Open AccessFinding a Tongue: Autobiography Beyond Definition
Author(s) -
Juliane PradeWeiss
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
european journal of life writing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2211-243X
DOI - 10.5463/ejlw.6.217
Subject(s) - biography , portrait , reading (process) , openness to experience , linguistics , point (geometry) , literature , psychology , history , philosophy , art , art history , social psychology , geometry , mathematics
The outset of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a stage of life and language that is commonly evoked and, at the same time, systematically avoided in autobiographies as well as theoretical approaches to language: infancy. This textual strategy refers back to Augustine’s Confessiones, one of the most canonical autobiographies, reading it as a mainstay for an unconventional hypothesis: Rather that understanding infancy as an early stage of, or even before, language, Joyce expounds that the condition called infancy – the openness for receiving language while being unable to master it – accompanies all speech, be it childlike or eloquent. The article analyses Joyce’s text as one instance of a general paradox of autobiographical writing: initial aphasia. Setting out with birth or infancy, autobiographical texts precede articulate discourse. In Joyce, this paradox appears as starting point for a poetical – rather than theoretical – thinking about language, and language acquisition. This article was submitted on September 22nd 2015, and published on April 9th 2017.