One great work, every day
by James Joyce(1916)
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
James Joyce(1916)
Stephen Dedalus grows from infancy to young manhood, from sensation to consciousness to artistic vocation. Joyce's first novel uses prose that mimics each stage of development: the baby-talk opening, the schoolboy sections, the adolescent religious crisis, the final diary entries in which Stephen prepares to leave Ireland forever. The villanelle he composes is deliberately awful; the ambition behind it is genuine. The novel ends at a threshold. Joyce would spend the rest of his life writing the books Stephen dreamed of.