Language Learning and Pedagogy in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Joyce had been trying to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or something like it, long before he became a committed teacher, starting in 1904 when he was living in Dublin after his first attempt at living on the continent. He wrote a rather didactic story called “Portrait of the Artist” that January; soon thereafter, he began the first draft of Stephen Hero. This novel, however, would prove unsatisfactory to its creator. To portray Stephen Dedalus’s character and development, Joyce required more experience and more distance from his own youth than Joyce had then. One of the experiences that contributed in particular to Joyce’s ability to portray Stephen’s development, and the educational context of this development, was Joyce’s work as a teacher. By the time the last installment of Portrait appeared in The Egoist in 1915, Joyce had worked for Berlitz in Pola and Trieste, for a similar school in Rome, and as a private language teacher. He had also begun to teach at the Revoltella school, though only briefly and too late to influence this novel.