This year is the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The course will study Joyce’s writings between (but excluding) Dubliners and Ulysses, focusing primarily on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and covering the period from 1904, with Stephen Hero, through to the publication of Joyce’s play Exiles in 1918. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was written across some ten years, during which time Joyce struggled to remake the novel into something revolutionary and new, abandoning the heavily autobiographical Stephen Hero with its ‘traditional’ narrative style, and recasting it in the modernist narrative of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with its thematically related episodes centred on the awareness of its central character Stephen Dedalus.
The course will look at the background and evolution of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, from Joyce’s 1904 essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, through Stephen Hero, to his first complete novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, itself a giant step towards the definitive modernist novel, Ulysses. The chronology of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man spans from around the time of the death of the great Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, to the year of Joyce’s own departure for Paris, 1902, and the conflicts which the growing Stephen encounters are cast in relation to the politics of Irish nationalism, sexuality and the Church, and the literary revival.
Our study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be informed by historical and biographical contexts, and augmented by consideration of Joyce’s other work during this period, his poetry, his short prose work Giacomo Joyce (1914), and his only extant play Exiles (written 1913-1915). Stephen’s growth into rebellion in his novel proclaims Joyce’s defiant credo: ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself […] as freely as I can and as wholly as I can’.
