Graphological Features As Portrait Of A Society In Crisis In James Joyce’s Dubliners

Graphological devices are a feature of linguistic resources which have implications for cohesion, coherence, and meaning explication in written texts. For literary writers, graphological language can be creatively utilized as a literary technique to enact the thematic signification of creative texts. To this end, this study examines the artistic deployment of graphological features in James Joyce’s Dubliners to construct the thematic preoccupations of the text. The study identifies the prominent graphological features in the novel. It categorises and analyses these salient devices and relates them to the socio-political context of the novel. This is with a view to construing the graphological style of the text as a tool to depict thematic concerns enunciated in the literary world of the novel. Six graphological devices were isolated for analysis as a result of the observation that their excessive use in the text is significant to the realization of its thematic essence. Analysis revealed that 7,136 punctuation marks were used in the text of just 170 pages, apart from other graphological devices that were not studied. Through this linguistic craftsmanship, the author ingeniously connected different stories with different plots into an interrelated unified thematic description of paralysis, confusion, retardation, and entrapment of the people of Irish society of his age. The study, therefore, concludes that besides its grammatical form and function, graphic language can equally serve a literary function to foreground the thematic message of a literary text.