Abstract:

Among the twentieth-century writers who made the city a part of their discourse aiming at revealing both self-identity and social meanings is James Joyce, a major representative of modernism. Portrait is a Bildungsroman which proves that this type of fiction is a psychological novel about an individual who strives to acquire a self, or, having a self, he or she embarks on a quest for a better self. Portrait prefigures modernism, Joyce making use of his aesthetic concentration to achieve literary innovation by exploring new fields of human experience and developing new means of artistic expression in his focus on individual, primarily psychological, existence. The present study argues about the link between the protagonist and the chronotope of the city as a factor of synthesis of the formative experience which in this novel ends in departure and search, whereas the Bildung (self or identity) is still to be acquired and asserted.

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