Department or Program

English

Abstract

As a narrative device which applies both to its characters and its respective reader, description of phenomenological experience as a source of insight is an integral aspect of James Joyce's fiction. To the same extent that Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man arrives at epiphanic conclusions about his faith and about art, the reader is in a similar position to examine these as part of the analytic process. This phenomenological framework is of utmost concern in the type of deconstructive analysis we find in the works of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, who challenge the non-transcendental subjectivity of intuition as a solution to the question "what is literature?" Joyce virtually relays the above deconstructive predicament as the process by which Stephen arrives at self-discovery and artistic becoming. A main, yet hitherto unexamined aspect of this becoming, however, is Portrait's extension into Ulysses, whereby Stephen's identification with Leopold Bloom's Otherness remedies the romanticized flaws in Stephen's aesthetic theory in Portrait and has legitimate implications in our conception of Joyce's works as metaautobiographical. To follow this claim, I will examine autobiographical information about Joyce and his relationship to the author who inspired Bloom's character: Italo Svevo. More specifically, throughout this thesis I will point out how the mutual influence both Joyce and Svevo had on each other translates into their texts, insofar as Joyce's fiction becomes the site for a meta-kunstelrroman about himself.

Level of Access

Open Access

First Advisor

Freedman, Sanford

Second Advisor

Osucha, Eden

Date of Graduation

11-2024

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Number of Pages

70

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