TY  - JOUR
A1  - Prade-Weiss, Juliane
T1  - Finding a tongue : autobiography and infancy in and beyond Joyce’s portrait
T2  - European Journal of Life Writing
N2  - The outset of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a stage of life and language that is commonly evoked and, at the same time, systematically avoided in autobiographies as well as theoretical approaches to language: infancy. This textual strategy refers back to Augustine’s Confessiones, one of the most canonical autobiographies, reading it as a mainstay for an unconventional hypothesis: Rather that understanding infancy as an early stage of, or even before, language, Joyce expounds that the condition called infancy – the openness for receiving language while being unable to master it – accompanies all speech, be it childlike or eloquent. The article analyses Joyce’s text as one instance of a general paradox of autobiographical writing: initial aphasia. Setting out with birth or infancy, autobiographical texts precede articulate discourse. In Joyce, this paradox appears as starting point for a poetical – rather than theoretical – thinking about language, and language acquisition.
KW  - James Joyce
KW  - St. Augustine
KW  - infancy
KW  - theory
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/43907
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-439079
SN  - 2211-243X
N1  - Copyright (c) 2017 Juliane Prade-Weiss. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
VL  - 6
SP  - 20
EP  - 39
PB  - Univ. [u. a.]
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -