A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 1916
Stephen Dedalus's journey from childhood religious terror to artistic vocation is the template for every subsequent novel about becoming a writer. Joyce established stream of consciousness as a literary technique here before perfecting it in Ulysses. Modern Library ranked it third.
The case against
Stephen Dedalus is a prig, and Joyce's irony toward him is calibrated so finely that generations of readers have missed it. The hellfire sermon runs to twenty-odd pages of sustained terror, then the final chapter trades narrative for an aesthetics seminar conducted at Stephen's lecture pitch. Admire him at your peril; Joyce mostly didn't.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
