Comparing James Joyce's Dubliners And The Commedia

Three quarters of a century have passed since the death of Irish writer James Joyce, and while he is today regarded amongst the literati as the quintessential Modernist writer, and one of the giants of Western literature, we cannot fault Eliot for his division; he could not then have known the tremendous and unquestionable influence of Joyce on the corpus of English language literature and the philosophy of the Modernist Project. Considered from the perspective of the established Western Canon, Eliot’s elevation of Dante and Shakespeare is both appropriate and institutionally recognized, and when we add to these two the works of Homer, we have, arguably, a literary trinity, the significance of which was not lost on Joyce, and for which we must credit all that Joyce wrote. This essay focuses on the particular influence of Dante upon the writing of Joyce, narrowed specifically on the fifteen short-story collection Dubliners.
In this short paper, the approach to Dubliners and the Commedia is from the literary perspective of New Criticism and from the philosophical lens of traditional Thomistic ethics as it informs the Modernist …show more content…
In this way, Joyce reveals an apprehension of both the tradition of allegorical writing and of the historical participatory responsibility inherent in the serious development of literary fiction. Of course, the purpose of such dedicated work is common to both Joyce and Dante; it is the philosophical disclosure of truth, particularly the truth of human nature as reflected by and through artistic