Joyce and Rhetoric: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Frank O’Connor hailed Joyce as ‘the greatest master of rhetoric who has ever lived’ (1967:478). This is difficult to prove, of course, but in English literature certainly Joyce ranks easily alongside Shakespeare. Surprisingly, however, Joyce’s use of rhetoric has not been extensively studied, despite its striking presence in Joyce’s major works. In this chapter I want to look particularly at his early prose, Dubliners and A Portrait, to show how patterns of repetition function with different stylistic effects; and to show how, as a maturing artist, Joyce became bolder in his use of such schemes in A Portrait to make them an integral part of structure and subjectivity.