USV – Messages Sages and Ages

CAUGHT IN THE LABYRINTH OF INTERPRETATION. THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND LANARK – Daniela Maria Marțole

This paper sets out to make a comparative study between James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, analysing the way in which the narrative structure in the two novels is used to organize the strategy for the delineation of the main characters. Thematically, both novels deal with artists’ inner struggle to shape their identity and dwell upon a series of similarities such as the motifs of transformation and flight or the water symbolism. Although the two novels belong to different literary backgrounds, they both try to resist a coherent reading usually based on the realist convention of the well-organized plot, chronological sequence and omniscient narrator. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the way in which the same conventions are handled in each of the two novels and the extent to which the undermining of these conventions enfeebles the reader’s authority in the process of reconstructing the meaning of the text.

Daniela Maria Marțole

Authors

Dr. Daniela Maria Marțole is Lecturer in English at the Department of Foreign Studies, Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava, where she teaches English language and linguistics and translation classes. Her research is mainly focused on the translation of Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, into Romanian. She has authored a number of articles on this topic, such as Mutilated Bodies. Maiming Energies in Macbeth and Ethnocentric Tendencies in the Romanian Translations of Macbeth. She is particularly interested in the way in which cultural, social and political factors influence the evolution of the language and the reflection of such changes in the language of the translations as well as in the production of literary works. Other fields of interest are Discourse Analysis, Cultural Studies and Victorian Literature (in translation). 

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