Counterparts,” by James Joyce’s Dubliners, occurs during a February afternoon and evening in the life of a lawyer’s scrivener in Dublin. Farrington, the heavyset protagonist, is frustrated by his demeaning, monotonous job of copying legal documents. Mr. Alleyne, his boss, chastises him for taking an extended lunch hour rather than completing his work. Farrington slips away from his desk to a nearby pub for a quick mid-afternoon drink.
Unable to finish the task before closing time, he turns it in two documents short while hoping his boss would not notice. This time he is told off by Mr. Alleyne for his failure work before his fellow clerks and, wealthy client. Faced with this public humiliation and affected by the combination of alcohol and suppressed rage, he blunders into an impertinent and accidentally witty answer, which sinks him in deeper trouble,losing job.
To drown these anxieties, when his workday is over he pawns his watch and spends the time boozing with his pals. His confrontation with Mr. Alleyne earns him their temporary admiration. As the evening progresses, they move from bar to bar, he pays for almost all the alcohol consumed in his honor, feels snubbed by a passing actress, and is defeated in Indian wrestling by an English vaudeville acrobat. He feels abused, cheated, and betrayed. When he finally arrives late that night at his cold, dark home to find his wife away at church. He turns his anger in violenton his own son.
There are eight approaches readers can use for many diffenert literary schools or perpectivies use to engage in a text. They are intellectual tools or lenses that can help enhance the interpretation of a literary text. Reader uses New Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Marxist Criticism, Deconstrction, Reader-response criticism, Postcolonial criticism, and New Historicism.
The New Criticism focus on the text itself. One principle that is found helpful is the specfic examples from the text for a particular interpretation. TAnother name for this is close reading. This helps you understand all the elements of the text self. The most common can be found in poems. Critic argue that interpretation are most consistent within the text. The critic also argues that all elements of the text are seen contributing to the resolution.
The goal of the Feminist Critic is to contest the partriarchal point of view as the standard for moral, aesthetic,political, and intellectual judgements and to show that gender roles are learned, not univeral.The critic hope to accomplish the challenges essentialist attitudes that hold for women. This group is interested in gender. They focus on issues of identity, gender criticism on how character
