In what ways can Dubliners be defined as a modernist text? What characteristics of Modernism can be found in James Joyce's Dubliners?

James Joyce's Dubliners follows the
thematic concerns of Modernist literature as summarized by the sociologist Georg
Simmel:

The
deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the
autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces,
of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of
life.

T. S. Eliot further
described Modernism in his discussion of Joyce's
Ulysses

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... It is simply a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary
history.

Certainly, in his
Dubliners, Joyce diagnoses the human misery of the Irish who live
in the capital city.  In addition, he identifies the source of much of this condition as
that Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency which served as the bulwark of British power in
the land.  With these social forces, Joyce portrays the tragic Irish paralysis which
prevents his characters from breaking their stultifying
conditions.

Providing the reader insights into the
individuals of his work, Joyce employs the distinctive Modernist technique of
stream-of-consciousness or internal monologues, at least.  The daily life of the
individual residents of Dublin is paramount to the vision of life and the spiritual
condition of the Irish as a whole.  As Terence Brown of Trinity College has
written,

It
was, Joyce believed, the artist's duty to expedite that uttering forth, that
manifestation, through his placing of such epiphanic moments in a context that allowed
the reader to discern their possible significance. ...some of
Dubliners' Dubliners achieve comedic fictional apotheosis and
occupy a text where variegated perspective and a mythic method would bring to full term
the embryonic Modernism of the precociously experimental and achieved
book.