James Joyce and victims

"Originating in Rene Girard's theories of scapegoats and cultural violence, the word victimage signifies broadly the process of victimization, especially the fundamental misrecognition of the cycle of violence in which modern subjects participate. Such a misrecognition, on personal and cultural levels, opens the door to analyses of the colonial subjects peopling Joyce's fiction. Dubliners offers portraits of characters who, as they mature from childhood to public life, ironically become less aware of the logic of colonial confinement that robs subjects of individual and collective agency.

In A Portrait and Ulysses, Joyce carefully disassembles the totality of civil society Dubliners inhabit to reveal the ways in which the church and state circumscribe citizens' imagination. The colonized, however, do possess power to deform cultural directives and to resist the roles in which colonizers cast them, but this power originates within logics which exclude and divide."--Jacket.