英语毕业论文A-Symbolic-Approach-to-A-Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-a-Young-Man《一个青年艺术家的画像》.doc

A Symbolic Approach to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man内容摘要詹姆斯乔伊斯是描绘人物的革命和发展现代小说情节的方法的爱尔兰小说家。他以惊人的方式构建小说，他对人性的坦诚写照，完整的英语结构，使他对20世纪的文学产生了巨大的影响。一个青年艺术家的肖像是自传体小说。一个青年艺术家的画像生动地描述了主人公斯蒂芬从婴儿朦胧时期到青年成熟时期的成长过程以及他为摆脱腐朽势力追求艺术事业所作的精神斗争。小说自始至终以主人公的心理矛盾和精神感受为基本内容，深刻地揭示了他隐密的内心世界与各种社会势力之间的冲突。乔伊斯别开生面地采用了各种象征手法来表现主人公内心深处错综复杂的意识活动，增加了该著作的文学色彩。本文将着力对一个青年艺术家的画像中的主人公和一组反复出现的形象的象征手法进行较为详尽的分析，从而深入挖掘其与作品主题的关系。关键词：一个青年艺术家的画像；象征意义；斯蒂芬迪德勒斯AbstractJames Joyce was an Irish novelist who revolutionized the methods of depicting characters and developing a plot in modern fiction. His astonishing way of constructing a novel, his frank portrayal of human nature in his books, and his complete command of English have made him one of the tremendous influences on literature in the 20th century. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is largely autobiographical, shortly after its publication in1916. It describes the childhood, youth and early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, a highly gifted young Irishman. After mental torment and inner conflict, Stephen abandons Catholicism and leaves Ireland and makes up his mind to devote himself to artist career in exile. It is a symbolic story concerning the relationship between an artist and society as well as that between art and exile in the modern western world. Influenced by the European movement, Joyce makes experiment with symbolic devices, that is, using certain myths, historical analogies, recurrent images in his story. Joyces use of symbols reflects the main theme of the book to some extent, and it makes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a more enjoyable read.This paper aims at making a detailed analysis of symbolic devices used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and seeking the connection between the symbols and the theme of the bookKey words: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man；symbol；Stephen DedalusContentsAcknowledgementsiAbstract（English）iiAbstract（Chinese）iii1. Introduction11.1 The author11.2 The novel11.3 Symbolism12. A symbolic reading of the novel2 2.1 Deciphering Names2 2.2 Road3 2.3 Cow3 2.4 Water4 2.5 Woman4 2.6 Bird and flower63. Conclusion8Works Cited91. Introduction1.1The authorJames Joyce is an Irish novelist who revolutionized the methods of depicting characters and developing a plot in modem fiction. His astonishing way of constructing a novel, his frank portrayal of human nature in his books, and his complete command of English have made him one of the tremendous influences on literature in the 20th century.1.2 The novelA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, shortly after its publication in1916, evoked powerful reaction among the reviewers. Ezra Pound, who helped to have A Portrait serialized in The Egoist, singled out for special praise the novels disciplined clarity and claimed that the novel was “the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we have now in English”.A Portrait is largely autobiographical. It describes the childhood, youth and early manhood of Stephen Dedalus, a highly gifted young Irishman. After mental torment and inner conflict, Stephen abandons Catholicism and leaves Ireland and makes up his mind to devote himself to artist career in exile. It is a symbolic story concerning the relationship between an artist and society as well as that between art and exile in the modern western world.It is generally acknowledged by many critics that symbols play a very important part in the whole design of A Portrait. Professor William York Tindall defines a symbol as a concrete image which is “indefinitely suggestive” in its meanings, As he puts in The Literary Symbol, “Joyces image, though partly assigned, however deliberate, are suggestive, indefinite, and not altogether explicable. They reveal not only the quality of experience but its complexity. Without attendant or essential images, A Portrait would be so much less immediate and less moving that few would pick it up again.”(Tindall 23) In A Portrait lines of images with suggestive meanings are used by Joyce not only to convey the meaning of A Portrait but also to reveal the characters mental development and shape the book structurally.1.3 SymbolismThe Symbolist movement originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century. Symbolism was a complex literary movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The openended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptionsnotably smell and sound. Stephane Mallarme, the high priest of the French movement, theorised that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as fundamental words that which slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator. This thesis aims at making a detailed analysis of all sorts of symbolic devices used in A Portrait and seeking the connection between the symbols and the theme of the book. 2. A symbolic reading of the novel Influenced by the European symbolist movement, Joyce makes experiments with symbolic devices, that is, using certain myths, historical analogies, recurrent images in his story to symbolize other meanings, such as the relationship between an artist and society, or the conflict between art and exile. Joyces use of symbols reflects the main theme of the book to some extent, and it makes A Portrait a more enjoyable read.The most important symbol in the book is that of the name of the hero Stephen Dedalus. Stephens name suggests that he is a martyr, maker, exile, and a prideful sinner as well. In a way, Stephens name reflects the theme of the book.Another important use of symbolic device is there current image. Reoccurring again and again, the images add richness, depth, and immediacy to what we get from character and plot. Without these symbolic devices, A Portrait would be less immediate and less enjoyable.2.1 Deciphering namesThe most obvious kind of culturally determined symbolism in A Portrait is the use of historical and mythological analogies, such as that invited by the heros name. As Stephen, he invites a comparison, simultaneously valid and exaggerated, with St. Stephen, a Jew of Greek education who became the first Christian martyr when he was stoned to death after his conviction for blasphemy. He re-enacts the crucification, as Parnell later was to do. Joyce as well as Stephen identified himself with these martyrs. St. Stephens Green in South Dublin, on the south side of which University College was situated,is also named for St. Stephen. Crossing Stephens that is my green.” (Joyce 224) His surname Dedalus is derived from Daedalus, a mythological artist craftsman of ancient Greece, who built all inescapable Labyrinth for King Monos of Crete. When Minos turned against him and imprisoned him in the Labyrinth, Daedalus and his son Icarus, escaped from Crete by flying on wings which Daedalus fashioned of feathers and beeswax. Icarus disregarded his fathers advice and in his pride flew too near the sun so that his wings melted and he plunged to his death in the sea. Icarus is also identified with Lucifer, another prideful soarer. Therefore, Stephens name reflects the theme of the book.2.2 RoadAs for roads: sometimes straight, sometimes circular, they run everywhere through A Portrait to the last page, where “the white arms of roads,” abandoning tradition, invite escape, like the bridge, which to be sure, is a road in a way or better, a way in a road. Most of the roads, however, are less encouraging: that dark country road where Davin sees the beckoning woman, and all those circular tracks. On the circular track in the park Mike Flynn trains Stephen to run in customary style. (Joyce 56) Breaking his spectacles on the track at Clongowes, Stephen is all but blinded. (Joyce 42) Not so the Jesuits, “walking round the cycles round and round the field The goatish creatures of Stephens private hellas if in Dantesswish “in slow circles round and round the field. ”Circular paths, implying custom and confinement are disagreeable throughout A Portrait.2.3 CowA cow, coming along it to accost the boy could imply everything aggressivelymaternal: church and country, for instance. (The cow is a traditional image of Ireland.) These implications are confirmed by reappearance in other settings. Later, Stephen loves to walk the roads around Stillorgan with traditionloving Uncle Charles and to ride along them with the milkman. How nice to be a milkman, he thinks, until dismayed by the cowhouse with its “foul green puddles”, Here the milkman is supposed to suggest the priest, and the cow suggests the Church, Then Stephens childish desire to follow a milkman suggests vocation. In this case, these images embody and predict the future. Still later, we find that Jesus was born not in a manger but in a “cowhouse”. Stephen，becoming “Bous”, or ox, as we have seen, goes to the Bull, emulates Daedalus the artificial cow maker, and, expounding an aesthetic theory, uses the cow to illustrate a point. (Anderson 14) Near the end, Cranly, his critic, is reading Diseases of the Ox.2.4 WaterA more important image than road or cow is water. Joyce water traditionally carries the meanings of life and death; for it is our origin and our goal. Ambivalent from the first, water is either warm or cold, agreeable or frightening. The making of water at the beginning of A Portrait seems an image of creation that includes the artists two realities. In the novels first chapter, His mother put on the oil sheet. Stephens wet bed is warm at first, then cold, first agreeable, then disagreeable, the water creates an unpleasant association for Stephen fear. His classmates Wales pushed him into the ditch cold water, death scene flashed in his mind, made him feel extreme fear. At school Stephen is shouldered into the “square ditch,” square not because of shape but because it receives the flow of the urinal or “square.” (Joyce 10) This image warns Stephen of the perils of regression, to which like one of those rats who enjoy the ditch, he is tempted by the discomforts of external reality. “The warnl turfcoloured bogwater of the bath adds something peculiarly Irish to his complex.” (Scholes 20) “Dirty water down the drain at the Wicklow Hotel and the watery sound of cricket bats (connected in his mind with pandybats and bats) confirm his fears.” (Seed 11) The concluding image of the first chapter; assigned only by previous associations, embodies his infantile career: “ Pick, pack, pock, puck, ”go the cricket bats, “like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.”(Joyce 38) If Stephen himself is suggested by this bowl and his development by an ablaut series, water is not altogether bad. This possibility is established toward the middle of the book, where, changing character, water becomes good on the whole and unmistakably a symbol of creation. On his way to the beach, Stephen still finds the sea cold and “infrahuman.” The bathing boys repel him, but the sight of the wading girl gives water another aspect. Rolling up his trousers, he himself goes wading. (Joyce 156) Here water symbolizes the new life. Stephen stood on the beach, the sea so that he suddenly wakes up to realize the real purpose of life. Water as a symbol of his re-birth. Thus constitutes a series of water images, so that the whole content of the novel to string together.2.5 WomanWoman embodies Stephens aspiration and increasingly, his creative power. Eileen, the girl who appears at the beginning of the book unattainable because Protestant, is soon identified with sex and the Tower of Ivory, symbol of the Blessed Virgin. Mercedes, Stephens dream girl from Monte Cristo who lives in a garden of roses along the milkmans road, also suggests the Virgin by her name while adding overtones of remoteness, exile and revenge. “Outside Blackrock, on the road mat led to the mountain, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived.”(Anderson 30). Both on the outward and on the homeward. As we can see, Stephens refusal of Mercedess love suggests his unconscious refusal of religion.Emma is another girl who suggests the Blessed Virgin. Emma appears in Chapter two as Stephen tries to write a poem but fails. Then in Chapter three, before he confesses his sin to the priest, Stephen has three days of retreat. Stephen hears a fiery sermon on the torments of hell and the punishments meted out by the just but stem God (Anderson 25). Stephen is made sick with fear; the sermons seem as though they were written specifically for him. He thinks about his sins, and is too fearful to confess to God, who seems too fearsome, or the Blessed Virgin, who seems too pure. He imagines being brought back to God through Emma. Later in Chapter five, as he heads toward the library, Stephen sees Emma. He is speechless as always. He feels somewhat cross towards her because he thinks she has flirted with a priest and mocked him behind his back. Even his anger feels like a kind of homage. But he dreams about her that night, and is inspired to write another poem to her. It is ten years since he fails in the writing of his first poem to Emma. This time he succeeds, but he does not send it. His new ideas about beauty are his obsession. Now he has moved from sensitivity and unfocused love of beauty to an obsessive and methodical contemplation of aesthetics. His obsession with Emma is more aesthetic and abstract; he has admired her from afar for ten years, but in truth he does not know her that well. His contemplation of her is based on a very abstract idea of woman. He can only damn her or worship. Emma is rejected at last as an image of religion.The girl wading in the ocean water, who embodies mortal beauty, gives Stephen a revelation of great strength. In looking at her beauty, he feels “all outburst of profane joy” (p.1 56). “Profane” because in the Catholicism of Stephens upbringing, his spiritual reaction to a girls physical beauty is alien. Stephen realized that his fate is “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”. (Joyce 156) Her image has passed into his soul for ever and no word has broken the “the holy silence of his ecstasy.” Her eyes have called him and his soul has leaped at the call. In allowing himself to enjoy the beauty of the girl, to believe in her beauty, Stephen accepts his own nature. He finds her an image of his own capacity. So this girl activates his subconscious artistic qualification, before that, all on religious and family dissatisfaction and opposition failed to fi