Joseph Buttigieg: A Portrait of the Critic in Different Perspective

Abstract

Joseph Buttigieg’s A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective aims at providing a critical reconsideration of Joyce’s work. Focusing on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it contributes to a radical revision of the central tenets of modernism as first established by T.S. Eliot’s conservative reading in the 1920s and reiterated by the New Critics in the 1950s. Buttigieg’s critical effort seeks to prevent Joyce’s work from being locked up in a literary museum, drawing on a dialectical and highly perceptive ability to unmask Western metaphysics and aesthetics as ideologies within which conservative criticism had framed Joyce’s Bildungsroman. Furthermore, his Maltese, English, Catholic roots made Buttigieg capable of identifying and demystifying high modernism’s irony and disinterestedness as instruments of the “higher” values on which the entire Irish social system was based. Together with Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd, Buttigieg was among the very first critics who realized the relevance of Portrait as an Irish national indictment against colonization because – as Deane maintains– it is the first novel to examine the distorted relationship between the Irish community and oppression and to focus on this oppression’s ultimate resource – cooperation with the oppressed. This Joycean experience informed Buttigieg’s study of Gramsci’s method and its application in various fields of the social sciences, a heritage that has influenced scholarship throughout the world.