Joyce, James - Joseph Valente (essay date 1998)
Joseph Valente (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: Valente, Joseph. “Thrilled by His Touch: The Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In Quare Joyce, edited by Joseph Valente, pp. 47-75. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
[In the following essay, Valente explores homoerotic elements in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.]
In his letters and essays, Joyce alludes repeatedly to the homoerotic activities supposedly rife in English or Anglo-Saxon boarding schools and implicit in their representative social and athletic customs (see especially SL [Selected Letters of James Joyce] 74, 136; CW [Critical Writings of James Joyce] 201-2).1 In the process, he not only displays a familiarity with the burgeoning scientia sexualis of his day, he flaunts a facility with the subcultural argot, dropping arcane phrases like “captain of fifty's...
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