Joyce's Esthetics In A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

James Joyce (1882-1941), the great writer of modernism, conveyed his literary aesthetics in his early novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, the manuscript of the former. In his early period of creation, Joyce was greatly influenced by three aestheticians and philosophers: Ibsen, Aristotle and Aquinas. Like many artists of his generation, Joyce learned the aesthetic ideas from them and formed his own aesthetic ideas. Moreover, he used these ideas in his writings. This thesis intends to trace the major aesthetic influences on Joyce's writing in the early period at first, and then it tries to investigate Joyce's aesthetics reflected in A Portrait from three aspects: language, structure and techniques and symbolic representations. In this novel, the language in some chapters produces the effect of music and painting. The author of the book applies different languages to describe the hero Dedalus at different stages and this will be analyzed from a stylistic view of point. The reason why he adopts these kinds of styles is that he follows the principle of truth. In the writing of the work, the most important influence on Joyce is from Aquinas. His theory of the three elements of beauty affects the writer greatly, especially in the arrangement and the structure of the novel. The techniques adopted in this piece are very special and unique, especially that of impersonality and epiphany. And these will be explored in detail in this paper. Meanwhile, Joyce also used some symbolic devices in A Portrait, which are among his important aesthetic concepts in the novel. Their applications achieve good artistic effects. And the current discussion of these effects explains why Joyce has been a great writer as well as a creative aesthetician, and how are his aesthetics reflected in this novel. This research attempts to draw the readers' attention to Joyce's aesthetics in A Portrait, with the view to eventually helping them have a better understanding of this masterpiece.