A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Getting Started

Some notes on today's lecture/talk:

1. Due dates for reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Read chapter 1 (page 59 in the green & white editions, page 51 in the brown) by Monday, November first (All Saint's Day which would have been a day of Holy Obligation for Stephen).

Read chapter 2 (page 101 in the green & white editions, page 89 in the brown) by Wednesday, November third.

Read chapter 3 (page 127 in the brown) by Friday, November fifth.

Read chapter 4 (page 151 in the brown) by Monday, November eighth (last day of term one).

Read chapter 5 (page 225 in the brown) by Friday, November twelfth.

2. Things I mentioned and/or we discussed in A-block and F-block.

Jansenism is similar in some ways to Puritanism. Human nature is not only corrupt, it is depraved. Salvation can only be achieved through God's grace and only a small number of elect will be saved. Communion should be reserved only to those who prepare for the sacrament through piety, prayer, and confession. Officially Jansenism was condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical in 1655 but aspects of Jansenism, especially the emphasis on the inherently depravity of mankind and the need for confession to purify oneself in order to receive God's grace, remained influential in Catholic countries including Ireland.

Stream of consciousness narration: Joyce uses third-person, stream of consciousness narration in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

3. Things I mentioned and/or we discussed in A-block but not in F-block.

Beautiful Losers is a film about a loosely associated group of diy visual artists creating art in the 90s & 00s, inspired by such things as skateboarding, graffiti, vintage signs and advertising, punk and indie music, surfing, urban street life, etc. Why did we talk about it? I wanted to start having a conversation about what compels a person to begin making art of any kind. I wanted also to think about how art is a way of enacting a response to one's environment. (Side note: Alfred Mansfield Brooks said that an artist is not a special kind of (hu)man but each (hu)man is a special kind of artist. So I'm talking to you.) See also Kunstlerroman below.

Epiphany, as a holiday, as a literary term popularized by James Joyce, & etymologically

Madonna (virgin)-whore complex: a psychological condition in Freudian analysis that seems relevant to aspects of A Portrait and more generally to a culture that associates ideal women with purity.

The body/soul (also, body/spirit and body/mind) problem in Western Civilization from the Greeks after Socrates through Charles Olson and Western Civ's interest in Eastern philosophies and practice that approach the body/mind problem differently (or don't see it as a problem).

Side note: Thomas Aquinas's thoughts about the soul in relation to the body are particularly relevant to A Portrait.

4. Things I mentioned and/or we discussed in F-block but not in A-block.

Irish nationalist Charles Stuart Parnell and Kitty O'Shea (the namesake of a pub on Cabot Street in Beverly) and the Christmas dinner argument in chapter 1 of A Portrait.

5. Things I meant to get to but didn't in either block.

Some notes on Joyce and the novel: Joyce wrote the book in Dublin, Ireland, Trieste, Italy; and Zurich, Switzerland. He felt he had to flee the repressive atmosphere of Ireland in order to continue writing. Many of the things that happen to Stephen happened in some form to Joyce himself though they are fictionalized, stylized, and otherwise transformed, which makes the novel (loosely speaking) a roman a clef.

Daedalus (Dedalus) and Icarus (Here's a relevant excerpt of a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.) (Here's a translation of the epigraph which comes from Metamorphoses and refers to Daedalus, who creates a labyrinth to entrap a Minotaur and later wax wings to escape from a tower in that labyrinth on Crete, an island : "And he sets his mind to work upon unknown arts." That trio of italicized words is significant to the novel. But there's a lot more too, especially the flying (and Icarus' falling). I wonder what you will notice as you read.

A novel of identity formation about an artist is called a Kunstlerroman.

That's enough for now.