Forging a New Nation: A Study of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Abstract

The paper tries to contextualize the modernist text, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce in the trajectory of nationalism and attempts to posit it as a cultural text that foregrounds the forging of the ‘uncreated’. The paper shows how Joyce becomes critical of the nationalization of the past that the Celtic Revival aimed at. The protagonist, Stephen tries to participate in the burgeoning national culture by forging new paths to future. Joyce also criticizes the ethnocentric, xenophobic and monolithic aspects of Irish nationalism which was hostile to the pluralistic, heterogeneous and multivalent perspectives. Along with nationalism, Joyce also criticizes the modern construct of the nation state. Based on the link between nation and imagination, Joyce provides a new possibility of imagining a nation that celebrates the multiple voices by accommodating the marginalized and silenced voices, quite outside the grids of the nation state. The text shows how through the recreation of primordial and perennial cultural and ethnic propensity of Ireland, such a nation can be forged, and thus the reality of experience can be encountered.