In Search of Cultural and Personal Experience behind woman in James Joyce’s Dubliners

Przemysław Łozowski, Izabela Jarosz

Abstract


In the article, we exemplify an individualized approach to lexical semantics, where an individual’s use of words is given priority over abstracted and all-embracing dictionary-like definitions. Thus, as identified in Dubliners, the senses of woman are presented as reflections of Joyce’s conceptualizations derived from his own life experience, both personal and cultural. These conceptualizatons may resemble some of the dictionary models/definitions of woman of the relevant (Victorian) period, but, on the whole, they are highly individualized and contextspecific. In our analysis, Joyce’s woman shows in Dubliners six main broad senses, all of which share the element ‘a female person of a status lower than that of a male person.’


Keywords


lexical semantics, conceptualization, experience, woman, James Joyce

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ayto, John, 2005, Word Origins. The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z, London: A & C Black.

Baccolini, Raffaella, 1998, “She had become a memory”: Women as Memory in James Joyce’s Dubliners, [in:] Rejoycing: New Readings of Dubliners, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher Jr., eds., Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, pp. 145–164.

Boag, John, 1848, A Popular and Complete English Dictionary, London: William Collins.

Bowker, Gordon, 2012, James Joyce: A Biography, London: Orion Books Ltd.

Brannon, Linda, 2004, Gender: Psychological Perspectives, London: Pearson.

Bulson Eric, 2006, The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511607301

D = Joyce, James, 1993, Dubliners, Herdfortshire: Feedbooks Editions Ltd.

Digby, Anne, 1989, Women’s biological straitjacket, [in:] Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall, eds., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 192–220.

Dunnage, Jonathan, 2002, Twentieth-Century Italy: A Social History, Harlow: Pearson.

Ehrlich, Heyward, 1997, Socialism, gender and imagery, [in:] Gender in Joyce, Jolanta Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran, eds., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 82‒100.

Ellmann, Richard, 1982, James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fowler, Henry Watson and Fowler, Francis George, 1919, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

French, Marilyn, 1988, Women in Joyce’s Dublin, [in:] James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, Bernard Benstock, ed., New York: Syracuse University Press, pp. 267–272.

Gleed, Kim Allen, 2011, How to Write about James Joyce, New York: Infobase Publishing.

Hogg, Robert, 2012, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137284259

Hendrickson, Robert, 2008, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, New York: Facts on File, Inc.

Johnson, Jeri, 2004, Joyce and feminism, [in:] Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Derek Attridge, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521837103.010

Johnson, Samuel, 1785, A Dictionary of the English Language, London: J. F. & C. Rivington.

King, Jeannette, 2005, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230503571

LII = Letters of James Joyce, Vol. II, Ellmann Richard, (ed.), 1966, New York: Viking Press.

Liberman, Anatoly, 2005, Word Origins… And How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Lombroso, Cesare and Guglielmo Ferrero, 2004, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman, Durham: Duke University Press.

Łozowski, Przemysław, 2007, On origins of grammaticalization: *magan in the Paris Psalter, [in:] Further Insights into Semantics and Lexicography, Ulf Magnusson, Henryk Kardela and Adam Głaz, eds., Lublin: Wyd. UMCS, pp. 101–111.

Łozowski, Przemysław, 2008, Language as Symbol of Experience: King Alfred’s ‘cunnan,’ ‘magan’ and ‘motan’ in a Panchronic Perspective, Lublin: Wyd. UMCS.

Łozowski, Przemysław, 2015, Lexical semantics with and without sense relations: pig terms in EFL dictionaries, [in:] New Pilgrimage: Selected Papers from the IAUPE Beijing Conference in 2013, Li Cao and Li Jin, eds., Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, pp. 321–336.

Łozowski, Przemysław and Anna Stachurska, 2015, The need for textual evidence in reconstructing linguistic pictures of conceptual categories, Etnolingwistyka 27, pp. 87–102.

Maddox, Brenda, 1990, Introduction to Dubliners, [in:] James Joyce, Dubliners, New York: Bantam Books, pp. xvi‒xiv.

Maunder, Andrew, 2007, The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story, New York: Facts on File.

Maynard, Mary, 1989, Privilege and patriarchy: feminist thought in the nineteenth century, [in:] Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall, eds., London and New York: Routledge, pp. 221–247.

Mitchell, Sally, 2009, Daily Life in Victorian England, London: Greenwood Press.

Morillot, Caroline, 2007, The phenomenology of light in James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Journal of Postgraduate Research” 06–07, Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, pp. 87–101.

Nelson, Claudia, 2007, Family Ties in Victorian England, London: Praeger.

OCDEE = Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, 1996, Hoad T. F. (ed.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

OED = The Oxford English Dictionary, 2009, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Papadopoulou, Eleni, 2005, Gender Roles and Sexual Morality in James Joyce’s Dubliners, Norderstedt: Grin Verlag.

Pappalardo, Salvatore, 2011, Waking Europa: Joyce, Ferrero, and the metamorphosis of Irish history, “Journal of Modern Literature” 34 (2), pp. 154‒77. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.34.2.154

Parson, Dorothy, 2007, Theorists of The Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, London and New York: Routledge.

Partridge, Eric, 2006a, Origins. A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: Routledge.

Partridge, Eric, 2006b, The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, Taylor & Francis e-library: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Schwarze, Tracey Teets, 2002, Joyce and the Victorians, Florida: The University Press of Florida.

SL = Selected Letters of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann, (ed.), 1975, London: Faber and Faber.

Tabakowska, Elżbieta, 2005, Iconicity as a function of point of view, [in:] Outside-In – Inside-Out: Iconicity in Language and Literature 4, Maeder Costantino, Olga Fischer and William J. Herlofsky, eds., Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 375‒388. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ill.4.27tab

Valente, Joseph, 2011, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1890–1922, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wheeler, William A., 1872, A Dictionary of the English Language, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co.

Wiener, Martin J., 2004, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511511547

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/arte.2016.1.157
Date of publication: 2016-05-09 12:15:33
Date of submission: 2015-08-04 14:03:27


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1301
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 0

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2016

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.