In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce used
the form or structure of his language to connote a meaning which
supported the content of the text. The elements of form he used
most often were sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation,
rhythm, and classical rhetorical schemes. By manipulating these, he
gained three benefits: he supplied an emotional appeal to the
content, he represented his epistemological beliefs in his language,
and he gave elegance to his prose.
Background research reveals the influences that led to Joyce
using form to support content. They include his Jesuit education, his
own predisposition to the connotative aspects of language, and his
literary work previous to Portrait.
The examination of the text of Portrait exhibits the particular
ways Joyce used the elements of form to fit content. Several of the
highly emotional episodes of the story, the most likely to contain
form-fitting-content examples, are examined in detail. Attention is
given to rhetorical schemes of repetition because it is through these
schemes that emotional pitch is adjusted in the story. Joyce's
innovative use of syntactical structures to fit content, and his
application of such poetic forms as rhythm and meter to simulate
physical action are discussed. An examination of the end of the book,
a section where rhetorical schemes and structural manipulation
seems to disappear, shows how the apparent lack of connotative
elements is appropriate to making a new form fit a new content.
The use of form to support content in Portrait was an artistic
commitment which Joyce began in Portrait. He would continue and
intensify his commitment in all of his writing after Portrait. How
Joyce wrote would always thereafter be determined by what he
wrote about. / Graduation date: 1995
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/35162 |
| Date | 26 April 1995 |
| Creators | Hogan, James Joseph |
| Contributors | Potts, Willard C. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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