Clashing Cultures in “Counterparts”: Navigating among Print, Printing, and Oral Narratives in Turn-of-the-Century Dublin

In this chapter, Miriam O’Kane argues that the tension in “Counterparts” between oral and print cultures reveals a gendered, literate modern world where a mechanized future is inevitable. O’Kane reads Joyce’s text alongside Belinda McKeon’s rewriting of “Counterparts” in Dubliners 100, arguing that McKeon’s story “invites a return to the original and uncovers some of the finer nuances of Farrington’s struggle as linked to not only a broad cultural shift to writing, but one that is destabilized by the tools and roles of mechanical print culture.” O’Kane’s reading of the two stories highlights the way that Irish identity is affected by the movement of mechanical reproduction and the need to manage a new discourse of print technology.