International Journal of Language & Literature

Reconstructing Identity through Remapping Dublin: James Joyce’s Heimat
Dr. Leila Baradaran Jamili

Abstract
Many modernist novelists invite the literary readers to read, interpret and decode spatially the writers’ hometowns or Heimat visualized in their literary fictions. In their act of remapping the cities, the novelists construct themselves and their inner selves. They represent a set of interconnections and relationships that help themselves and every individual to construct and reconstruct his/her own national identity. Their travelling or wandering in the streets of Heimat can be considered as a sort of negotiation of the familiar spaces. Strolling in the streets of hometown paves the way for every novelist to encounter diverse aspects of life, and observe different places which provide enough motifs to formulate and reshape one’s own identity. Home is, according to Paul de Man, “always also a means of leading to the observation of self” (9); it can be one source of constructing the national identity and at the same time an essential reason for the continuity of self. The quest for identity at home is an interminable attempt that James Joyce portrays in all his works, particularly in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He imagines his Heimat, Dublin, and shows how it can be treated as a metaphorical map in which his characters begin the exploration of self or identity. This paper does not use a cartographic method, and it does not portray a scientific or objective map rather a spatial, subjective and sensational map, through which Joyce provides an aura of self-knowledge that Heimat/home might be the centre of the world.

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