Establishing Authorial Self in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

This research looks at James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the perspective of autobiographical subjectivity. Perceiving the novel as plain autobiography without considering the components involved in the creation of the work appears problematic. Taking the insight from reading autobiography, this research examines the involvement of constitutive components on the composition of this novel. This research analyses how constitutive processes of autobiographical subjectivity work while writing an autobiographical text. In the novel, Joyce establishes his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, the major character of the novel, through a very complex process that consists of memory, experience and identity. By showing that the novel as the product of complex constitutive processes rather than a plain narrative, this research highlights the importance of memory, experience, an effort to have an identity and interrelationships among these factors while writing the autobiographical narrative.