O tempo do artista em A portrait of the artist as a young man

Abstract

The work of James Joyce (1882-1941) discussed in this research, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, in the period of time that goes from his childhood to early adulthood. It is from the perspective of the evolution of the text along with the character that we propose a study of the novel as a genre differentiated in the treatment of the category of time. We set out to analyze how the language developed by the author allows the creation of a linguistic layer for the development of the character and the category of time throughout the narrative, allowing the sharing of a temporal experience from the language. We will also analyze how the language is used to develop the theme of character's rebellion, which is also observed in the linguistic structure of the novel. We carry out this research in A Portrait from the theoretical underpinning of authors such as Ricoeur (1995), Bakhtin (2010), Benjamin (2011), Lukács (2007), Mendilow (1972), Genette (1995), among others. We also discuss the narrator-character interaction and its influence on narrative evolution, based on Candido (2007) and Auerbach (2002) theoretical background. Our proposal first depicts a study on the romanesque characteristics that make of the category of time an essential element to the form of the novel. We next deal with the way language embodies a reconfiguration of temporal experience in the linguistic structure of the novel. We conclude that in order to configure the time within the language, the author uses literary resources such as the relationship between the narrator and character, which can be seen in the manipulation of the point of view, the possibility of uniting the speech of the narrator to the words of the character through a hybrid language, the use of tools such as the repetition or the exploration of the levels of the character's consciousness by its language and the adaptation of narrative styles and patterns corresponding to each stage of the life of the character, causing its evolution to be felt, not just stated, in the linguistic experience of reading.