James joyce on art, poetıcs and pornography

Abstract

James Joyce, in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, elaborates on the definition of art and illustrates what he had in mind about proper and improper art. Questions of art, poetics and pornography had been central to his mind for a long time. As early as Portrait of an Artist, he quotes Aquinas on the subject of "proper" and "improper" art. Proper art has to do with aesthetic experience, which is static, and it doesn't move the audience/reader to anything. It is aesthetic arrest. Although his theory is largely built upon Aristotle and Aquinas, Joyce, as a modernist, “turns his mind toward unknown arts” using the figure of Dedalus as his pioneer and creates a system which he will best examine and apply in his later work such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This paper will focus on Joyce’s ideal model of art as mimetic and static and discuss the validity of the proposition today where everything is so pornographic (i.e. kinetic and diegetic). Keywords: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, aestheticism, Joycean poetics.