Study On The Writing Techniques In James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

As an outstanding representative of modernism, James Joyce has drawn wide attention. Over the past several decades studies of Joyce have engaged students, scholars and critics of literature the world over so that now there is a "Joyce industry". The present paper, therefore, is an attempt to analyze Joyce's early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It focuses on the writing techniques the author manipulates in structure, narrative and the using of symbols, and shows how they are uniquely united with the content. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an autobiography and a work of art at once, representing Joyce's early artistic experiment. To reflect the painful and tortuous process of spiritual development of a young artist Stephen Dedalus, Joyce employs a wave-like five-part structure, governing the sequence of events of all chapters; to mark Stephen's development in his childhood, adolescence, and early manhood, Joyce adjusts appropriately his narratives and adopts a complex symbol system. The techniques employed in the novel, on one hand, help to display Stephen's character and his development, on the other hand, make the novel depart from the traditional Bildungsroman. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is two-fold; it examines the artistic skills employed in the novel, it also discusses Joyce's innovations in the novel.Chapter One is an introduction. Chapter Two discusses the novel and its literary position. Chapter Three shows in detail Joyce's employment of various techniques. The last part is a conclusion based on the discussion in the previous chapters.