Ghosts and Ethics in the Early Works of James Joyce

In the last 20 years, critics have contributed new insights into the character development, overall messages, themes, and other literary aspects of James Joyce’s works by focusing on their ethical implications. By following an intertextual method and by performing close readings of Joyce’s texts, I try to fill a gap in the scholarly literature by adding a related focus on ghosts to the conversation about Joyce’s ethics and those of his characters. Focusing on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I hope to show that the ghosts in Joyce’s corpus motivate characters and readers to revise their attitude towards supposed role models, to cultivate an appreciation of different languages and other points of view, to relate in the right way to the human body, to affirm the value of their body in this life, and to achieve personal growth despite the pervasive influences of a repressive, colonized society