Literally glued

In Joyce’ short story “The Dead”, I came across a rather curious use of literally. A few days later, the word literally came up in class. Students discussed the emphatic use of literally in sentences like “The audience were literally glued to their seats”. Is this acceptable? A perfectly well-formed English sentence but a use of literally which seems to fly in the face of its “real” meaning, almost contradicting it. The speaker does clearly not mean that the audience were literally glued to their seats. Rather the speaker means it metaphorically, quite the opposite of literally. This use has recently come to the attention of many and is controversially discussed, most strongly objecting to it. I was intrigued by the fact that I had read it in “The Dead”. Usually it is believed that this “erroneous” use of the word is a recent phenomenon, but “The Dead” is almost a hundred years old. So I picked up the book and looked for the word. In vain. I read the story diagonally and then read the dialogue passages more closely. Nothing. The word seemed to have disappeared. I gave up. The following day, I picked the book up again, repeating the procedure. Nothing. I decided that I must have made a mistake and that I had read the word somewhere else. Then it happened that I read a study of “The Dead”, and when I least expected it, here it was: the passage in which literally occurred was quoted. It occurs right in the very first sentence of the story! It says “Lily was literally run off her feet.” So that confirmed my suspicion that this use is not so recent as is generally believed. What is more, there was a comment on this use of literally. Its use serves as an example to illustrate Joyce’s particular style: although the narrator is speaking, the language is the character’s, it is Lily’s. Someone like her would use the word in this sense, not Joyce. This finally also explained why I had not found the word in the dialogue passages of the story, where I had expected it.