Finding a tongue : autobiography and infancy in and beyond Joyce’s portrait
- 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.
Author: | Juliane Prade-WeissORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-439079 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.6.217 |
ISSN: | 2211-243X |
Parent Title (German): | European Journal of Life Writing |
Publisher: | Univ. [u. a.] |
Place of publication: | Amsterdam |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2017/10/19 |
Date of first Publication: | 2017/04/09 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2017/10/19 |
Tag: | James Joyce; St. Augustine; infancy; theory |
Volume: | 6 |
Page Number: | 20 |
First Page: | 20 |
Last Page: | 39 |
Note: | Copyright (c) 2017 Juliane Prade-Weiss. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 427940877 |
Institutes: | Neuere Philologien / Neuere Philologien |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 82 Englische, altenglische Literaturen / 820 Englische, altenglische Literaturen |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitung 4.0 |