46c 15

1. ELIT 46C: Class
IMAGISM: 1909/1912-1917
I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether
subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in
sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of the metronome.
James Joyce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkGvfX6BNFM

2. Imagism, a reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry,
fathered most famously by Ezra Pound, emerged in both England and America
in the early twentieth century. It emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and
precision through the use of purposeful and exact visual images.
The idea of imagism spread very fast. At the onset, William Carlos Williams, a
friend of Pound’s from Pennsylvania, set out to simplify his style. James Joyce
sent Yeats an imagist poem, “I hear an Army,” which Yeats passed on to Pound
and Pound accepted. D H Lawrence also sent in imagist poems including the
one we will hear next: “Brooding Grief.” Pound himself was shortening his
poems, focusing intently on image and line, so that the majority of the poems in
his collection, Lustra, are under 14 lines, including In a Station of the Metro:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough
Imagism
DH Lawrence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO-YmpJbOrM

3. Agenda
Chair Poet
Lecture: Dubliners and
Ireland
Discussion: “The
Dead”
Author Presentation:
WWI Poets
(Overview)

4. Chaise Lounge
Poet

5. James Joyce
(1882-1941)
1914: Dubliners (short story
collection, includes “The Dead”).
1916: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man
1922: Ulysses
1933: United States v. One Book
Called Ulysses. Ulysses ruled not
to be “obscene.” Ruling allowed
for literary free expression.
1939: Finnegans Wake
(inventing a new
language?)

6. Historical Context

7. Imagism: A Movement in Poetry
• Imagism was founded around 1912 by the American exile poet Ezra
Pound, along with Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Richard Aldington. The goal
of the imagist was to present an image directly; that is, to eliminate excess
sentimental feeling.
• Although the movement focused on poetry, there are similarities to
imagism in Joyce's style. Joyce presents both Gabriel's thoughts (subjective)
and the action of the story (objective) with little or no comment.
• In a review of Dubliners, Pound wrote, ‘‘Mr. Joyce's merit [. . .]is that he
carefully avoids telling you a lot that you don't want to know. He presents
his people swiftly and vividly, he does not sentimentalise over them, he
does not weave convolutions.’’
• Although Joyce knew and might have been influenced by Pound, he wrote
"The Dead'' five years before imagism came into vogue as a movement.

8. Philosophical and Social Mind-Set
By the turn of the century, most people, but especially artists and intellectuals,
started to see the world differently. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud drove these
new perspectives, and their ideas challenged the intellectual climate of the 20th
Century. People no longer took for granted traditional structures and values.
• Freud claimed that mental illness is a result of repressed
unconscious sexual desires.
• Marx challenged the assumptions of the capitalist economic
system.
• Nietzsche challenged the values and assumptions of
Christianity, asserting that God is dead.
The destabilization of old values left modern artists liberated to find
new forms to represent reality; as a result, they created works that
questioned the the very perception of reality.

9. Irish Culture
 The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 to revive Irish
culture and promote Gaelic as a spoken everyday
language.
 Molly Ivors is a supporter of the Gaelic League. She
rebukes Gabriel for not traveling in Ireland or learning
Gaelic and for preferring to travel in Europe and to
speak European languages. Gabriel denies that Irish is
his own language, as English is the spoken language
of Ireland. Joyce was also against the movement to to
revive Gaelic, calling it an imposition on the English
speaking public.

10. Literary Style

11. Point of View
“The Dead” is mostly told in the third-person limited point of view via
Gabriel.
Joyce was one of the first writers to use the now relatively common
device called “mimetic style,” a style that mimics or imitates; in “The
Dead,” Joyce does not report thoughts using objective language; rather,
he shows the character's thoughts by using the character’s language.
The first sentence of the story exemplifies the mimetic style: "Lily, the
caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.’’
The phrase, ‘‘literally run off her feet,’’ mimics what Lily would say.
Another example is when Gabriel looks over his speech and is worried
that he “would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in
the pantry.’’
The phrase is more like what Gabriel would say than to the words of an
objective narrator. The mimetic style shows his frustration over his
earlier encounter with Lily.

12. Realism
“The Dead” is written in the realist tradition; that is, the writer
presented life as it is, rather than sensationalizing it. Sometimes,
the realist traditions inspires comments like “nothing eventful
really happens,” but the same is true of daily life. In “The
Dead,” Joyce generally shows the story by presenting
characters’ thoughts and actions, but he does not
sensationalize it by adding dramatic commentary. Even when
Gabriel has his epiphany at the end of the story, the reader is
left not knowing exactly what his revelation means: as readers,
we are forced to interpret the events for ourselves.

13. Epiphany
The celebration in “The Dead” takes place on the feast of
Epiphany on January 6, which honors the manifestation of the
baby Jesus to the wise men. The term “epiphany” generally refers
to the manifestation of God's presence in the world.
James Joyce turned the word into a literary term. “The Dead,”
represents the most complex application of his device of the
epiphany, defined by Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as a moment of revelation in
which a new perception of reality is suddenly achieved, revealing
“the soul of the commonest object” or the “whatness of a thing.”

14. • Richard Ellmann, Joyce scholar, tells us the source of this story is
autobiographical.
• In Galway in 1903, Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, had been wooed by
Michael Bodkin, nicknamed “Sonny,” who suffered from
tuberculosis. When Nora left Galway for Dublin, Sonny Bodkin, like
Michael Furey, left his sickbed in bad weather to bid her farewell in a
song. Later, Nora received news that Sonny had passed away. Joyce, a
very jealous man, was irritated by this story. The letter that Gabriel
quotes in the story is almost an exact replica of one Joyce wrote to
his wife, Nora.
• Ellmann also notes that every year, the Joyce family gathered for a
Christmas party at No. 15 Usher’s Island, where the writer’s great
aunts lived—Mrs. Lyons, Mrs. Callanan, and her daughter, Mary
Ellen. According to James’s brother, Stanislaus, their father would
both carve the goose and address the dinner guests in the same
showy style that Gabriel does after dinner.
Autobiographical

15. Groups

16. Discussion Questions
1. When describing his intentions in writing Dubliners, Joyce
said that the city of Dublin seemed to him the center of
paralysis. What does Joyce mean by paralysis?
2. Lily is the first character to be introduced to us. What is her
position in the text -- her social class, etc? How important will
she be in the rest of the story?
3. Why does Gabriel “color” as if he has made a mistake when Lily
becomes upset about the subject of men? What might his reaction
reveal about his ability to relate to women and to people of other
social classes?
4. How are women are portrayed in "The Dead"? What changes
do you notice as we move from the Victorian period into
modernism?
a. QHQ: Why are none of the women in the story happy?

17. Discussion Questions
5. For much of its history, Ireland has been dominated by British rule,
and the debate between independence and allegiance to Britain
appears in "The Dead.’’ Identify and discuss a reference or two to
this tense relationship between Ireland and Britain.
6. Dead people play an important role in ‘‘The Dead.’’ Gabriel honors
them in his after-dinner speech, and several dead characters are
mentioned during the story: Ellen (Gabriel's mother), Pat Morkan
(his uncle), Patrick Morkan (his grandfather), and Michael Furey.
Discuss a dead or missing figure that possesses greater vitality than
do those of the present. Indicate the influence these dead have on
the living.
7. Why is Gabriel anxious about the after-dinner speech he must make? How
does he see himself in relation to his hosts, Aunts Kate and Julia? Does
the narrative voice offer any enlightenment about Gabriel's thoughts here
-- or elsewhere in the story?

18. Discussion Questions
8. Gabriel makes his speech. What themes does he offer his
guests, and how sincerely do you suppose his words reflect his
real views about Kate and Julia, his own self-image, and Irish
hospitality? Discuss the many ironies presented in Gabriel’s
toast to his two aunts and cousin.
9. Gretta explains why she is wearing galoshes. What
picture of her marriage with Gabriel emerges from the
interchange (spoken and unspoken) between Gretta,
Gabriel, and Aunts Kate and Julia?
10. What mistake does Mr. Browne make? How does his conduct
hint at the rift that is beginning to open up between the men
and the women in Joyce's story?

19. Discussion Questions
11. Why is Miss Ivors successful in
getting under Gabriel's skin? What
things has she implied about him
that he finds unpleasant?
12. Why is Mr. Browne unable to
understand what he is told about the
Monks' habits? More generally, what
contrast does Mr. Browne provide in the
story?
13. What effect does the narrative's
mention of snow have upon your
perception of events and of the
characters' thoughts?

20. Discussion Questions
14. What does the text reveal about Gabriel's understanding
of his wife as an individual with thoughts beyond her
marriage relations with him? Describe the advancing
stages of Gabriel's desire for his wife -- what makes him
remember their "secret life together," and what further
excites him?
15. How does Gabriel's long-time misunderstanding of his wife
play out? To what extent is Gabriel able to reflect accurately
upon his own motivations, desires, and actions? to what extent
does he seem sincere or accurate in his reflections upon
himself and Gretta?
16. By the story's end, we hear that the snow is falling all over
Ireland, on both the living and the dead. What symbolic and
predictive value does the snowfall have by this point?

21. QHQs
Question: Why is it so hard to understand James Joyce’s “The Dead”? Does
Gabriel fit in this story? Could he be taken off of the story without a major
impact on the plot? Why or Why not?
QHQ: Is Freddy in love with Aunt Jane? Is there some kind of unrequited
love thing going on? And why is Aunt Kate so nervous about it? Is Joyce
saying that the “new woman” can't be happy as an independent woman or as a
married woman? Does Lily Ivor leave early to show that Irish nationalism will
kill the idea of Irish hospitality? Lily is named after a flower that is traditionally
used in funerals. Is there a message that Irish nationalism is dying or dead?
QHQ: Of what significance is Patrick Morkan’s story?

22. The War
Poets
A “War Poet” is simply a poet who writes at the time of and on the
subject of war, especially one on military service during the First
World War.
Siegfried Sassoon Wilfred Owen

23. To Watch Out For in
the War Poems: Literary Devices
Structure/Form
Rhyme
Rhyme scheme
Rhythm
Meter
Repetition
Alliteration/Consonance/
Assonance
Paradox
Metonymy
Onomatopoeia
Oxymoron
Personification
Hyperbole
Irony
Imagery
Symbol
Similes
Metaphors
Cacophony

24. Homework
Assigned Reading:
Brooke, “The Soldier” 2019
Sassoon, “The Rear- Guard” 2024
Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the
Trenches” 2030
Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est” 2037
Cannan, “Rouen” 2043
HW: Discussion Question #15
Review: Literary Devices