Items related to Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,...
COLLECTORS EDITION! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! What makes Joyce's work so important in the Modern prose movement is his radical use of the experience of ordinary, intelligent, hands-on people, and his open expectation that such people can think for themselves. The typical prose product of Joyce's era was an endless stock of stylishly refined, and excruciatingly moralistic, thinking and feeling codified in middle-class society to comfort their need to see themselves as a superior, educated, progressive elite. The new Middle class leadership, that replaced the nobility following the French and American Revolutions, was wary of the rising collective power of the 'lower orders', and they used a developing market for prose to cow the still barely literate masses into seeing themselves as inferior and not quite up to the complex operations needed to make civil institutional life function. Joyce, and his fellow 'originals' made literature of the clever, practical thinking of ordinary people in their getting on with the humor, tragedies and grit of everyday life. The social context of the end of the 19th century is difficult to imagine today, but the refreshing mental effort required to read Joyce still has lost none of its stimulative potency. In the actual prose, the thing to look for is the very demanding range of association his writing requires, and also notice how much is expected of the reader to follow along and fill in the gaps left for imagination. It's extremely rewarding to read a text by an author who assumes his reader can, and might want to take an active, intelligent role in the making of art. Not everyone comes to literature to work, but some will, and, with Joyce, they'll find more than a little satisfaction. After a first read of Joyce, it helps to read some commentary from supplementary sources, then make a second pass. I re-read Joyce every five years or so, and I find that as my experience grows I see more of what was (and is) at stake. I encourage any curious person to take the Joyce challenge. 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait' are wonderful journeys by themselves, even if the reader stops there, and doesn't venture on to 'Ulysses', or 'Finnegan's Wake.' The inexperience of the observer's viewpoint is an essential element in what makes what he sees a source of wonderment, so inviting to his uninitiated curiosity, not yet complicated by the layering strategies of social experience-- this is true both for 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1470164566
- ISBN 13 9781470164560
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages450
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want