Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

A reviewer

This handy Barnes and Noble edition collects two classic early works from James Joyce. Presented first, but released second in its final form, is PORTRAIT, an experimental and challenging (yet wholly worthwhile) autobiographical masterpiece about a young man who, throughout the early stages of his life, lets others speak for him (family, religion, etc.) until he finally releases the inner artist within. An inspiring work. Second is his short story collection DUBLINERS, which is striking because of how different the prose and literary technique is from PORTRAIT... Joyce would spend the rest of his career challenging and testing the limits of language, but the writing in DUBLINERS is eloquent, clear, immaculate. Two essential works from one of literature's undisputed giants. Wonderful stuff.

6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

Good, but challenging.

When you think James Joyce, think Shakespeare of prose. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is essentially an auto-biography of Joyce's life growing up in Dublin. Don't be surprised if you are reading the same paragraph 3 or more times over due to the 'stream of concious' technique Joyce applys to his story along with the along with his confusing, but beautiful prose, make this story about growing up, religion, and the makings of an artist(Joyce) an excellent read.

4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Very Highly Recommended

Mainly because one cannot consider one's self well versed in the western canon without reading Joyce, along with Pound, Proust, Woolf, and Eliot, the high priests (and priestess) of high modernism.

The stories in 'Dubliners' are easy to read (if often a bit of downer). In 'Portrait,' Joyce abandons Zola-esque naturalism for the beginnings of the style now associated with his writing.

While I find the main character of 'Portrait' to be uninspiring (which is one reason why I prefer 'Ulysses' to it - Stephen has a much smaller role), but pay attention to how Joyce captures sensory perception and how he captures the experiences of the various ages of the main character. As a small child, the style reflects the limited understanding that a small child would have. As Stephen grows up, so does the writing. In his adolescence, the style reflects the overwrought sensibilities of a teenage boy with artistic pretensions.

Read it. Please.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Joyce, Modernism's Homer

In the early twentieth century Lenin wrote, ¿Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, `a cog and a screw¿ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class!¿ And so, the working class anti-hero was born. Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, and Priam are no where to be found among the modern writers human ideal. Myrmidons and Argonauts are not even contemplated. Schoolboys, AA members, political canvasers, and anxious housewives have become the 'new human ideal', and their everyday thoughts and desires become 'high literature'. Realism and base truths rule the day, and closure and the 'happy ending' are banished from the realm of possibility. Wonderfully written, Joyce captures the essence of great anti-literature and applies it to a subject totally unworthy of exposition. He allows his reader to experience the epiphanies of the base, and thereby acquire greater cynicsm and misanthropism. One might almost feel that he had 'learned' something, if the cause for 'revolution' lay not already within his heart. If Joyce weren't laughing AT his Dubliners, I doubt he would have written it. And if modern readers weren't as self-absorbed and wonderfully democratic, one wonders who would ever read it. It's no wonder that what modernism started with Joyce has culminated in Gangsta Rap Music, the 'new' Great Literature of the masses. Can 'art' be used to more destructive ends? Only time will tell.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Good

Joshua Babb Jacob Gillum

1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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