Free Essays on Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

â€Å"Silence, exile, and cunning.†- these are weapons Stephen Dedalus chooses in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And these, too, were weapons that its author, James Joyce, used against a hostile world.Like his fictional hero, Stephen, the young Joyce felt stifled by the narrow interests, religious pressures, and political squabbles of turn-of-the-century Ireland. In 1904, when he was twenty-two, he left his family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the â€Å"dull torpor† of Dublin for the European continent to become a writer. With brief exceptions, he was to remain away from Ireland for the rest of his life.It was a bold move for several reasons. In spite of his need to break away from constrictions on his development as a writer, Joyce had always been close to his family. He still admired the intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition that had nurtured him. And the city of Dublin was in his soul.(Asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he answered: â€Å"Have I ever left it?†) But Joyce did achieve his literary goal in exile. The artistic climate of continental Europe encouraged experiment. With cunning (skillfulness) and hard work, Joyce developed his own literary voice. He labored for ten years on Portrait of the Artist, the fictionalized account of his youth. When it appeared in book form in 1916, twelve years after Joyce’s flight from Ireland, it created a sensation.Joyce was hailed as an important new force in literature.Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many of the incidents in it come from Joyce’s youth. But don’t assume that he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus, with whom he was very close, called Portrait of the Artist â€Å"a lying autobiography and a raking satire.† The book should be read as a work of art, not a documentary record. Joyce transformed autobiography into fict ion by selecting, sifting, ... Free Essays on Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Free Essays on Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an autobiographical novel of James Joyce. The novel Stephen Hero was originally written as Joyce’s autobiography, which was reworked from the autobiographical piece entitled â€Å"Portrait of the Artist.† This piece was written for a journal, but was rejected due to sexual content. In each of these works it was Joyce’s main goal to create a story, in which the protagonist was a Catholic hero as well as a martyr, according to Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer. Stephen Dedalus is the main character of the novel, as well as the protagonist. The work starts out when Stephen is about three years of age, and Joyce does an excellent job of describing the experience of growing up to the reader by taking us into the mind of Stephen Dedalus through a literary technique called â€Å"stream of consciousness.† Stephen constantly detaches himself from others throughout his childhood. Sexual urges are a large problem for Stephen because he assumes he is the only boy feeling them. This only causes him to feel more distanced and outcast. Because Stephen is so shy and isolated, people believe that he is egotistical and arrogant, a mistake made all too frequently in our society. This makes it even harder for Stephen to fit in and get along with others. Stephen has persistent feelings for a girl named Eileen, but the idea of them being together is frowned upon by his family, which upsets Stephen. This obstacle is similar to a situation in another work, Dante’s Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. In Dante’s real life, his love is also out of reach. He is in love with a girl named Beatrice but cannot realize this love due to his betrothal to another woman. Beatrice dies prematurely at the young age of twenty-five, and this inspires Alighieri to write Inferno. Inferno is a story about Dante’s a brief period in his life when he lost sight of his moral principles, and turns to his faith in order to g... Free Essays on Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man â€Å"Silence, exile, and cunning.†- these are weapons Stephen Dedalus chooses in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And these, too, were weapons that its author, James Joyce, used against a hostile world.Like his fictional hero, Stephen, the young Joyce felt stifled by the narrow interests, religious pressures, and political squabbles of turn-of-the-century Ireland. In 1904, when he was twenty-two, he left his family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the â€Å"dull torpor† of Dublin for the European continent to become a writer. With brief exceptions, he was to remain away from Ireland for the rest of his life.It was a bold move for several reasons. In spite of his need to break away from constrictions on his development as a writer, Joyce had always been close to his family. He still admired the intellectual and artistic aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition that had nurtured him. And the city of Dublin was in his soul.(Asked later how long he had been away from Dublin, he answered: â€Å"Have I ever left it?†) But Joyce did achieve his literary goal in exile. The artistic climate of continental Europe encouraged experiment. With cunning (skillfulness) and hard work, Joyce developed his own literary voice. He labored for ten years on Portrait of the Artist, the fictionalized account of his youth. When it appeared in book form in 1916, twelve years after Joyce’s flight from Ireland, it created a sensation.Joyce was hailed as an important new force in literature.Portrait of the Artist is usually read as an autobiography, and many of the incidents in it come from Joyce’s youth. But don’t assume that he was exactly like his sober hero, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus, with whom he was very close, called Portrait of the Artist â€Å"a lying autobiography and a raking satire.† The book should be read as a work of art, not a documentary record. Joyce transformed autobiography into fict ion by selecting, sifting, ...

Process Analysis in Richard Selzers Essay The Knife

Process Analysis in Richard Selzers Essay The Knife An accomplished surgeon and a professor of surgery, Richard Selzer is also one of Americas most celebrated essayists. When I put down the scalpel and picked up a pen, he once wrote, I reveled in letting go. The following paragraphs from The Knife, an essay in Selzers first collection, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery  (1976), vividly describe the process of the laying open of the body of a human being. Selzer calls the pen the distant cousin of the knife. He once said to author and artist Peter Josyph, Blood and ink, at least in my hands, have a certain similarity. When you use a scalpel, blood is shed; when you use a pen, ink is spilled. Something is let in each of these acts (Letters to a Best Friend  by Richard Selzer, 2009). from "The Knife"* by Richard Selzer A stillness settles in my heart and is carried to my hand. It is the quietude of resolve layered over fear. And it is this resolve that lowers us, my knife and me, deeper and deeper into the person beneath. It is an entry into the body that is nothing like a caress; still, it is among the gentlest of acts. Then stroke and stroke again, and we are joined by other instruments, hemostats and forceps, until the wound blooms with strange flowers whose looped handles fall to the sides in steely array. There is sound, the tight click of clamps fixing teeth into severed blood vessels, the snuffle and gargle of the suction machine clearing the field of blood for the next stroke, the litany of monosyllables with which one prays his way down and in: clamp, sponge, suture, tie, cut. And there is color. The green of the cloth, the white of the sponges, the red and yellow of the body. Beneath the fat lies the fascia, the tough fibrous sheet encasing the muscles. It must be sliced and the red beef of the muscles separated. Now there are retractors to hold apart the wound. Hands move together, part, weave. We are fully engaged, like children absorbed in a game or the craftsmen of some place like Damascus. Deeper still. The peritoneum, pink and gleaming and membranous, bulges into the wound. It is grasped with forceps, and opened. For the first time we can see into the cavity of the abdomen. Such a primitive place. One expects to find drawings of buffalo on the walls. The sense of trespassing is keener now, heightened by the worlds light illuminating the organs, their secret colors revealedmaroon and salmon and yellow. The vista is sweetly vulnerable at this moment, a kind of welcoming. An arc of the liver shines high and on the right, like a dark sun. It laps over the pink sweep of the stomach, from whose lower border the gauzy omentum is draped, and through which veil one sees, sinuous, slow as just-fed snakes, the indolent coils of the intestine. You turn aside to wash your gloves. It is a ritual cleansing. One enters this temple doubly washed. Here is man as microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth, perhaps the universe.    * The Knife, by Richard Selzer, appears in the essay collection Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, originally published by Simon Schuster in 1976, reprinted by Harcourt in 1996.