JAMES JOYCE ON ART, POETICS AND PORNOGRAPHY
Abstract
James Joyce, in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
elaborates on the definition of art and illustrates what he had in mind about
proper and improper art. Questions of art, poetics and pornography had been
central to his mind for a long time. As early as Portrait of an Artist, he quotes Aquinas on the subject of
"proper" and "improper" art. Proper art has to do with
aesthetic experience, which is static, and it doesn't move the audience/reader
to anything. It is aesthetic arrest. Although his theory is largely built upon
Aristotle and Aquinas, Joyce, as a modernist, “turns his mind toward unknown
arts” using the figure of Dedalus as his pioneer and creates a system which he
will best examine and apply in his later work such as Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake.
This paper will focus on Joyce’s ideal model of art as mimetic and static and
discuss the validity of the proposition today where everything is so
pornographic (i.e. kinetic and diegetic).
Keywords
James Joyce,A Portrait of the Artist,aestheticism,Joycean poetics.
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