A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man As A Quest For Self

This thesis mainly discusses what the fictional character Stephen Dedalus'"self-fashioning"(the neo-historicist scholar Stephen Greenblatt's coinage, in myusage, it is "quest for self") and the author James Joyce's own "self-fashioning"in APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man mean, and how the image of the young artistportrayed by Joyce puzzles and stimulates the critics and influences the readers thereand then, here and now.First, a survey of the Joycean criticisms through so many years is made in lightof reception theory which reveals that through the dynamism between "horizon ofexpectations"and the text, what readers/critics fundamentally do is "what we havebeen 'reading,'in working our way through a book is ourselves"(Eagleton 68). Theinvestigation of the reception history of A Portrait demonstrates not only the changingof various critical opinions but also the critics'understanding of the self and theirself-understanding under varying historical situations to a certain extent.After that, the thesis does a narrative reading of the novel supported by the"narrative identity theory"developed by two contemporary philosophers AlasdairMacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur which is frequently employed in literary researchnowadays. As far as this theory is concerned, the novel is a "narrative quest for self."This theory highlights the necessity of a narrative understanding of ourselves in the"postmodern condition"where the social and philosophical climate prevents us from"envisaging each human life as a whole, as a unity,"and promises a narrative identitywhich is "coherent but fluid and changeable."The thesis focuses on the interactivefunction of Joyce's narrative and the construction of Stephen's self and personalidentity.In the framework of "the theory of narrative identity,"self (or selfhood),ontologically distinct from identity, refers to the kind of entity that is characterized byits ability to reflect upon itself. Identity, on the other hand, is a narrative constructionthat is the product of this reflective process.In its reception history of more than eighty years, A Portrait has attracted andprompted various readings that can be counted as a "branch"of the "Joyce industry."In Jauss's and Iser's reception aesthetics, through the reader-text interaction, thereader carrying his own "horizon of expectations"into understanding the novel maycome out anew with "updated"expectations both of the work and of himself. Criticsarguing about the genre of this novel might be caring about the problems of thejuvenile such as Stephen when they are "first"faced with society and reality as livingout a "dangerous"age: If the novel is Bildungsroman, Stephen manages to conquerthem and becomes a successful artist at last; if it is anti-Bildungsroman, Stephen is aworthless character because he takes things around him ironically, fails in his revolt,and is too proud and isolated from the outer world. Critics looking for naturalism andsymbolism in the novel seem to be favoring the viewpoint of founding life on the soilof reality on the one hand and invigorating life with the wings of imagination on theother. The feminist reading of the novel, through disclosing the "negative"portrayalof the female figures, rediscovers and speaks for "the repressed,"and stresses the factthat a "patriarchal"novel written by a great writer as Joyce manifests the gravity of"the women issue."In the light of the archetypal criticism, Joyce shows us thepossibility and necessity of imposing order on chaotic and fragmented modern lifethrough the revival of ancient myths, and in the "modern labyrinth,"people canproject their "multiple"self onto not one mythic figure but several figures, just asStephen projects himself onto Daedalus, Icarus and Minotaur. The psychoanalysisdiagnoses Stephen's villanelle as the product of his "phantasms and daydreams"signaling his unfulfilled wish for "the embodiment of womanhood,"and in this wayevidences perhaps Joyce's own artistic pursuit of the stream of consciousness.According to Marxist criticism, Stephen is a "romantic idealist"fighting with thedominant ideologies of colonialism, religion and the bourgeoisie for freedom andindividuality, and the only "arms"he allows himself to use is literature, which mayimply literature of a revolutionary nature. With the help of "the theory of narrative identity,"the thesis comes to a narrativeunderstanding of the novel whose purpose should be to expound the correlation...