A Discourse Analysis Of James Joyce’s Construction Of Identity In Dubliners And A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Abstract

The present paper attempts to acknowledge and dig out the largely unexplored late Victorian and Edwardian ethos of subjectivity in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and to show that Joyce himself, like much of his characters was bound by the ideologies of his age namely nationalism, Catholicism as well as gender conditions. In other words, this short analysis aims to show that Joyce’s collection of short stories and his novel not only give the surfaces of daily life in turn of the century Dublin, but they also expose the discursive and cultural contexts, ideologies, religiosity and gender forces that colonized Irish modern subjectivity.