A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Why it’s on the list: 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.

Where I heard about it

• University of Austin — assigned in Writing and the English Language on its Fall 2025 reading list, shared by @uaustinorg in November 2025. The course is taught entirely out of fiction and memoir — Wolff, Woolf, Wright, Salinger, Hemingway, O’Connor, Maclean, McCarthy, Douglass, Morrison — and Portrait is the one where style is not the vehicle but the subject. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.
• On Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf — Patrick Collison’s catalog of the physical books he owns (unflagged). Saved in Kyle’s April 19th, 2020 Roam daily note.

About this edition

Serialised in The Egoist in 1914–15 and published as a book in 1916.

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