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.

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Metadaten
Author:Juliane Prade-WeissORCiDGND
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):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitung 4.0