Free Kindle
A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man (Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks))
ebooks Download

Webster's paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently assigned readings in English courses. By using a running English-to-Romanian thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce was edited for three audiences. The first includes Romanian-speaking students enrolled in an English Language Program (ELP), an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program, an English as a Second Language Program (ESL), or in a TOEFL� or TOEIC� preparation program. The second audience includes English-speaking students enrolled in bilingual education programs or Romanian speakers enrolled in English-speaking schools. The third audience consists of students who are actively building their vocabularies in Romanian in order to take foreign service, translation certification, Advanced Placement� (AP�) or similar examinations. By using the Webster's Romanian Thesaurus Edition when assigned for an English course, the reader can enrich their vocabulary in anticipation of an examination in Romanian or English.TOEFL�, TOEIC�, AP� and Advanced Placement� are trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which has neither reviewed nor endorsed this book. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Series: Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks)

Audio CD

Publisher: Naxos of America Inc. (October 9, 2000)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 5552956508

ISBN-13: 978-5552956500

Product Dimensions: 5 x 5.8 x 1 inches

Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (420 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #11,571,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #53 in Books > Books on CD > Authors, A-Z > ( J ) > Joyce, James #148164 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Literature #351220 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

I'm always up for a good challenge, whether it be in books, music or movies, and from what I've heard Joyce is about as challenging as they come in the literary world. However, since it seemed like "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" would be a bit much to start with, I found myself reading "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" as an introduction to his work. And although I found this book about as easy to get into as Princeton, it was about as rewarding as well. "Portrait" is certainly anything but a light read. Joyce's meandering narrative and serpentine prose can be confusing to say the least, and on more than one occasion I had to read a sentence about five times in order to figure out what I had just read. For all its verbosity, though, "Portrait" is an essential read because the story of Stephen Dedalus carries so much resonance. I'm about the same age as Stephen was in this story, and I can relate pretty easily to his search for answers. Growing up in Ireland around the turn of the twentieth century, Stephen faces existential questions that should ring true for a young person coming from any culture at any time. He tries to find satisfaction by giving in to his lust, and when that doesn't work he goes all the way to the other end of the spectrum in seeking fulfillment through religious devotion. In the end, however, neither of these extremes provides Stephen with the answers he's looking for. Stephen's story demonstrates one unfortunate fact of life: when you're seeking meaning, there are no easy answers.

I've seen some reviews that criticize the book for being too stream of consciousness and others for not being s.o.c. enough. The fact is, for the most part it's not s.o.c. at all. (See the Chicago Manual of Style, 10.45-10.47 and note the example they give...Joyce knew how to write s.o.c.). A better word for A Portrait is impressionistic. Joyce is more concerned with giving the reader an impression of Stephen's experience than with emptying the contents of his head. What's confusing is the style mirrors the way Stephen interprets his experiences at the time, according to the level of his mental development.When Stephen is a baby, you get only what comes in through the five senses. When he is a young boy, you get the experience refracted through a prism of many things: his illness (for those who've read Ulysses, here is the beginning of Stephen's hydrophobia - "How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum."), his poor eyesight, the radically mixed signals he's been given about religion and politics (the Christmas meal), his unfair punishment, and maybe most important of all, his father's unusual expressions (growing up with phrases like, "There's more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes" how could this kid become anything but a writer?)It is crucial to understand that Stephen's experiences are being given a certain inflection in this way when you come to the middle of the book and the sermon. You have to remember that Stephen has been far from a good Catholic boy. Among other things, he's been visting the brothels! The sermon hits him with a special intensity, so much so that it changes his life forever. Before it he's completely absorbed in the physical: food, sex, etc.

One of the great changes in literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the birth of autobiographical literature. Even at the end of the 19th century, it was very unusual for any writer to make one's own life the basis for a purely literary work. To be sure, Dickens had put much of the London he knew in his youth into his novels, but there is no Dickens novel that can be described as purely autobiographical. Mark Twain had written memoirs that employed novelistic techniques and Samuel Butler put much of his own life into THE WAY OF ALL FLESH (a novel written in the early 1870s but not published until 1903), but it was only with such works as D. H. Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS (1913) and James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN in the English-speaking world and Marcel Proust slightly earlier in Paris that authors began taking their own lives as material for works of fiction. In Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS, a host of real life characters and actual life experiences became characters and scenes in novels. Likewise, most of the events of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST were based on actual events. It isn't quite autobiography, but neither is it pure fiction. Because the genre of fictionalized autobiography has become such a common literary form in the century that has followed Proust, Lawrence, and Joyce's work, the importance of this work can hardly be overestimated.PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST is important also for the innovations Joyce made in narrative. While the events in the story occur along a time line, Joyce is not particularly concerned with most of the details in the timeline.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks)) A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks)) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks)) (CD-Audio) - Common A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (Naxos AudioBooks) To the Lighthouse (Modern Classics (Naxos Audiobooks)) Oliver Twist (Naxos Junior Classics) (Naxos Junior Classics (Audio)) Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: From Ulysses (Naxos Classic Fiction) (Naxos Complete Classics) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The Complete Classics) (CD-Audio) - Common The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition] Sense And Sensibility (Naxos AudioBooks) Lady Susan (Naxos AudioBooks) Northanger Abbey (Naxos AudioBooks) Ulysses (Naxos AudioBooks) Moby Dick (Naxos AudioBooks) A Midsummer Night's Dream (Naxos AudioBooks) The Tempest (Naxos AudioBooks) King Richard III (Naxos AudioBooks) King Lear (Naxos AudioBooks) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A