A Poststructural Reading Of Stephen Dedalus’s Growth In Joyce’s A Portait Of The Artist As A Young Man

What Irish novelist James Joyce is to the modern novel, Eliot is to themodern poetry, Picasso is to the modern painting, and all can be listed to bethe peak of the modernist art in each field. A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man (hereafter Portrait) known as Joyce’s first published novel, thefirst initiation novel uses the technique of “stream of the consciousness”,also as an experimental novel that Joyce shifted from traditional toinnovative.This thesis intends to explore Joyce’s experimental novel—Portraitthrough Derrida’s theory of deconstruction and Foucault’s theory ofdiscourse and power so as to better explain the paradoxical process ofgrowth of the young fledgling artist, namely, Stephen Dedalus as anunstable movement, punctuated with failures and frustrations which are thevery elements that constitute the road to art.After an introduction to the background introduction and thetheoretical framework, this thesis analyzes the three stages of theprotagonist’s “circular” progresses respectively in early childhood, juvenile,and the early manhood through the theories of Derrida and Foucault. Basedon these theories, the thesis reveals that the protagonist’s growth takes abackward pattern, and that his growth suffers from the severe oppressions from family, school, nation and religion, highlighting a rough life pathunder which individual is structured by ideology and suppressed by theinvisible social power, just like living in a “panopticon”. The conclusion isthat Joyce, by means of innovative narrative skills, vividly depicts thespiritual growth of a young artist, and Joyce tends to indicate that, far frombeing something that one can be brushed away and neglected, the setbacksand pressures are the very necessities that can not do without in the processof the formation on the part of Stephen.