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Article: Power play: games in Joyce's "Dubliners."(Special "Dubliners" Number)
- Article from:
- Studies in Short Fiction
- Article date:
- June 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In one of Dubliners' most arresting observations, the boy in "Araby" says he has "hardly any patience with patience with the serious work of life which . . . seemed to me child's play" (26-27). Reading this stunning paradox in reverse offers a way of approaching the stories through Michel Foucault's theories about power and knowledge, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of comedy: embodying both subversion and inversion, child's play is the serious work of life.
Foucault argues in Power/Knowledge that the challenge to accepted truths comes through "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges," admitting into the discourse what has been systematically excluded ...