Jan 6, 2010

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Suggested Essay Topics

Chapter 1
1. Discuss Stephen’s relationship with language in his chapter. Why is his interest in language significant at this early age? Does this make him more or less engaged with the other students his age? Are there any political implications, in light of the Irish nationalist movement, to his identification of English as “his” language?

2. At various points in this chapter, Stephen proposes a theory of language based upon onomatopoeia—the idea that a word’s sound has a kind of concordance to its meaning. Examples of onamatopoeia would be “splat, bam,...