A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce’s first novel: Stephen Dedalus from small child to the young man who decides to leave Ireland, written so that the prose grows up with him — baby talk, then schoolboy, then the aesthetic theorising of somebody who has worked out what he is for. Serialised in The Egoist in 1914-15 and published as a book in 1916.

Why it’s on the list: It is assigned in Writing and the English Language, a course taught entirely out of fiction and memoir — Wolff, Woolf, Wright, Salinger, Hemingway, O’Connor, Maclean, McCarthy, Douglass, Morrison. Portrait is the one on the list where style is not the vehicle but the subject.

Where I saw it: Assigned in Writing and the English Language on the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list — “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, 65 assigned texts across 12 courses, shared by @uaustinorg on November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this was assigned in.
• The University of Austin — the institution whose course list this is.
• Literature
• Narrative — the technique the course is studying.
• Storytelling