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It is easy to see why there has been so much written about Portrait. The amount of different things happening is staggering and the discussion linked below only scratches the surface. Still, it’s a starting point and an enjoyable first encounter with the book. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man posts: Online […]
The IMDB page for the movie found here. I didn’t know what to expect from a movie version of the book. How do you portray everything that happened internally? Internal discourse can be done as a voiceover, but there is so much more happening inside Stephen than just thoughts. Despite some large lapses and omissions, […]
Of all the alienations, the most painful estrangement for me was Stephen’s distance from his family. Comparing Simon Dedalus’ attitude and actions toward his son at the start of Chapter 5 with their train trip in Chapter 2 (as well as trying to pull strings for him in Chapter 4) highlights the distance between the […]
Chapter 4 begins with Stephen’s religious discipline. One comment I saw for this section is that the language Joyce uses in this section is dry, but the change I notice more is the lack of sensual descriptions (with a few exceptions, made notable because of the lack everywhere else), especially compared to the first two […]
I finished the book a while ago but have been too busy to write. So going from memory on what I read a couple of weeks ago… The retreat in honor of St. Francis Xavier takes up the bulk of this chapter. As the book progresses, previous events are directly or indirectly echoed while additional […]
This chapter reflects much change in and around Stephen, with much of the change for the worst. Many of the things around Stephen show decline: Uncle Charles becomes senile or Stephen’s family encounters financial troubles, for example. Even something simple, like the description of coach Mike Flynn as a long way from being a famous […]
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road… Sign from cowdepot.com My comments on Joyce’s work will obviously pale in comparison to the library shelves groaning with books and dissertations analyzing everything down to the punctuation, but writing a post on what I […]
Source A few online resources for the next book on my list (many, alas, have fallen to web erosion over time and have been deleted). I listed a few general resources on James Joyce in this post A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man text at Project Gutenberg There are numerous audible versions […]
I finally got a chance to see the recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and I wanted to add a note since I had reviewed the 1986 version. I just noticed that I had originally commented on the (then) upcoming version and hoped that it would succeed…and indeed it did. My comments have to […]
I found George Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling recently. It appears Orwell was responding to a T.S. Eliot essay that prefaced selections of Kipling’s poetry as well as an essay by Edmund Wilson. While much of the review is about the poetry itself (Orwell’s take in a nutshell—third-rate, but a guilty pleasure that speaks to […]