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Assignment A: James Joyce’s “The Boarding House”

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Deadline: February 16th, 2026.

Be sure to include in your filename: Assignment A and your name.

Instructions

Read Joyce's "The Boarding House" (from Dubliners). Choose ONE interpretive idea from Margot Norris’s essay on the story and use it as a lens to produce your own reading.

After reading the story, you may have felt unsure about how to interpret it. After reading Norris, one idea probably helped something “unlock.”

Your essay should (1) explain that idea, (2) show how it changed your reading of the story, (3) and then push the idea a little further using your own close reading.

Minimum 700 words - max 1000 words.

Again: no AI for this one. If you submit a ChatGPT-generated essay, I'll use ChatGPT to grade it.

Guiding Questions

As you read Norris’s essay, ask yourself:

  • What idea in Norris suddenly “clicked” for you — what helped the story make sense in a new way? Identify the moment where your understanding of "The Boarding House" shifted.

  • How does that idea help you read a specific aspect of the story differently? For example: a character’s motives, the narrator’s style, a moment of silence or omission, a metaphor, or the social dynamics at play.

  • Where can you take this idea further? Norris opens the door — what can you add, extend, or complicate?

Specific interpretive questions

You may use one of these more specific interpretive questions if they help you focus.

  • What does the story’s omissions or redactions make possible that Norris helped you notice?

  • How do institutions (confession, morality, social pressure) shape the characters in ways Norris highlights?

  • Where do you now suspect the narrator is biased or selective after reading Norris?

  • How did Norris help you rethink Polly’s lack of interiority or the possibility that she performs roles?

  • How did her discussion of violence or respectability reshape your reading of Mrs. Mooney or Bob Doran?

  • How did noticing class markers in language (thanks to Norris) alter your sense of who has power in the story?