"Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own." -- James Joyce, in a letter to his brother With these fifteen stories James Joyce reinvented the art of …
Joyce's semi-autobiographical chronicle of Stephen Dedalus' passage from university student to "independent" artist, is at once a richly detailed, amusing, and moving coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique, and a profound examination of the Irish psyche and society. Stephen Dedalus is a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to the consummate craftsman of Greek myt…