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The Future Of Joyce's A Portrait: The Künstlerroman And Hope, David Rando

English Faculty Research

This essay aims to capture some of the future effects that result from A Portrait's manipulation the artist novel genre. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's distinctions between the detective and the artist novel genres, this essay views A Portrait as a hybrid of both genres, at once obsessed with detective fiction's 'darkness at the beginning' (as emblematized by Stephen's anxiety surrounding the Foetus inscription) and the artist novel's 'not-yet' (as emblematized by the wish image of Stephen's green rose). A Portrait's status as an artist novel is complicated by Stephen's reprisal in Ulysses, but this essay argues that, …