James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I read the introduction last night (Oxford World's Classic edition). I will not explain in detail, but list some thoughts I found interesting. This way, you all can discover your own analysis and ideas.
Early reviewers of Portrait characterized Joyce's writing as 'invincible honesty'. Others described his 'intellectual integrity, his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely... He is a realist of the first order'. Joyce received mixed response from his 'sheer undecorated, unintensified truth', however, no doubt that he was one of the early sculptors of Modernism.
As Joyce has described, he meant the novel to be 'almost autobiographical' (and in a reversal that had life imitating art). The novel traces the growth and development of an individual to the point that he or she walks out of the novel on the last page seemingly self-determined and self-determining.
Portrait shows Joyce compressing, selecting the salient detail, arranging things to suit the aesthetic pattern of the novel, not to accord with the timing of his own life history. Things happen in this novel because of their significance to the portrait of Stephen that Joyce wishes to draw, because they reveal something about him (and the culture in which he exists).
The themes that will exfoliate over the course of the novel are sounded: Irish history, politics and religion brought into the intimacy of family marked by the conflict between Irish Catholicism and English Protestantism; family's and society's inculcation of heterosexual norms; the expectation that moral behavior can be elicited and enforced through the threat of punishment; the aesthetic disposition of life (where 'art, alters nature').
This is a nice vantage point... and commence with the discussioning.
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Originally Posted by subterranean
