Beginning with Hugh Kenner’s “The Rhetoric of Silence” (1977), silence has long been an object of critical attention in Joyce studies, and understandably so, since in ]oyce’s works it plays, not surprisingly, a major role. Especially in a post-structuralist era, silence has been more often culturally considered than textually investigated and it has profitably been intercepted by sophisticated philosophical lenses and transformed into a vastly complicated topic.The essay explores the rhetoric of silence in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and postulates that silence - in all its many forms - is here used by Joyce to define the feminine sphere of expression and empowerment, since Joyce's most powerful silences are those constructed around the feminine
