Readers have very credibly seen their most innovative concepts about gender reflected in James Joyce’s works. Joyce presented gender as it affects our attempts to live collectively and on shared terms, suggesting that gender flexibility is crucial to understanding human community, the polis, and thus the political. He explored gender as a physical experience, a socially intersectional construction, a performative speech act, and a phenomenological gesture while consistently challenging the stability of gender difference. Joyce’s famously ambiguous prose remains the creative strength of his oeuvre, which may put political and social wrongs to right by witnessing to a long history of gender-based violence, but equally may perpetuate old ideals in the service of strange comedy. His texts place responsibility on the reader to make meaning and justice in the world, while his words also provide readers with more fluid possibilities to counter the old inequities of the sex/gender system.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

The second chapter, “Paris Recognized,” shows that Joyce’s discoveries in Paris shape his subsequent understanding of Dublin life. The chapter traces a series of meetings between Stephen Dedalus and Emma Clery in Stephen Hero and Portrait, culminating in an encounter in the colonnade of the museum library that undoes the transactional relations that mar their earlier encounters. In tracing their relations, the chapter uncovers Joyce’s development of a desublimated and unconscious aesthetic practice. Even though Stephen rehearses Joyce’s earlier aesthetic theory, in the scene in the colonnade he is an artist in a way that has been overlooked. Joyce draws on the synesthesia of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” to present Stephen and Emma as engaged in a sensory exchange that defies calculation; in their encounter, the Thomistic integritas, consonantia, claritas of the artwork are replaced by a transient expression of physically digested material