Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Shut up James, you had me at 'moo-cow.'
Portrait of the Artist (1916) reads like the story of a missed priestly vocation and the dawn of a literary calling. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was” — introducing Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego, to be reencountered in Ulysses. The novel follows Stephen through his learning years, back in late 19th-century BE-colonised Ireland: episodic scenes about his family, divided between their orthodox Catholicism and the Irish nationalist movement, his upbringing at Clongowes Wood
This book is a very dry, written version of the Dead Poet’s Society without Robin Williams. I was already grateful to Whoopi Goldberg this week for her reasonable comments about the most recent Sarah Palin ridiculousness, so I feel kind of bitter at having to be grateful for the other half of that daring duo. I had sworn them as my nemeses – minor nemeses, yes, of nowhere near the caliber of Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, or Harold Bloom, but nemeses nonetheless. Now, I find myself thinking, “It’...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of ripening, a story of the complicated and excruciating spiritual struggle.A boy in the world of adults: he finds out that there is injustice, that there are such things as perfidy and hypocrisy… It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a sc...
Words, art, life...Life, art, words...BEAUTIFUL! James Joyce,... what a masterful writer!!This book is insightful, poetic, artistic and profound. It is , if I may say so, a tour de force of wisdom and language. I will try to make this review not ridiculously long, but as you can imagine, when a book is this good, there is no way you can write a short review and be satisfied. So let's take a look at Joyce's brilliance,1. Language - Joyce's language is fresh and unique, his techniques and style
CELEBRITY DEATH MATCH : STEPHEN DEDALUS VS. HOLDEN CAULFIELD(Note : this is not part of the current ongoing Celebrity Death Match series organised by Manny but I thought I would revive it as a companion piece)****************BUCK MULLIGAN : Come on, kinch, you fearful jesuit. I’ve got a tenner on this so I have so get in that square ring and batter this lollybogger senseless.STEPHEN : Pro quibus tibi offérimus, vel qui tibi ófferunt hoc sacrifícium laudis.BUCK MULLIGAN : Give us a rest of your g...
First read back in High School – 2 StarsReread as an adult – 4 StarsThis is a Bildungsroman – that is a word I always think sounds fun but I always forget what it means. I only realized this book is one because of my followup review of it on Wikipedia for extra facts. For those who are like me and think it is a fun word but can’t always place how to use it, it is “a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood . . . . in which chara...
James Joyce is widely recognized as a great writer but often obscure. This almost autobiographical novel belies this reputation. We read it without difficulty, and we do not have to look for complicated literary ulterior motives. Stephen Dedalus, a character the author has featured in several of his books, is Joyce's alter ego. In this "Portrait", we see a boy (first attending college) becoming a young adult. Everything is intelligible in this journey. Everything sounds authentic. But Joyce intr...
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Hell-Fire: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce(Original Review, 1981-02-16)"April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."How much I love/hate Joyce when I read about him...how could he have denied his mother on her deathbed? That act disturbed me - he did not even kneel when she died.I am not speaking of hypocrisy here just thinking of a young poseur who was thinking of himself above al...
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ~~ James JoyceThis novel ... this fucking, brilliant novel ... I don't even know where to start
“His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.” Thus awarene
I am concurrently reading two enormously stimulating and intellectually challenging books - both of which I can recommend strenuously - My Bright Abyss and Holy Desperation. Each of these, distinctly different and imperiously individualistic, is by a writer who takes James Joyce’s commandment to become the conscience of our race at face value. Each does that differently - the former by a disinterested poetic conscience - and the latter by a socially committed religious conscience.But each is - o...
(Book 736 from 1001 books) - A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce (1882 - 1941)A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ir...
"Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes”(And he sets his mind to unknown arts.) - Ovid MetamorphosesThe above mentioned quote from Ovid, which appears at the start of the work, best describes the conclusion of a journey of an artist through his self, trying to come up with things that matter most, while still trying to discern his place in this world. I still remember the day, when as a teenager, ready to explore the world around me, I, once looked up in the sky, which was sunny and inspiring, and...
Forget The Perks of Being an Insufferable Wimp; forget the hollow, hipster-plasticity of Holden Cauliflower and his phony attempts at wry observations on adolescence; forget that clumsy excuse of an experimental storyteller that is Jonathan Safran Foer, aka “Meat is Murder” Johnny, with his nauseating, gee-I-guess-our-hearts-really-are-just-too-big-to-fit-into-one-sentence-after-all mentality; forget all that useless bullshit, if, like me, you can pick up James Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist
I read this back in high school (and a few times since) and it blew my mind. The textual maturity grows as Stephen Daedalus grows and it is absolutely captivating. The scene where his knuckles are beaten in class (thank goodness we have moved beyond corporal punishment in schools for the most part!) was so real that my hands ached. You of course see Stephen Daedalus again in Stephen Hero as well as Ulysses.A must read.
And there he was following the alleys, away from his original filial shell, searching where the way would take him, and there were icons on the walls. Icons of guilt, icons of duty. Some promised a reality beyond those grey walls announcing that there would be more light – but still imagined. Some pretended a glorious past and a glorious and heroic future for the community -- an imaginary polity. Captivating nets of restricting nationalism, coined discourses and gelled devotions. He took the tur...
He longed to let life stream in through the windows of his mind in all its sordid and colorful glory so that he could sift through the layers of feeling, impulse and meaning and find what his restless soul craved for - that shred of truth too primevally pristine for anyone to begrime. But the world intruded rudely upon his solemn preoccupations, planted seeds of insidious doubt wherever it could find the soft, yielding ground of inchoate perceptions. His oppressors were many and unapprehended -
An semi-autobiographic novel, featuring a fictionalized character as Joyce's alter-ego, it traces his formative childhood years that led him ambivalently away from a vocation in the clergy and into that of literature. There are sections which appealed to me (a priestly sermon on the damnation of ones soul into hell is particularly vivid), but by and large the plot line was too disjointed for me to engage with. Uncertain of exactly where I had been or what path the novel was taking me, I found m
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:- Introibo ad altare Dei." Scratch that.At the last minute, before witnessing Buck Mulligan mocking one of church's most important celebratory traditions and embarking on my odyssey with Ulysses, I decided to take the time to get acquainted with St