The most autobiographical of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reimagines the bildungsroman story as it traces the formation of Stephen Dedalus’s artistic manifesto. Published in 1916 shortly before the Irish Easter Uprising, the novel departs from conventional Victorian fiction in its experimentation with language and its frank realism.

Through an innovative style, Joyce hoped to “forge. . . the uncreated conscience of my race.” We will examine the novel in terms of how the author experiments with language and incorporates the political, historical, and religious context of Victorian Dublin into his first novel.

Participants should anticipate reading 40 pages per week and watching an occasional short video. For the first class, please read the short story, “Araby” (available online here: https://www.plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Araby.pdf).

Suggested Readings: James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Wordsworth Classic (paperback), ISBN 978-1-85326-006-3, will be used in class, but any other complete edition is fine, though the pagination will be different.

Nancy Walters holds an MA in English from Trinity College (Hartford) and an MA in English (ESL) from Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville). After teaching for forty-five years at Webster Groves High School (St. Louis), St. Louis University and Lindenwood University, she moved to the Berkshires and became active in OLLI at BCC. This is the sixth course she has taught for OLLI.