoveries concerning Joyce's life and biography or his writing of the stories in Dubliners have been made in the past thirteen…
