About This Blog
This Blog, about the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, arises as a part of my final project for the English 11 Course taught by Mr Bazilewich in Delta Secondary School (Ladner, British Columbia).
The Posts of this Blog are grouped in 6 pages or sections.
The section named Joyce Timeline collects the highlights in the live of James Joyce with a special attention to the main landmarks in his literary work.
Posts of the third section , A portrait …, are used for contextualizing the novel and for reflecting some aspects that have caught my attention (as the relevance that Dublin has in the novel with a role transcendent to be the place where the action occurs or the great number of characters that accompany the main one: Stephen Dedalus). The first post of it analyzes the social and political context of Ireland in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th; a key element to understand many of the aspects and facts that James Joyce incorpores in the novel A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The next four posts of this blog page approach the novel giving it a glance overview to it´s characters, the role that Dublin plays (with a map that incorporates places, quotes where they are cited and photographs of them) and the different colleges in where Stphen Dedalus receives formal education during the period of the life in which A portrait of the artist as a young men focus, from the time of his first entering Clongowes College (the same where Joyce started at age 6) through his University days (Joyce attended University College Dublin from 1898 to 1902, ages 16 to 20). The last post of this part tries to answer to the question: What does this book sound like? including musical elements that appear in the novel (reinforcing the common space shared by the two artistic fields that passionated to James Joyce).
Sections four and five ( Rebellion & Uprooting and An Own Aesthetic sections) collect the elements that guide the readers through the proceses of Stephen´s personal and artistic growing, focusing in two main fields: politics ( how is the Irish society of the early twentieth century represented in the novel and how Stephen rebels against them) and aesthetics ( both in the novel and in Stephen’s own vision of art ); two interrelated dimensions as Richard Ellman notes in his book The Consciousness of Joyce: “Joyce’s politics and aesthetics were one. For him the act of writing was also, and indissolubly, an act of liberating. His books examines the servitude of his countrymen to their masters Church and State, and offers an ampler vision” (90).
Rebellion & Uprooting´s posts reflect on Stephen’s rebellion against the social, cultural and religious stereotypes of the Irish society as well as his uprooting, which leads him to assume that the only way in which he can free himself from this suffocating environment and be free is the exile (following the same path than James Joyce). After analyzing how the theme of Stephen’s artistic growth is becoming the central issue of the novel (which leads us to characterize the novel as a Bildungsroman novel that transits to a Künstlerroman one), the next posts focus in the “nets” that, according to Stephen, he must cut: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (220).
Under the heading An Own Aesthetic, are grouped both the posts that address some formal aspects of the novel and the key elements from which Stephen Dedalus builds his own aesthetic, giving special attention to the rol that epiphanies play, as relevant literary device of modernist aesthetic. Ending with a post about what art is and the mission of the artist.
The last section of the blog (Resources) contains the works cited in the posts, as well as the links to the most outstanding pages that address the study and analysis of James Joyce and his work.
