A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (Barnes & Noble Classics) [Paperback]

James Joyce (Author), Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2004

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, by James Joyce, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

Widely regarded as the greatest stylist of twentieth-century English literature, James Joyce deserves the term “revolutionary.” His literary experiments in form and structure, language and content, signaled the modernist movement and continue to influence writers today. His two earliest, and perhaps most accessible, successes—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners—are here brought together in one volume. Both works reflect Joyce’s lifelong love-hate relationship with Dublin and the Irish culture that formed him.

In the semi-autobiographical Portrait, young Stephen Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but first must struggle against the forces of church, school, and society, which fetter his imagination and stifle his soul. The book’s inventive style is apparent from its opening pages, a record of an infant’s impressions of the world around him—and one of the first examples of the “stream of consciousness” technique.

Comprising fifteen stories, Dubliners presents a community of mesmerizing, humorous, and haunting characters—a group portrait. The interactions among them form one long meditation on the human condition, culminating with “The Dead,” one of Joyce’s most graceful compositions centering around a character’s epiphany. A carefully woven tapestry of Dublin life at the turn of the last century, Dubliners realizes Joyce’s ambition to give his countrymen “one good look at themselves.”

 

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author or editor of a half-dozen books on James Joyce, modernist literature, and rock music. He is currently finishing a term as President of the Modernist Studies Association.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author or editor of a half-dozen books on James Joyce, modernist literature, and rock music. He is currently finishing a term as President of the Modernist Studies Association.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Kevin J. H. Dettmar’s Introduction to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners

Though written very nearly in tandem, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have very different agendas, and represent very different reading experiences, as well. We might, for purposes of illustration, think of Joyce’s first two works of fiction as representing critiques of two rather different literary genres: Dubliners, a critique of the short story as Joyce had inherited it, in which complicated psychological struggles are simplified and resolved in the course of three thousand words; and Portrait, a critique of the deeply romantic legacy of the Bildungsroman (novel of education and maturation) and its close relative the Kunstlerroman (which focuses on the development of the artist), forms that perpetuated a notion of heroism wholly unsuited to the realities of life and art in the twentieth century.

If early readers and critics of Dubliners were taken aback by Joyce’s unflinching reportage of the sordid details of modern urban life, contemporary readers are more often struck by the stories’ very abrupt endings: Time and again they seem merely to stop, dead in their tracks, rather than properly ending. The first three stories, in this regard, are representative. “The Sisters” ends while one of the eponymous sisters is in mid-conversation, mid-sentence: “So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. . . .” The ellipsis that closes the story is just one of twenty sets in this very elliptical three-thousand-word story, in which meaning seems to lie just behind the words, in between the words, peeking out at us but ultimately eluding us. At the close of the second story, “An Encounter,” our narrator calls for help to his friend Mahoney, but this message is relayed along with confession of a sin we cannot understand, or even guess at: “And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.” Hence, rather than the sort of closure a short story is supposed to provide, “An Encounter” opens up, vertiginously, on a host of other issues just when it should be shutting down new possibilities. The beautifully lyrical ending of “Araby” has been much analyzed, and to read the criticism, one would think that there’s nothing at all out of the way about the narrator’s sudden outburst in his closing sentence: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” What—? Revelation, it seems, arrives from out of the blue (or black), but we readers can neither see it coming nor figure out with any certainty whither it will lead our protagonist.

These three stories—and many others in the collection besides, including “Eveline,” “Two Gallants,” “The Boarding House,” “Clay,” “A Painful Case,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead”—focus on the moment of sudden revelation that Joyce called, after the traditions of the Catholic Church, an “epiphany.” A full description of the epiphany is one of the elements that Joyce stripped out of Stephen Hero in making Portrait; if we turn back to that earlier text, however, we discover the following explanation of the place of the epiphany in Stephen Dedalus’s evolving aesthetic philosophy:

This triviality [of a banal conversation he has overheard] made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments (James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, second edition, New York: New Directions, 1963, p. 211).

This insistence on the importance of the trivial plays throughout both Dubliners and Portrait; and a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid over the years to the concept of the epiphany. Without rehearsing in detail that voluminous scholarship, we might pause here to note that the terse description given in Stephen Hero describes a locus for the epiphany (in “everyday life”) and an agent of the epiphany (the writer); if much of public life consists of playing some kind of role, wearing a mask, an epiphany is one of those rare moments when the mask slips, and we see past convention, past language, and glimpse some fundamental truth about human nature. But the question of for whom the timeless human truth of the situation is suddenly made manifest, apart from the writer who records it, is left somewhat ambiguous.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (July 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840224681
• ISBN-13: 978-1593080310
• ASIN: 159308031X
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 5.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Bargain on a Comprehensive Edition, December 14, 2011

By 

Tyler Proctor (South Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

I bought this about 3 years ago from B&N. $6.95 for a volume that included 2 books that would be around $10 each in other editions was an unbeatable price. The volume (like all B&N classics) is sturdier and more durable than all of those $15 paperbacks. It also contains far more annotations and background information than standard editions. However, most of the footnotes are unnecessary at best, and annoying at worst. Anyone well-read enough to understand Joyce's prose shouldn't need half of them. I mean, do we really need a map of some Dublin neighborhood every few pages? Anyway, on to the actual books. The night I bought it, I began "Portrait". I found it to be really difficult (or at least I did 3 years ago, maybe it's time for a rereading), but not near as rewarding as other difficult works (The Sound and the Fury, for example). The novel had its moments, and I appreciated what Joyce was trying to do with language and narration etc., but there was just something about it that bored me through most of it. I let it sit on my shelf for quite a while until just a few days ago my friend(also an English major) told me that he didn't really care for "Portrait", but that he really liked "Dubliners", so I started reading it the next day. I'm about halfway through "Dubliners", and am enjoying it a lot more than "Portrait".

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bang for your buck, but underwhelming, January 15, 2007

By 

Jeffrey K. Boruszak - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

If you're here, you're here because you're looking for the cheapest edition of this book, which means one of two things:

1. You're reading it for a class, or
2. You want to read it for leisure and you're looking for the cheapest edition.

Either way, you probably have some idea of what this book is about. I have only read Dubliners, and will be commenting primarily on that. As one of James Joyce's earliest novels, it is a series of short stories, chronicling life in Dublin.

As a book, it's worth a read. It alternates between dull and interesting, with "The Little Cloud" and "The Dead" (the latter of which is universally renowned as the masterpiece of the work) shine above the rest. If you're a fan of realism, spontaneous prose, or Joyce, then it's for you. It's also good if you've never read Joyce and are looking for a "value pack."

My biggest complaint with this edition is the notes. Many things are footnoted, usually to define a term. Most of these terms don't need definitions, and the sheer quantity of them is distracting. This was the major setback of the edition.

If you want to read Joyce, I'd suggest a more expensive edition with better notes, unless you want a copy that is absurdly cheap. If so, this is for you.

2 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Once again disapointed by a Classic, June 30, 2008

By 

Joseph Guillaume (Kailua, HI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)

Unfortunately I was at a severe loss to begin to understand James Joyce's writings. I found the style of writing similar to Charles Dickens, but without the story that Dickens would spin. I'm sure there are some very sophisticated people who have read James Joyce and appreciate his works, to bad I can not be among them. I would think at the time he wrote this it must have broken some barrier's, but in today's world sounds just like another repressed Catholic. I do find reading about the Irish of the time interesting, I didn't realize the extent of the political upheaval. I found the sub notes to be distracting, but necessary.