Title:
"A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man"
Author: James Joyce
Date of Publication: December 29, 1916
Sources: http://www.utm.edu/staff/lalexand/brnovel/Portrait.html
file:///C:/Users/David%20Smith/Downloads/a-portrait-of-theartist-as-a-young-man-LitChart.pdf
http://www.shmoop.com/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-youngman/genre.html
http://www.tobiasboes.net/wpcontent/uploads/2011/01/01_75.4boes.pdf
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/portrait-of-theartist-as-a-young-man-is-published http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/joyce/portraitartist.pdf
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artistas-a-young-man/about-a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man http://www.utm.edu/staff/lalexand/brnovel/Portrait.html
Information about the period (literary, historical, artistic, philosophical, etc.):
Portrait takes place during one of the most turbulent and eventful periods of Irish history. A significant issue during this period was Irish nationalism and separatism. Since the
Norman invasion in the 12th century, large parts of Ireland had been held under British rule, and in 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. Throughout the 19th century, and especially after the great potato famines of the 1840s, many
Irish people felt growing dissatisfaction with British rule and dreamed of becoming a sovereign nation. Irish separatists splintered into two major groups: Fenians, who favored the use of brute force, and constitutional reformists, who chose to follow a more moderate path within the confines of international law. Michael Davitt and Charles Parnell were famous separatist leaders of the 1870s and 80s. Under
Parnell’s leadership, and with the support of the British prime minister, the Irish people hoped to finally establish home rule; but when it came out in 1891 that Parnell had been engaging in an extramarital affair with Kitty O’Shea, the wife of a member of the Irish Parliament, the Catholic Church denounced Parnell and he fell from power. He died only a year later, and the Irish separatist movement lost direction – until erupting in the 1919 War of Independence.
Significant biographical details about the author:
Full Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
Pen Name: James Joyce
Date of Birth:2 February 1882
Place of Birth: Rathgar, a Dublin suburb
Date of Death:13 January 1941
Considered by many scholars to be one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century writing, Joyce dedicated himself to exuberant exploration of the total resources of language.
Joyce was born in Dublin, where his father was a rates collector. His father, who took pride in coming of an old and substantial Cork family, had some talent as a musician and much more as a genial lounger, and was little troubled by the economic straits into which is household was drifting during his son's boyhood. Joyce was sent at first to the expensive
Jesuit boarding school described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When he was still an undergraduate, in 1900, his long review of Ibsen's last play was published in the
Fortnightly Review. At this time he also began writing his poems which were later collected in Chamber Music (1907).
In 1902 he broke away from his family and his studies and went to Paris on a tenuous proposal to read medicine. After a year of near starvation he was recalled to Dublin to the deathbed of his mother. His refusal to kneel in prayer beside the dying woman, whether it be matter of fact or the artistic transmutation of fact, certainly marks that turning point in his life at which he formally renounced the Christian faith and thereby thought to free himself from influences by which (as we can now see) his mind had been irrevocably colored.
From 1904 he lived with Nora Barnacle, whom he married in 1931 (the year his father died), a son was born in 1905, and a daughter in 1918. Miss Barnacle, who is said to have worked in a Dublin hotel [as a chambermaid], had little education and no understanding of
Joyce's work; to the end she seems to have felt merely that he made things very difficult for himself by writing in so strange a fashion. But she shared the fondness for music and was vivacious and humorous. Their home from 1905 to 1915 was Trieste, where Joyce taught
English at the Berlitz school. In 1909 and 1912 he made his final trips to Ireland, attempting to arrange the publication of his first book Dubliners, which finally appeared in England in
1914. It was during this time that he was contacted by Ezra Pound, a leading champion of modernist writers who helped organize financial payments to keep Joyce writing during his most poverty-stricken periods.
In 1918, his revolutionary stream of consciousness novel Ulysses began to be serialized in the American journal Little Review. However, the U.S. Post Office stopped the publication's distribution in December of that year on the grounds that the novel was obscene. Sylvia
Beach, owner of bookstore Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, where Joyce moved in 1920, published the novel herself in 1922, but it was banned in the United Kingdom and the
United States until 1933.
Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939, and Joyce died in 1941
Bio specific to this book:
According to Joyce's celebrated biographer, Richard Ellman, Joyce hoped that his Portrait would be an autobiographical novel, "turning his life into fiction." While scholars disagree on the extent to which Joyce's life affected his fictional narrative in the novel, most of them concur that Stephen Dedalus is both the protagonist of the novel, as well as the persona
(Latin, meaning "mask") behind which Joyce paints his fictional "portrait" of the "artist" and of the "young man."

Identify the genre and specify how this work fits its characteristics:
Coming of Age, Literary Fiction, Modernism
This book is a truly classic and often-cited example of the Coming of Age novel. The whole deal with this genre is that it shows us the development of a character or set of characters through their experiences and thoughts. If you want to get all fancy schmancy and German, you could call it a Bildungsroman, which is just a highfalutin’ literary term for "Coming of Age Novel." However, it is actually useful to go into the German terminology, since they have an even more specific word for what Portrait of the Artist is – Künstlerroman. This term represents a specific subgenre of Bildungsroman, in which we see the development of an artist, not just any garden-variety young person.
Anyway, enough of the German; Portrait also falls under Literary Fiction, mostly because Joyce was really up on himself and just knew that his books were very special and brilliant (he was infamous for making comments along these lines, particularly when it came to Ulysses).
Finally, it’s quite well known for being one of the first real Modernist novels. Joyce, along with Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, among others, was known for really getting the whole Modernism ball rolling, in response to the Realist style prevalent in the 19th century.
In (very) short, the Modernist movement was concerned with creating works of art relevant to a rapidly changing world, in which institutions like religion, capitalism, and social order were thrown into question by new and confusing ideas (Evolution! Marxism! Revolution!), technologies, and world events like World War I (or in this case, the Irish nationalist cause). Here, we see Joyce take on this challenge by creating a character who has to maneuver past the hang-ups of his family, church, and country by forging ahead on his own.
Provide a brief synopsis (include exposition, main conflict(s), climax, resolution, and major plot points):
In A Portrait, the reader learns through the particular experiences of Stephen Dedalus how an artist perceives his surroundings, as well as his views on faith, family, and country, and how these perceptions often conflict with those prescribed for him by society. As a result, the artist feels distanced from the world.
Unfortunately, this feeling of distance and detachment is misconstrued by others to be the prideful attitude of an egoist. Thus the artist, already feeling isolated, is increasingly aware of a certain grow ing, painful social alienation.
In addition, Stephen's natural, maturing sexual urges confuse him even further. Stephen is a keenly intelligent, sensitive, and eloquent young man, but he also possesses the feelings of urgent sexuality, selfdoubt, and insecurity — all universal emotions which are experienced during the development of the average adolescent male. Joyce reveals these tumultuous adolescent feelings through a narrative technique called stream-of-consciousness. He takes the reader into both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, showing him the subjective and the objective realities of a situation. Using Stephen Dedalus, he explores the depths of the human heart. This novel is narrated, for the most part, in the limited omniscient point of view; at the same time, it progresses in form from the lyrical and epical modes of expression and moves finally into the dramatic mode of expression. (These "modes of expression" are Stephen's own terms, defining the various kinds of literature; when we encounter them in the novel, we should write down Stephen's definitions and attempt to chart the course of this novel according to its evolving lyrical, epical, and dramatic levels.) Stephen's thoughts, associations, feelings, and language (both cerebral and verbal) serve as the primary vehicles by which the reader shares with Stephen the pain and pleasures of adolescence, as well as the exhilarating experiences of intellectual, sexual, and spiritual discoveries. In order to highlight the importance of Stephen's aesthetic experiences, Joyce borrowed a word from the Catholic faith in order to create a literary term of his own. When Stephen suddenly understands "the essential nature of a thing" — whether it is the understanding of a person, an idea, a word, or a situation — he has a moment of profound revelation. Joyce called these moments epiphanies. Some of Stephen's earliest epiphanies come from his acute sensory awareness and are recorded through Joyce's masterful use of imagery. In the novel, repeated patterns of sounds and remembrances of tastes, touches, and smells are all emphasized. Stephen's eyesight (like Joyce's) is weak; therefore, Joyce emphasizes other senses, and in doing so, he employs the valuable motif method of narration, wherein he records recurrent images of hot/cold, wet/dry, and light/dark images, as well as recurring symbols. He also uses dramatic irony to identify Stephen's basic conflicts and emphasize significant events in his life. Although several themes such as alienation and betrayal exist in the novel, Ellman states that Joyce originally recognized the work's main theme as "the portrait of the renegade Catholic artist as hero." Certainly, evidence from Joyce's life mirrors Stephen's need to escape the bonds of Irish nationalism and Catholicism, both of which seemed to threaten his pursuit of a literary career. The most obvious clue that the author's life is related to the novel's thematic development exists in the hero's name —
Stephen Dedalus, which combines significant elements of both Greek and Christian myths. "Stephen" is the name of the first Christian martyr who was persecuted for reasons of faith. Joyce's hero identifies with his patron's martyrdom by recalling an early reprimand against marrying a Protestant, the unjust pandying incident, and a variety of instances wherein he was ostracized or made to feel guilty by his peers and older people. It is, however, the author's choice of his character's family name — Dedalus — which reveals to readers the source of the novel's greatest thematic parallel. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the story of the cunning Greek inventor and his ill-fated, impetuous son, is the framework responsible for the major imagery and symbolism which pervade the novel.
Daedalus, an architect commissioned by King Minos, designed an elaborate labyrinth in which the king planned to confine the monstrous Minotaur. However, ill-fortune soon caused Daedalus and Icarus to be imprisoned in the labyrinth, from which they were forced to contrive a daring and ingenious escape.
Symbolically, Stephen, like Daedalus, feels compelled to find a means of escape from the labyrinth of Dublin, which threatens him with spiritual, cultural, and artistic restraints. Similarly, Stephen can also be compared with Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, melted his fabricated wings, and plunged to his death in the sea. Like Icarus, Stephen ignores the warnings of family and clergy and is symbolically drawn toward a philosophical illumination which ultimately casts him into sin (spiritual death) and leads him to renounce his Catholic faith.
The final and most dramatic parallel associates Stephen with his mythic namesake Daedalus — the "great artificer." Like Daedalus, Stephen succeeds in escaping the labyrinth of cultural restraints. At the end of the novel, Stephen is imaginatively soaring — in flight away from Ireland toward a future of unfettered artistic freedom

Identify and explain the use and effect of three literary techniques:
1. "Free indirect discourse" may sound all fancy, but it’s really just another way of saying that the narrative voice transfers between characters’ minds and the outside world of the novel with ease. Free indirect discourse is a narrative style that combines traditional third-person narrative with insights into a character’s mind that resemble the first person. For example, we often "hear" Stephen’s thoughts mediated by the narrator, and one instance can be found immediately following Stephen’s confession in Chapter
Three. Instead of having markers of interiority and exteriority ("Stephen thought," "he wondered," etc.), we often slide smoothly from a moment of external description and action into Stephen’s thoughts, with no alerts from our narrator:
2. & 3.
Epiphany and Leitmotif
The conversion of historical experience into poetic language also explains the peculiar texture of Joyce's novel: its oscillation between disjunctive and conjunctive elements and its reliance on the antagonistic techniques of ephiphany and letimotif. For after all, both style and structure of A
Portrait reflect the growing consciousness of its hero, from the infantile babblings on the opening page to the transition into the diary form in closing chapter. And if the form of this novel is explicitly shaped by the polyrhythmic historical experience that serves as its content, then it only makes sense that it would attempt to move in multiple directions at once. Michael Levenson recognized as much twenty years ago, when he attempted an intervention to save Joyce critics from their paralyzing obsession with "irony," defined long ago by Wayne Booth as a refusual to take sides.
Epiphany and leitmotif are, in other words, nothing less than a stylistic precipitate of the conflicting vectors that defined
Irish intellectual life in the early years of the twentieth century. The epiphany, for example is unmistakably aligned with the modernist aesthetics of rupture, and with the
Nietzschean blink of an eye ( Augenblick ). In the Stephen
Hero manuscript, Stephen himself defines it as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”30
This emphasis on the epiphany’s sudden and unexpected appearance stresses its family resemblance to the shock, that other quintessential symptom of modernist experience. Like the shock, the epiphany renders the everyday strange by disrupting the comfortable distance that ordinarily exists between the objective world and an apprehending subject.
But while the shock reduces the objective world to a jumble of meaningless signifiers that encroach upon and threaten to overwhelm the subject, the epiphany increases the distance between the two until the objective world is quite literally consumed in a moment of radiant and pure signification.31
Here, again, is Stephen Dedalus on his morning walk to
"The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy. It would be beautiful to die if
God so willed. It was beautiful to live in grace a life of peace and virtue and forbearance with others" (3.2.108).
It’s this style that allows Joyce to retain some distance from his character while also revealing his innermost workings to us. Instead of totally being immersed in Stephen’s personal experience, we have the privilege of moving between his inner thoughts and the narrator’s exterior, removed voice; this allows the author to toss in a little irony to shake things up occasionally. Even if Stephen is often humorless, it doesn’t mean that Joyce has to be.
His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed : and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded round him like a mantle and that in revery at least he had been acquainted with nobility. But when this brief pride of silence upheld him no longer, he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city fearlessly and with a light heart. ( P , 191; my emphasis)
Leitmotifs, on the other hand, function in a manner that is diametrically opposed to that of epiphanies in A Portrait .
Instead of emphasizing historical ruptures, they reiterate continuities, and instead of focusing on the contingency of the subject, they restrict personal options and underscore necessity. In the closing paragraphs of the first chapter of the novel, for example, Joyce offers a detailed and psychologically realistic description of Stephen’s exuberant feelings after he elicits an apology of sorts from the rector of
Clongowes Wood College over the unjust beating administered by Father Dolan: “The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. Hew would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something kindbfor him to show him that he was not proud”
( P , 60–61). The text then continues with a paragraph that enumerates Stephen’s surroundings in sensual detail—the color of the air, the smell of the fields. But whenthe description shifts into an auditory register, it takes on symbolical overtones: “The fellows were practicing long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air thesound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl” (
P , 61).

Name

An intelligent, sensitive, anxious, and ill-tempered boy growing up in an increasingly impoverished
Catholic household in
Dublin. In his long student years,Stephenpass es through many discrete stages
 Stephen’s father, a joker and merrymaker from
Cork who supports the Irish nationalist Parnell and distrusts the church
He has held a string of different jobs in his lifetime; as time goes on, he finds it more and more difficult to support his large family.
When he comes physically of age, he is anguished to discover that he cannot reconcile his austere Catholic upbringing with his intense erotic desire. His shame becomes so great that he turns wholeheartedly to religion in search of spiritual peace. But despite his many years of religious observance, he comes to find the religious life and worldview profoundly unsatisfying: shallow, illogical, and boring.
Stephen seems to find peace, or something like it, only when he discovers his vocation and ambition as a writer.

 Stephen’s mother, a modest and retiring woman who struggles to keep the family afloat when they begin to struggle financially
She is a devout Catholic. She disapproves of
Stephen’s studies at the university, and does her best to convince Stephen to be a good Catholic despite his artistic ambitions.

A young woman about whom very little is revealed
Stephen becomes infatuated with her after a party sometime during his summer at
Blackrock; he writes her a poem that night, and another poem ten years later.
Throughout the book she is his beloved object, his feminine ideal. Stephen’s feelings for Emma are tender and romantic, so the memory of her serves as a constant reproach to his lust.
 Stephen’s great uncle.
Stephen spends a large part of his summer at
Blackrock listening to Uncle Charles’ stories

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Explain the significance of each passage or explain how it relates to the work as a whole:
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These first lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represent Joyce's attempt to capture the perceptions of a very young boy. The language is childish: "moocow," "tuckoo," and
"nicens" are words a child might say, or words that an adult might say to a child. In addition to using childlike speech, Joyce tries to emulate a child's thought processes through the syntax of his sentences and paragraphs. He jumps from thought to thought with no apparent motivation or sense of time. We have no idea how much time goes by between Stephen's father telling him the story and Stephen wetting the bed. Moreover, the way
Stephen's thoughts turn inward reflects the way children see themselves as the center of the universe. Stephen is the same
Baby Tuckoo as the one in the story his father tells, and the song Stephen hears is "his song." As Stephen ages, Joyce's style becomes less childish, tracking and emulating the thoughts and feelings of the maturing Stephen as closely as possible.
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One technique Joyce uses to indicate the development of
Stephen's consciousness is to end each of the five chapters with a moment of epiphany in which Stephen recognizes the fallacy of one way of life and the truth of another. This passage is the epiphany that ends Chapter 3, the moment in which Stephen understands that he must turn to a religious life. The passage demonstrates one of the most revolutionary aspects of Joyce's narrative style: whereas other confessional novels usually involve narrators looking back at the events of their youth with an adult perspective, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not mediated by such a detached voice. When Stephen declares,
"Another life!" and "The past was past," we are given no indication that Stephen's religious life is eventually replaced by a calling to an artistic life. Rather, just like Stephen, we are led to believe that he will remain religious for the rest of his life and that the arrival of the ciborium symbolizes the arrival of his true calling

This passage, from Chapter 4, demonstrates Joyce's contention that becoming a true artist involves a calling, not a conscious decision the artist can make himself. These thoughts fly through
Stephen's mind just before he sees a young girl wading at a beach. The sight of her image leads to one of the most important epiphanies. At this moment, Stephen finally feels a strong calling, and determines to celebrate life, humanity, and freedom, ignoring all temptations to turn away from such a celebration. He has already succumbed to temptation twice: first, a "dull gross voice" causes him to sin deeply when he succumbs to the squalor of Dublin; second, an "inhuman voice" invites him into the cold, dull, unfeeling world of the priesthood. Both of these temptations, as well as the calling to become an artist, are forces through which the outside world acts upon Stephen. In this context, the passage suggests that it is as much fate as Stephen's own free will that leads him to
 become an artist.

Describe the setting(s) and explain its/their significance:
Dublin, Ireland and its outskirts, end of the 19th century
Dublin is necessary to this book. It’s inextricably tied to Stephen’s discontentment and to his sins; immersion in a bustling, often squalid urban space heightens Stephen’s (and our) awareness of his physical sense. The dirtiness of the city contrasts the spirit of possibility that surrounds the few natural spaces we encounter (such as Stephen’s summer idyll at Blackrock and the open, outward-looking expanse of the sea). Notably, the character most untouched by the darkness, sensuality, and cynicism of the city is Davin, whose country roots keep him at a distance from urban dangers.
The political climate of turn of the century Ireland is also particularly important; there’s a perpetual undercurrent of sadness and anger at the lack of Irish independence that runs through the entire text. The argument between Mr. Casey and Aunt Dante at the beginning of the novel lays out some of the sources of political tension. The brief recap is that many Irish people felt like Charles
Stewart Parnell was their best chance to gain "Home Rule," that is, autonomy from England. In contemporary terms, he was "a uniter, not a divider." But then
Parnell made one little mistake: he had an affair with Kitty O’Shea, a woman who had already separated from her husband. This issue split the nationalist cause, with pious moralists (like Dante) Overall, Stephen has mixed feelings about his hometown. He often seems to think that Dublin is hopelessly mired in the past and unable to modernize like the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe. He thinks its citizens are paralyzed by nostalgia and inaction – like his father, Simon
Dedalus. On the other hand, he often finds beauty even in the dinginess of the red-light district, his cluttered home, or the seaweed he sees from the shore of the beach.
MUSIC
Stephenoften evokes music to describe the intuitive, mysterious loveliness of certain experiences: the sound of the gas pipes at Clongowes is a song, the wheels of the train to Cork beat out a rhythmic music, the words in poems sound out melodies, memory itself is like music. Music also signals moments of transition and discovery; a simple melody turns Stephen away from the priesthood and reminds him of his artistic ambitions. More generally, music represents a loosening of boundaries: “the music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children.” Stephen responds strongly and intuitively tomusic, and it helps restore his childlike, artistic connection to the world around him.
BATS
Bats seem, to Stephen, to represent something essential about the conflicted, dark, mysterious Ireland of his childhood. He does not make the comparison entirely clear, yet he refers to it several times, with strong feeling: “he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats acrossthe dark country lanes,” he writes in one place; and “she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.” At the turn of nineteenth century,
Ireland was emerging from many centuries of British domination to astrong sense of national pride and dreams of independence. Stephen feels that Irish identity and self-awareness is still very young and uncertain, like a blindbat flying in the dark; it is also secretive and elusive, unlike the raucous Fenian celebrations in the streets. It is his artistic ambition to capture this identity and bring it to light.
Identify and explain the theme(s) of the work:
SOUL AND BODY The gap between soul and body means a great deal to
Stephen during childhood and adolescence. As a child, Stephen notes countless particular sights, sounds, and smells, and interprets them with great tenderness and seriousness: they seem to lead him deep into his memories and his understanding of the world. In this way, body and soul are naturally connected for Stephen as a child. But Stephen also shies away from many social activities, preferring to keep to himself and attend to his thoughts and daydreams: he distinguishes between extroverted activity, in which his body interacts with others, and introverted activity, in which his soul communes with itself. Stephen’s religious education reinforces the soul-body split. He has been taught since early childhood that premarital sex is a grave and shameful sin, so he perceives his adolescent sexual longing as a sort of insubordination of body against soul – an appalling perversion he must keep hidden at any cost. His secret lust, vague ambition, and keen poetic vision create a strange and weighty inner world that does not often correspond to the shrill, dirty, practical world of city, school, and family. Though he often feels burdened by this ghostly inner life, he seeks to protect it from dogmatic external influences: when he tries to control his body and elevate his soul through meticulous religious practice, the formulaic religious teaching ultimately fails to leave any permanent mark on his inner life. The culmination of his religious crisis seems to mark the reunion of soul and body: the senses, “the call of life to his soul,” turn Stephen away from the priesthood, fuel his artistic ambitions, and restore his inner world – the senses of the body, the same senses that fuel his lust. But when Stephen arrives to university, he carries the split into his rather antiquated aesthetic theories. He brags that he will “try to fly by [the] nets” of nationality, language, religion; but before he can become truly free, before he can repair the antagonismbetween soul and body, Stephen must create an aesthetics of his own. This new aesthetics, embodied byPortrait itself, will be one that does not privilegeunity over dispersion, thought over feeling, or purity over reality.
LITERATURE AND LIFE
Since earliest childhood, novels and poems helpStephen make sense of the world around him. From the very first scene of the novel, in which infant
Stephen creates a little rhyme from Dante’s threat that “eagles will come and pull out his eyes,” words shape and brighten Stephen’s experience. The sounds of words puzzle and enlighten him, and novels likeThe Count of Monte
Christo help him shape his adolescent identity. At times, beautiful phrases from poems thrill him as much as real romantic experiences. Yet, though
Stephen’s inner experience melds art and life, Stephen the young poet and aesthete believes there must exist a great distance between them: he imagines art as the vapory spirit soaring high over the city of the real. Drawing on the philosophy of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Stephen decides that art must inspire only philosophical abstractions about emotions, “ideal pity or terror,” but not real emotions themselves – he thinks passions like love and anger are too lowly for art. In his own poetry, he omits random or unsavory detail in favor of high romantic abstraction. “Excrement or a child or a louse” finds no place in his art. Joyce’s novel itself, of course, includes everything
Stephen omits: passion, crudeness, dirt, randomness, contradiction. The novel itself gently mocks and refutes Stephen’s youthful theories – theories that once belonged, perhaps, to the young Joyce himself.

Write at least three questions or topics for class discussion:
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