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Folks, Here is a useful site that has its own full set of annotations to Joyce's "The Dead" ------ maybe it will prove helpful. At least it is worth a look-see. One need not agree with everything on it (I sure don't) but I find it a very interesting site filled with useful background information and many original suppositions about the text we are about to read. Here is the link to "The Dead" in the Worldwide WEB Dubliners Project------ it has both a text of the story and clickable links to the annotations-------- Click here: http://www.stg.brown.edu/~rog/WWD/WWDdead.html Click here: James Joyce's "The Dead" </A> Good Reading
I have just returned from a visit to Britain. I notice that the Joyce Luck Club mesaages are, sadly, drying up. I have not read any introduction by a group member to The Dead yet. ( Was there one and have I nmissed it?). Anyway, I am jumping in with a quotation from George Steiner's 'Errata', an autobiographical piece, about the experience and emotion Steiner shared with a bunch of students while doing The Dead. It is short, but remarkable. In few short lines, Steiner catches the beauty of The Dead so well! Steiner is a major literary critic. In my opinion, he is worth reading, specially, on his commentaries on Kafka, and some rather unconventional, critical thoughts on Shaespeare, who no one ever dares criticise: "Not long after, a group came to my room. They crowded the upper and lower bunks and the floor. Could I be of use in regard to Joyce's story, 'The Dead'? they are few short fictions more manifold, more interleaved with pressures of rewmembered history and the gradual revelations of intent. Few in which it would be impossible to omit a sentence without impairing the intelligence, the commanding shape of the whole. I found myself conducting an unauthorized seminar into the long night, raeding with and just ahead of these concentrated listeners. I glimpsed them taking notes, underlining nad filling the margins in their text. I spoke of the sheer musicality of the story. Songs and song-titles are as informing in 'The Dead' as they are in Twelfth Night or Finnegans Wake. I read aloud the finale: "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Fury lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His souls swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." Chandra, I hope you read this wherever you are, on the undulating plains of Karnataka filled with mystery and soft boulders that look as if they of cotton and have no weight, the spires of temples capped by the hazy blue of the sky, arresting time, the air simmering endlessly in the heat. -- Rasik Shah |
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