Day 5

During the morning sessions we worked on the topic of James Joyce by discussing his background and his main pieces of literature. Then, we focused on one of his works, Dubliners, which is a collection of fifteen short stories and it was first published in 1914. In this book, Joyce depicts Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

We focused on two of the short stories: Eveline and The Dead. We were analysing the stories, searched for the various literary devices and also worked on the vocabulary of the texts. We watched a short part of the film adaptation of The Dead and shared our feelings and opinions related to the story. It was a really useful workshop because I could brush up my knowledge about James Joyce and also learnt some approaches to analysing literary pieces.

During the afternoon session we continued our group project on the topic of sculptures and statues in Dublin. In this project, our primary aim is to discover what Dubliners’ attitude is towards the different sculptures that can be found in the city and also to discover what nicknames they know related to them. Firstly, we collected the questions we wanted to ask and then we split into two teams and set out to do the field-work. We needed to interview real Dubliners. To be honest, it proved to be a little more difficult than I had anticipated, because the city is full of tourists and many people we approached were tourists. Interestingly, there are a lot of American tourists. After several attempts we managed to find some helpful local people who were kind enough to share their opinions with us. It was interesting to hear what statues they named and what their opinions were. All of them named the statue of O’ Connell and Molly Malone, so these two seem to be the most beloved by the local people. We will compare our findings with the other team and report our findings next Friday.

In the afternoon I took a stroll in the bustling city and visited some more sights and took photos of some more sculpture for the project.