Between “The Artist” and “a Young Man”: Stephen Dedalus and the dialectics of exception in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

In this article, I will argue that, far from trying to prove or actualize Stephen's exceptional status, Joyce's narrative in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man focuses instead on the process which this character undergoes, his intimate and complex drive to “except himself” from those around him, and the challenges which he faces in his endeavour. Through this progression, Joyce delineates a specific dialectics between the individuals and the powers that surround them, which ties in with his conceptions of literary authority as a whole. Against the worshippers of the Artist and the Author as a demiurgic character, he offers up a figure of elusiveness, always caught in a productive dialectics between the desire for transcendence and the irreducible multiplicity of common experience.

Keywords

• Modernism
• James Joyce
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Stephen Dedalus
• Author-theory
• Exception