It's Okay to be Frustrated with Joyce (Dubliners, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Dubliners, editor Ian Whittington discusses the inspiration for the cover of his Norton Library edition, his favorite lines in the collection, his Dubliners hot take, and some suggestions for a Dubliners playlist.

Ian Whittington is an independent scholar whose research and teaching focus on twentieth-century anglophone literature and culture. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. His work has appeared in Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, The Global South, and other venues.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Dubliners, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dublinersNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Dubliners: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0pOrIz0CbgngT4sANu6fkC?si=2c9950dee6f542ab.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dubliners/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Music] 

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library: a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Dubliners, James Joyce's collection of short stories. To explore this text further, we welcome back its editor Ian Whittington. In our first episode, we discussed how Joyce came to write and publish Dubliners, the works’ historical context, and we paid particular attention to the closing story The Dead. In this second episode, we asked Ian Whittington about his personal engagement with Dubliners, including his favorite line, how he would teach some of these difficult stories, a Dubliners playlist, of course his hot take, and much more. Ian Whittington is an independent scholar whose research and teaching focus on 20th century Anglophone literature and culture. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics, and the BBC and co-editor of The Edinburg Companion to Modernism and Technology. We are so happy to have him with us today. Ian Whittington, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast! 

[Ian:] Thanks, Mark. It's great to be back. 

[Mark:] Good to see you again and I look forward to talking more with you about your new edition of James Joyce's Dubliners. Can we start by talking about the cover of your edition? So, why is it the way it is? 

[Ian:] Yeah, it's gorgeous. So as your listeners may know, the Norton Library editions all have a similar design: there's no image on the front but it's blocks of color with just the name of the author and the name of the book, and then the editor's name. The variation all comes in the colors that they use. I think the overall cover design was by Debra Morton-Hoyt, who is Norton's executive creative director, and I just wanted to give a shout out to her. Also, I asked the editors that I was working with—because I love the color scheme so much and they said that this particular color scheme for my edition was chosen by Joan Greenfield who's a contractor, a freelance designer who sometimes works with them. So shout out to Joan Greenfield as well. 

[Mark:] Appropriate last name, also.  

[Ian:] Yes it is, because the predominant color on this cover is green. Under different light, it seems almost like a slightly bluish tinge to it, but also kind of foresty green. Then Joyce's name is in a kind of yellowy orange and then there's a bar of that same yellowy orange along the bottom, and then the remaining text—the word Dubliners—is in a kind of off-white gray with a little bit of green shining through. So the overall effect is predominantly green, a little bar of yellowy orange, and a little bit of off-white. To me, I love that because it echoes the colors of the Irish tricolor, the Irish flag, which is a bright green and a bright orange and white. But it doesn't replicate it exactly, which would be maybe a little bit heavy-handed. But the other reason I love this is because Joan Greenfield took her inspiration for this color scheme from a bottle of whiskey: Jameson has an 18-year-old whiskey called The Bow Street one, and they have as like a cask strength, will-knock-you-off-your-chair kind of whiskey, which I have not tasted yet, but I'm looking forward to, as soon as I  clear my royalty forward, or whatever. But anyway, it's a beautiful looking bottle and it just makes for a great connection here because Jameson was a Dublin based distillery. They moved out of the city for a while, but they've actually come back and have a presence in the city again. So, it seems very appropriate. 

[Mark:] What a perfect backstory to that cover. Ian, how did you first encounter James Joyce's writing? Do you remember? 

[Ian:] The funny thing is, that I'm sure that I read a couple of stories from this collection as an undergrad. The precise memory of that encounter is lost to me, like so much of my undergrad years. I think it was probably “The Dead” and “Araby” and I know I enjoyed them but I have no concrete memories of it. But when I decided to go back to grad school, was doing a master's in English at McGill University, I took a modernism seminar with Alan Hepburn, who's a still at McGill and is a mentor and friend to me. It was great class and I said to him, “Okay, I'm going to be a modernist now, give me a reading list, a crash course reading list for the summer so I can brush up on my modernism and be ready for next year.” He gave me a long list of fantastic works, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was on that list, which I hadn't read up to that point. This is all sort of embarrassing to admit on a podcast about how I'm editing a book of Joyce, but we all have to come to it sometime, right? I read Portrait and it immediately jumped out to me as just such a wonderful and captivating book. The opening line of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins from the point of view of a young child, and it says something like once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moo cow coming down the road, and this moo cow was down along the road—and it sort of goes on from there, and you realize, “I'm in this totally other universe. I'm in the mind of a child.” So, from that point on, it totally sucked me in and there are just so many captivating, dramatic, compelling scenes in that book and so I was I was hooked from that point on. I then came back and read all of Dubliners and went forward, and Ulysses and so on. So that was the point for me. 

[Mark:] Is Dubliners the same way as some parts of Portrait of the Artist or Ulysses or—heaven forbid, Finnegan's Wake—is Dubliners similarly challenging? 

[Ian:] No, I would say to anybody who's considering approaching this book for the first time, this is not in any way the same kind of difficulty that that Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake is. Dubliners is written in a much more straightforward style. It is drawing on that realist tradition of the novel where you can understand the world that's presented to you through the text. So, on a scale of difficulty, it is way lower than Joyce's later works. But I will say that there is a kind of inscrutability that Joyce works into the book that lends it complexity that makes us want to return to passages and stories and to the whole collection, because it doesn't reveal itself entirely on first reading—or, let me assure you, on twenty-first reading. There's lots to puzzle over, and that's where Joyce worked in his more experimental edges. It's a collection of stories that continues to reveal itself over time, so I think that's where the difficulty and the joy is in this collection. 

[Mark:] You mentioned in our first episode about sometimes the point of a story or the climax of the story isn't always evident. It's not always in the text. It might be hinted at. Is that part of the complexity for readers who are first approaching Dubliners?  

[Ian:] Yeah, we're often led to feel a certain way by the text, like to detect a sense of foreboding or of incompleteness or of dissatisfaction and to not be able to put our finger on it exactly. Sometimes that feeling of dissatisfaction or of perplexity, you can kind of resolve it by reading and digging into it and sometimes there's just not quite enough there for you to access it entirely. I think that that sense of having to work for the ultimate meaning of what a story is getting at is—it's, to my mind, part of Joyce's attempt to depict our lived experience as it really is, right? We don't always know why something is happening, why a character behaves a certain way, or someone we know in real life behaves a certain way. What's motivating people, why a certain event happens to us, why we feel a certain way. So much of our own inner life is unknown to us, even in our age of pop psychology. So, Joyce I think understood that and writes some of that into his stories. Characters are constantly—some characters are discovering themselves, some characters are refusing to actually see what's going on in their own minds and to recognize patterns of behavior and stuff. So that's some of the stuff that remains unsaid and unresolved in some of his stories.  

[Mark:] This kind of opaque style by Joyce can either be really inviting to readers but can also be kind of frustrating if something is not immediately apparent. Do you find that readers can react those two different ways? 

[Ian:] Yeah, I would say so. I would say we all know that in our world there are some people who are more comfortable with sitting with uncertainty, sitting with complexity, and others who just want it to be clear. They want to know what's going on. Maybe there were always those two kinds of people—and maybe there aren't even just those two kinds of people, maybe that's an oversimplification—but yeah, it'll sort of depend on whether you're willing to just sit with that lack of resolution for a bit, and to work at it and to see what you can tease out, because the teasing out is part of the pleasure, right? You learn things, as you do that, you discover new nuances to the text, new interesting ways he’s phrased things, or shades of character, or of relationships between characters. It's a chance to pause and sit with the text, and just to zoom out a little bit, these are great stories for counteracting the tendency to ingest small, very easily assimilable bits of information, rather than sitting and practicing attention and patience, because these stories are not long. They're not going to take you all day, but they do reward in introspection and inspection. 

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in Dubliners? 

[Ian:] I do. Again, to go back to something we talked about in our previous story, “The Dead.” I always want to pull out that surprise story. Like, oh it's really “Two Gallants” that is my very favorite story! Which is a great, great story actually. I could have chosen that one, and I could have chosen a line from that one. But to me, “The Dead” is still the one that has a special place in my heart. I would even go back to the very final line. Is it too much to read that last paragraph in “The Dead”?  

[Mark:] No, it's beautiful. Go for it. 

[Ian:] Yeah, because it's a few lines but it builds to such a nice passage. So yes, we're with Gabriel Conroy as his wife has fallen asleep and he's realized that she has this whole past that he was not a part of, and he's looking outside the window of their hotel room as he tries to come to terms with all that this means. “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. 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, farther 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 Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul 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.”  

[Mark:] What an ending!  

[Ian:] Chills, I say, chills down my spine! There's so much to love about that. I won't talk about the whole paragraph, but just that last sentence that begins, “his soul swoons slowly.” There's a musicality to that passage. In a story that is all about music—like there's so many references to singers and people actually singing. Of course “The Lass of Aughrim” is an Irish folk song that plays a prominent role in this story. So, I think Joyce indulges in a little musicality at the end to sort of make his prose sing, as it were. He does—it's alliteration, his soul swoons slowly, it's assonance, there's a lot of repetition of vowel sounds that gives it a kind of—I don't know; it reverberates through our brains and our minds and maybe our ears, as well. I think that's interesting because the collection as a whole doesn't always indulge in that kind of musicality. I think there's a tension in Joyce between just really letting her rip—like he wants to be that romantic poet who just plays with sound and appeals to the emotional register of our lives, but he also wants to pull away. I talked previously about the scrupulous meanness of his style, that withholding, refraining, but this is a passage that doesn't hold back so much, I think. Then it gets to some of the thematic things that we've talked about earlier, about the fate that awaits us all, that snow that blankets. Snow is general all over Ireland, a kind of absolution and also a kind of death comes on us all, like snow will blanket the landscape. It mutes us, it dampens us, it equalizes us, and it's all in that final image that I love so much.  

[Mark:] When you were reading, I heard that we go from falling faintly to faintly falling. He inverts the phrase, and he says swooned slowly as you heard the snow falling faintly through the universe. Who else would think about the snow going through the entire universe? You might think of Dublin as being this claustrophobic look, but the volume ends on such a cosmic note. 

[Ian:] Yes, I mean it is such a cosmic note. It's interesting to think about Joyce always wanting to place that local scene in the bigger universe, because his next published book-length work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has as an early scene Stephen Dedalus, the quasi-James Joyce character, writing in his schoolbook his address, and he starts with the local level and goes out, out, out, out, out. So there's always a tendency to tie the local to the universal here. 

[Mark:] I'm looking also as The Dead leads towards your passage, just before it, it says this line: “one by one they were all becoming shades.” That realization that he has, I feel—you didn't ask me what my favorite line is, but that would be my—I think that's just a thunderbolt of a line. This notion of mortality. 

[Ian:] Of mortality, and of a kind of—that it might not be an on/off switch, that it's like a fading, a gradual transition. Even as we live, we are dying. I guess what you do with that knowledge is up to you. Do you hold more tightly to an illusion of immortality and just pretend it's not going to happen, or try to accept it?  

[Mark:] Ian, if you were faced with the challenge of teaching this collection, what would be some of your techniques about letting readers who might be new to Joyce appreciate this work? 

[Ian:] So there's a few different ways you could do this. It depends on the audience here, but let's say it's an undergraduate class. One way for a work that is so steeped in the local—for  all the universal themes we've been talking about, it's also a collection that is deeply invested in Dublin and what it means to be a Dubliner, and that's a place that is removed in geography for most North American readers and is certainly removed in time for all readers; it was 120 years ago or so that these stories are set. So there's so many resources online now, maps and historical archives and things, so you could assign a group of students, each pick a story and map out where the characters go, where they live, what was there. They reference this distillery in this part of Dublin, or there's a character who seems to go on a long perambulation around the city. Where does he go? Where does he walk past? What does he see? So you could access some of those online resources and make it a sort of spatial exercise to give students a better sense of where people move in space in these stories, because it can be so abstract if you're just reading place names in in a book. I remember encountering The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad before I'd ever been to London and trying to figure out where in space they were. Famously that's a book where Conrad messes with space and time a little bit to keep you on your toes. Anyway, Dubliners is much more faithful to the realities of space and time, so it's a great one for that. I would also say that's a great opportunity to get away from all the wonderful resources that are available online and actually bring in a physical paper map to class. You can find archival maps of Dublin around 1900 1910 online. Print one off, mark it up, get Post-it notes, start drawing all over it. It's amazing how that kind of tactile experience can open things up for undergraduate readership, and even for grad students. I've done that with other novels based in London for my grad classes and it work great  

[Mark:] Yeah, excellent idea. Well Ian, you know that on the Norton Library podcast we are shameless seekers of clickbait, so we ask our guests for a hot take or something controversial or counterintuitive about the work that they've edited. Do you have such a take on Dubliners? 

[Ian:] I don't have one on Dubliners per se, but on Joyce, I will say this. I don't know if this qualifies as a hot take, but Joyce has such a vexed place in the canon because he's like, the guy. People hold him up and talk about him in such elevated terms and I feel like we have to let ourselves be okay with getting frustrated with him and his stylistic tendencies, and just saying, “I'm not going to put up with that, James. Jim, let me tell you.” That sometimes it's all just a bit much. I don't think Dubliners is a collection that indulges in the stylistic excesses or the philosophical abstractions or the deep dives into Catholic theological doctrine. It doesn't go there, but his other works do, and even as someone who teaches and loves, loves, loves this material, sometimes I roll my eyes. Like if I have to read “Oxen of the Sun” again I'm going to—oh my God, hit the roof. So it's okay to not get it and it's okay to find it all a bit much, because Joyce was writing at a particular time in a particular moment, and he was a very idiosyncratic thinker and writer. But give it time. There is so much to discover there for people, even if there's some difficulty in getting there. Patience is rewarded. Especially if you think of yourself as a reader who wants to be challenged and then finds something kind of daunting, let yourself sit with that feeling and it's okay. It's okay to be like, this isn't to my taste right now. But then see what you can get by sitting with it for a while. 

[Mark:] And you're saying approach it maybe in a non- reverential way? 

[Ian:] Absolutely. Oh yeah. I guess I try to take that approach with all writers, but Joyce is definitely someone who could probably use a little bit of being lowered off the pedestal a little bit. The funny thing is, he kind of undermines his own position so often in terms of—he's a very earthy and humanistic thinker. Like his books are kind of funny; a lot of people don't tell that. You think of like oh Ulysses, the greatest novel ever written in the English language. It's hilarious. 

[Mark:] It’s a romp, yeah.  

[Ian:] It's naughty, and it's all kinds of things. So, Joyce takes his own steps to deflate that kind of myth of the great author, or at least bring himself down to earth. He's already done some of that work for us, let's follow his lead and approach him as just another person. 

[Mark:] Ian, how has Dubliners been adapted or appropriated over the years, maybe in other forms, other than literature? So that we might be able to appreciate these stories. 

[Ian:] The big one is a film version of “The Dead” that John Houston directed in 1987. It stars his daughter. I quite like it. It's quite good; it's very faithful. It might seem maybe—how to put it, for a contemporary audience who's used to a maybe faster paced form of cinema, it's meditative and slow, but it captures so many details of the story so well and I think it is illuminating for readers today because it gives you a visual sense of what this kind of a Christmas party might have looked like, how did people dress, what did they eat, what music were they playing? So both what the party looked like and what it sounded like. That's very helpful, and so that's the big one. I know that there was—RTE is the Irish National broadcaster, and they aired a reading of "The Dead” by the actor Steven Ray some years ago. I have not listened to that myself but he's an amazing actor so if that's something you can track down, I would say check it out. And this is not an adaptation of Dubliners per se, but I did want to put in a little shout out for one of my favorite bits of media about Dublin as a city. There's a great podcast called Three Castles Burning by a podcaster called Donald Fallon who's a social historian of the streets. Literally he got his start doing walking tours of Dublin and moved to the blogs and then has published books and has this great podcast called Three Castles Burning and it's all about Dublin history. It’s across maybe the last thousand years or more, but it really focuses on the last 120, 150 years and it's a great introduction to so many little parts of Dublin's history as a city. He's a very engaging speaker, so check it out if you have an interest in Dublin as a city. He's got a couple episodes that tie in with Joyce, one about the first Bloomsday celebration in 1954, which is the day where everybody gets together to recreate the day that Ulysses takes place on, and then another one about Lucia Joyce, Joyce's daughter. 

[Mark:] I'm interested in the audio book that you mentioned because when they did the reading of Ulysses, you find that Joyce's writing lends itself to the kind of musicality and you mentioned that a little bit in the in the first episode how his prose is so rhythmic and lyrical that it lends itself to that performance. 

[Ian:] Absolutely, yes. It's as much to be listened to as it is to be read.  

[Mark:] We've also talked about music quite a lot in these conversations. What songs would you put on a Dubliners playlist? 

[Ian:] Okay well, I already mentioned one of the songs, which is “The Lass of Aughrim,” which plays a central role in “The Dead” and it's a traditional Irish ballad. there's a good version by Susan McKeown, which is about 20 years old and it's fairly classic. I just heard a new version by a contemporary Irish folk indie folk singer-songwriter named Lisa O'Neill. She does a great version as well, a little rawer than some of the other ones. It's a great story—it's a great song. In “The Dead,” this is the song that Greta Conroy hears, and it sort of brings her back into the past and she recalls the boy that she used to love who would sing this song to her and he dies so tragically. The song itself is about a woman who knocks at the door of a castle or a manor looking for the man who's impregnated her and abandoned her and she's got the child in her arms. It's not clear if the child is dead—or it just says the child is cold in her arms. She's not admitted to the castle, so the song is a tragic story of abandonment and this all too familiar power imbalance where a wealthy and powerful man seduces and abandons a woman and his child, and her child. It's in contrast to the story where Greta Conroy has lost a boy who loved her unconditionally, passionately, would have given anything to be with her, and is sickly, and maybe a little bit foolish and dies out of his love for her in a way. I'll let folks read the story to find out how exactly that works out, but that's a great one that's a that's a must-have. A couple others: more in the vein of class relations in the novel, I have to admit the first song—in the collection of stories, I should say—the first song that came to mind, to me, was actually not an Irish song at all, but it's the song “Common People” by Pulp, which is a 1995 song of Pulp's album Different Class. There's no connection—like, Pulp is an English band—but it's one of the purest  distillations of anger at the forms of spectatorship that some people have around class, of like, “oh, the poor live such fabulous lives of destitution and artistic expression and everything,” and the whole point of this song is like, you just do not understand what it's like to have so little to live for that you just, you burn the candle so brightly that you that you burn out early. It's just an absolute Banger of a tune so, check that out. But if we want tie it more into Ireland, I will just say one last one. There's an Irish Post Punk band called Fontaines DC who's been around for a few years now. They've had some great success, and they've got a song called “Boys in the Better Land” which is just like—first of all, it's peppered with Joyce-ian allusions. It talks about, everyone's talking about a runaway model with a heart like a James Joyce novel or something like that. Then you get all these snippets of like an anglophobic, sort of nationalist cab driver who spits out Brits out. Really, it's about longing to get away from Dublin and the claustrophobia of that city and looking for opportunity elsewhere, which is as true in 2019 when that song came out as it was in 1904 when Dubliners was started. So, those are my picks.  

[Mark:] Those are fascinating choices. We've talked a lot about how to put these stories into context and you have this really generous section of notes, end notes, at the end of your edition of the Norton Library Edition of Dubliners and there's one I was hoping to get you to talk about just a little bit more, Ian, and that is the note to page 95. You are talking about the title “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” which might sound like a little bit of a mysterious title to the non-expert. Could you explain a little bit about where Joyce is coming from with that title, and what you do with your note to that phrase?  

[Ian:] Yeah, so Ivy Day is a day that—it's not commonly celebrated anymore, but around the turn of the 20th century, was celebrated to honor Charles Stewart Parnell who was a really towering figure of 19th century Irish politics. Parnell was a nationalist. That is, he wanted independence for Ireland. He was pursuing what was then called home rule, which is like Ireland would have stayed within the British Empire, but it would have had autonomy over its own affairs, which I think was seen as the best Ireland could hope for at that time. So, Parnell was hugely successful. He sat in the parliament in Westminster in London despite being from Ireland and he just advocated really strongly for Irish home rule, and he also was a shrewd political navigator. He got the party that was in power to work with him towards Irish home rule. Then around about 1890 everything fell apart because of personal scandal. It turned out that Parnell had been involved in a long running affair with a married woman named Katharine O'Shea. Her husband filed divorce proceedings against her and named Parnell as a respondent and turns out it had been a decade long affair, they had had three children together during this affair. I should say that Katharine O’Shea and her husband were separated this whole time he was only staying married to her because of an inheritance, so that whole thing, it wasn't an honorable marriage that Parnell destroyed. It was a flawed, opportunistic marriage in some ways. Anyway, this revelation destroyed Parnell politically and personally. His party turned against him, and they did so really only after the Catholic Church made it clear that they would not support Parnell as the figurehead of Irish home rule. They just simply couldn't put their authority behind a man who is a known adulterer. So, his party turned against him and splintered. He was left in charge of a small minority of the party he used to have, and basically was politically powerless after this point, and he died a year after the scandal broke, brokenhearted, and with him, for a few decades at least, the dream of Irish nationhood also died, I think is how it was seen. So why is this important to Joyce? It was a formative moment in Joyce's political awakening. His family—Joyce's family had had nationalist leanings. They wanted an independent Ireland. Joyce's father especially advocated for this, and to see Parnell failed for reasons that had nothing to do with his qualities as a politician catalyzed in Joyce an anti- religiousness, because he saw how the church was not actually interested in Irish Independence but would turn on that movement if it suited them. So that was one of the beginnings of Joyce's drift away from religion. In the story, it's a bunch of political operatives, campaign workers, who are sitting around a committee room talking about Parnell and his legacy, but it's not—they pay lip service to his legacy, but it seems as if that glory of what he had come so close to achieving is very much faded. So this is a story of kind of the deflation of political possibility. 

[Mark:] Finally, Ian, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts, as you were editing this volume, about how this volume applies to our current society. What is the contemporary relevance to these stories that were written, as you say, 125 years ago? 

[Ian:] I'd say there's a couple of things; the first of all is that Joyce understood how strongly our lives are shaped and molded by forces outside of us, whether that's religion or nationhood, empire, gender. He understood that these are not entirely determining forces, but they have a strong influence on us and can be extremely hard to escape for anyone who wants to break free of convention or of what we might think of today as social constructs. That, I think, is endlessly relevant. The other thing that this collection captures is what we think of now as intergenerational trauma: how the abuses that are heaped upon one generation are then passed on. The father who is belittled at work drinks too much and goes home and beats his son mercilessly; the mother who can't have what she wants, so forces her daughter into professionally precarious situations, things like that. Joyce was attuned to that, probably because his own father's financial incompetence doomed his family. So, I think that's why Joyce pays such attention to it in this collection. Those are the things I think that would stand out for contemporary readers. 

[Mark:] Ian Whittington, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the Norton Library podcast to discuss James Joyce's Dubliners.  

[Ian:] Thanks so much, Mark. It's been a real pleasure for me too. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Dubliners by James Joyce edited by Ian Whittington is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library including the full catalog of titles. 

[Music]