1.

What is the significance of the name of the protagonist of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.
In etymology dictionary (2014): "Stephen or Steven is a masculine first name, derived from
the Greek name "Stephanos", in turn from the Greek word, meaning "wreath, crown, honour,
reward", literary "that which surrounds or encompasses" and in addition ,in Greek mythology,
Daedalus /di:dəlɪs/ or /dɛdəlɪs/ (Ancient Greek:Daedalos, meaning "clever worker"; Latin:
Daedalus; Etruscan: Taitale) was a skillful craftsman and artist" (Online Wikipedia & Online
Etymology Dictionary, 2014)
In Christianity Stephen's first name strikes as St. Stephen the martyr who was stoned to death by
a mob because he claimed that he saw God appear in the heavens" (Fargnoli, 1996, p. 55).
Stephen becomes the hero and creator of his own story while many myths was surrounded him.
(Robbins, 1994, p. 261).
The significance of the name of the protagonist Dedalus represents a mythological creator.
Stephen in Irish history is the name of a holy man. Saint Stephen was one of the first ordained
deacons of the Church, and a Christian martyr.
Dedalus it is used in the Greek mythology, he was a brilliant artificer who constructed a
pair of wings for himself and his son, Icarus this pair of wings is associated with nothing other
than the flight, which suggest the motif of the flight because this is what Dedalus was doing. His
name Dedalus comes from the basic myth that is prevalent in Portrait, so the Greek legend of the
escape from the island of Crete by Daedalus and his son Icarus. Daedalus, a great architect, cre-
ated a large maze called the Labyrinth to house a half-man, half-bull called the Minotaur. The
Minotaur was birthed to King Minos' wife as punishment for keeping a sacrificial bull that was to
be given to the sea-god Poseidon. Minos, to keep the secret of the Labyrinth safe, imprisoned
Daedalus and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth on Crete. The only escape from the island was by
air. . Daedalus created two pairs of wings from feathers and wax and he and his son flew from the
island togethe

2. Read the following text and enlarge upon the condition of the modernist artist.
,, The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the
persons and the action like a vital sea. […] The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence
or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence,
impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and
reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation,
is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond of
above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’’
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 244-245).
In the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s style is uninhibited and freeflowing
following Stephen’s unrestrained conscious thought. This is an essential technique of
modernism as it creates a psychic reality which has little to do with the true reality.
The final pages of the novel represent Stephen‘s diary for the period before leaving for Paris
and it is the reader who decides whether Stephen will succeed. Like Icarus, the son of Daedalus,
he may fall into the sea with melted wings. There is a close identification between the author
and hero and no distinct omniscient narrator to comment on the action. Stephen‘s diary
announces Joyce‘s later experiments and the process of rendering Stephen‘s consciousness by
representing his thoughts in a continuous flow makes A Portrait of the Artist a precursor of the
stream of consciousness novel and Joyce believed that modern fiction needed to depart from
previous conventions in order to express modern life properly in a subjective realism as
opposed to the social and mimetic one.
The modernist novel also derived from the focus on the subjective consciousness of the
individual mind and the term comes from William James‘ description of mind‘s experiencing of
thoughts, perceptions, memories, associations and sensations in their multitude. Conscious
experience in William James‘s view, expressed in his Principles of Psychology (1890) is described
as continuous and unbroken, referring to the never-ending associative flow of thoughts,
perceptions and feelings. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce‘s style is uninhibited
and freeflowing , following Stephen‘s unrestrained conscious thought. This is an essential
technique of modernism as it creates a psychic reality which has little to do with the true reality.
In the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s style is uninhibited and freeflowing
following Stephen’s unrestrained conscious thought. This is an essential technique of
modernism as it creates a psychic reality which has little to do with the true reality.
. All the characteristics of Modernism: the desire of breaking away from tradition; the quest
for finding new ways to view man‘s position and function in the Universe and experiments in
form and style are to be found in James Joyce‘s novels. Modernist novels were generally written
in the first person and fragmentation was a device currently used, the chronological order of the
events being sometimes rearranged to follow the inner life of the characters.

3. Read the following text and ,starting from it, identify the consciousness investigating
technique and enlarge upon the advantages and disavantages of using it in the opening of
Woolf”s novel.
‘I see a ring’, said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow’, said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
,I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp’ going up and down. ‘
,I see a globe’, said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
,I see a crimson tassel’, said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
.I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps,
and stamps.’
,Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,’ said Bernard. ‘It was beads of water on
it, drops of white light.’
,The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,’ said Susan.
,A shadow falls on the path,’ said Louis, ‘like an elbow bent.’
,Island of light are swimming on the grass,’ said Rhoda.
,They have fallen through the tress.’
,The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,’said Neville.
,The stalks are covered with harsh, short, hairs, ‘said Jinny, ‘and drops of water have stuck to
them.’
,A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’
,The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda.
,And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,’said Louis.
(Virginia Woolf, The waves, 5)

This novel is structured of the life of society, or a particular group, is not about nature
which is hostile and changing. The novel contains six characters, and it’s used to discover theirs
development for the childhood and to determines theirs responses for all of them. The principal
theme in this novel is focused on the inward experience of individuals and theirs reactions
about love, death, growing old,or to life as a whole. The structure of the novel it’s composed to
a series of monologues. This way of approaching the theme can be an advantage to making it
possible to present the inner thoughts of the characters into a convincious way, but represent,
of course the difficult problem with regard to the way in which characters could be made
recognizable for the reader, each of they are expressives persons in the same world of
thoughts , or by a specific language, Virginia Woolf is the product of device, each of theirs
characters have a distingued quality, which being emphasized sometimes and, becomes a
symbol for each character who is attached to his curiosity, to this phrase into the stories: ,,that
is, I am a natural coiner of words, blower of bubbles through one thing and another’’ (pg. 82).
The Waves illustrate how an individual’s dispositions underpin their education of consciousness
and their conscious understanding of who they are. Even though each individual’s dispositions
play a significant part in conditioning their education, they do not themselves seem educable or
changeable. Dispositions, in the context of reading The Waves, are also not another name for an
«essential self» but rather one of many relations effecting on the conscious comprehension,
agency, and passive receptivity of self that, for a few of the characters, is often in question. The
structure of experience for these individuals is at the educative intersection of their dispositions,
their consciousness and the external world.

The first section of the novel begins with descriptions of almost entirely passive experiences.
There is very little content to the thoughts of the children that could not be described as bluntly
empirical. They see («a ring…a slab of pale yellow…a globe») and hear («a sound…something
stamping») but they do not act on what they see or hear (Woolf, 1931, p. 4). However, their
perceptions quickly turn to analogies, allowing their empirical experiences to become a part of
an abstracted consciousness: «The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears»,
said Susan (Woolf, 1931, p. 4). An overlap between internal and external experience is already
apparent. Memory allows the children to make these analogies and, as external experiences
multiply in number, so do the resources of memory. The children all experience different things,
so their memories are different and therefore the analogies they are able to make are, once
again, different. For Woolf the complexity of individual consciousness seems to begin not with
empirical experience but in the relation of memory to empirical experience through analogy.
However, the disposition towards consciousness is not simply the sum of their memory and
experience. Consciousness is itself something to be related to by their unique dispositions. One
of the children, Louis, shows what happens when his dispositions run contrary to the elicitation
of a conscious determination of subjectivity:
«Now they have all gone», said Louis. «I am alone». They have gone into the house for
breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons.
Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from
the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters.
I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world,

Tthrough earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre…
(Woolf, 1931, p. 5).
When left alone he loses his identity to his surroundings. His self at once disintegrates and is
extended to become his context: «I am the stalk». However, even this relatively radical
experience of depersonalization is not without the resource of memory, here employed as
imagination. The experience is one that Louis desires, preferring to be «all fibre» over the
company of the other children. He hears them calling for him but would prefer to «be unseen»
(Woolf, 1931, p. 6). It seems that his socially and consciously determined subjective self has
disintegrated, leaving behind an asocial and experientially extended self: He is the stalk, he is
not Louis. This experience is not the realisation of an existential self or a Heideggerian authentic
moment but merely one among many examples of where dispositions and consciousness clearly
reveal a subject that is inseparable from objects; or, to put it another way, where notions of
insides and outsides become indistinct and arbitrary. Louis’s experience here is exemplary only
in that it reveals the complex relations that – albeit in different ways – condition all
consciousness. For Louis, this intense experience continues until he is found and kissed by Jinny
and «all is shattered» (Woolf, 1931, p. 6).

Bernard demonstrates his imagination in the moment when he sees the sun as ‘a ring hanging
above’ that 7 ‘quivers and hangs in a loop of light’ ; the words quivering and hanging are a
special semnification because of the six, Bernard is the character who symbolize the flux of life.
Susan represent an element solid, which is associated with ripeness and the seasons; she sees
the sun as a ,,slab of pale yellow, spreading away until it meets a purple stripe’’, the slab of
yellow suggest the autumn. Rhoda is thimide, she just hears a sound, which does not see: ,I hear
a sound, cheep, chirip; cheep chirp; going up and down’’: And Jinny is more focused on her
physical image: ,,I see a cimson tassel, twisted with golden threads.’’ Loius and Rhoda have a
fear in theirs visions: ,,I hear something stamping. A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and
stamps and stamps.’’ This image can bee a symbolic character who, feeling like ,,a cadge tiger’’
which wants to break free for his past. Neville is inevitably cold and precise: ,,I see a globe
hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill’’. This hill suggest the vision of
the word ,,drop’’ for he, failing to find some bound of union among facts, will live his life
moment by moment as if they were drops. In the first chapter, the whole offered some
informations about the eight characters, under they may easily recognizable for the reader.
Susan is that observed the difference among them: ,,I love, I hate, I desire one thing only. My
eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda loves the flowers which moths
come in the evening. I am tied down with single words. But Bernard slip away. Rhoda live in a
dream world, with flower petals in a basin full of water, she is a dreamer, and at the same time
she make a picture of the world like she sees it: ,,all my ships are white, I do not want red petals
of hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up….’’(pag.13)
Her view of the world is pessimistic: the ships sail in a hostile sea, the feeling nine of loneliness
is suggested , and it is also significant that she, the person who has ,,no face’’, should have
chosen only white petals for her fleet. In the same chapter, Neville characteristied their
personality when he saying: ,,I hate dangling things, I hate dampish things. I hate wondering and
mixing things, I hate dampish things. I hate wandering and mixing things together.’’(pg.14).
There is a symbolism in the mesure which is presented the play like a knife, which is associated
with a sterile intellectual.