Autobiography as Fiction in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Abstract

This paper looks into the artful way in which James Joyce fictionalizes his autobiography in his Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce projects his essentially artistic self onto the fictional character Stephen Dedalus, the namesake of the classical ‘cunning’ ‘artificer.’ In his turn, Stephen dreams of becoming Joyce and writing Ulysses. Thus, Joyce’s personal history and Dublin’s geography lose their recognizable ‘reality’ in a blueprint of the artist’s mind that charts a Dublin and a self-reshaped by his imagination.