James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

This new study of "A Portrait of the Artist ..." uses Bakhtin's theory of dialogics to explore the ways in which Joyce dramatizes the growth of Stephen Dedalus through his interactions with the "voices" of his culture. A number of overlapping sections consider the different phases to this growth starting with Stephen's attempts to locate himself in relation to the voices of his fellow pupils and his masters. Bakhtin's notion of "heteroglossia", which asserts the multivocal nature of novelistic texts, is used to look at questions of the Church's authority, of gender and of culture in the novel. Attention is also given to the novel's concern with the linguistic ferment in Ireland in 1890 and to Stephen's attempts at poetic composition. Stephen's growing interest in the theatre is explored, and his efforts to control his dialogues with fellow students are analyzed. The study concludes with an examination of Stephen's diary as an internalized dialogue with himself.