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Stephen Dedalus and Nationalism without Nationalism


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Authors

Stević, A 

Abstract

While recent critics have often downplayed the significance of Joyce's attack on the Gaelic Revival in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel actually enacts nothing less than a systematic repudiation of nationalist tropes from the position of liberal cosmopolitanism. As a detailed comparison of Joyce's text with the turn-of-the-century revivalist discourse shows, A Portrait undermines each of the key revivalist preoccupations (including both linguistic nationalism and ethnic essentialism), finally deconstructing the project of nation building in toto. This radical critique of nationalism suggests that, after twenty years in which Joyce studies have been dominated by attempts to displace the once-prevalent vision of Joyce as an apolitical and internationalist aesthete with a version of Joyce as, above all, a colonial Irish intellectual, it is time to once again take his commitment to aestheticism and cosmopolitanism seriously.

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Keywords

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, aestheticism, Gaelic revival

Journal Title

Journal of Modern Literature

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0022-281X
1529-1464

Volume Title

Publisher

Indiana University Press