THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the second in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is Joyce’s first novel, the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I discuss the novel’s history, from its first version, Stephen Hero, a 1000-page omnisciently narrated realist saga, to its revision as a dense, brief novel narrated entirely from within the language of consciousness of Joyce’s stand-in Stephen Dedalus, from the babytalk of his childhood to the philosophizing of his early adulthood. I explain Joyce’s modernist revision of the bildungsroman as genre: his schematic exposure of its structure and devices. I detail the paradoxes of a static portrait that is also a developmental bildungsroman, an interpenetration of time and eternity. I explore the relations between literature and painting. To demonstrate the type of close reading Joyce demands, I give a dramatic reading from a passage in my doctoral dissertation about the function of articles (a, the, a) in the novel’s title. Then I journey through the novel’s plot and structure, elaborating on themes, styles, and motifs, with attention to the narrative’s mythic dimension in the story of Daedalus and to the themes of gender and sexuality the novel raises. I also link the novel to Romanticism as both a fulfillment and critique of that earlier movement, with reference to Joyce’s Blakean, Byronic, and Shelleyean allusions. Finally, I discuss Stephen as Luciferian rebel, anti-nationalist apolitical radical, and aestheticizing philosopher. Next week, we will rejoin Stephen in the first three chapters of Ulysses. The first 14 minutes are free to all; please offer a paid subscription for the full episode. Please like, share, and comment—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.