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JAMES JOYCE: A STUDY OF THE SHORT FICTION by Mitzi M. Brunsdale. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. xxv + 264 pages. $23.95
I'll always associate Twayne books with Sister Aelred, the deaf, elderly nun who ran my high school library and who first recommended them to me. I must have been 14 or so, working on a research paper for an English class, the first time I handled a Twayne volume. It would have been Yeats, I suppose. I remember leaving it out on a desk, and the forced casualness of my voice as I said to a friend: "Oh, that? That's the book I'm using for my research." What a precious, precocious snot I was, but innocent too, with that feeling of nascent pride in scholarship, with that first tiny step beyond the encyclopedia.
Mitzi Brunsdale's James Joyce: A Study of the Short Fiction struck me, at first, as that kind of introductory criticism, the kind we assign to students who want to read pages 30 through 37 and get a solid...