BUILDING SELF-IDENTITY IN URBAN BACKGROUND: PORTRAIT AND RESHAPING THE THEMATIC PERSPECTIVES OF THE BILDUNG IN THE AGE OF MODERNISM

Among the twentieth-century writers who made the city a part of their discourse
aiming at revealing both self-identity and social meanings is James Joyce, a major
representative of modernism. Portrait is a Bildungsroman which proves that this type
of fiction is a psychological novel about an individual who strives to acquire a self, or,
having a self, he or she embarks on a quest for a better self. Portrait prefigures
modernism, Joyce making use of his aesthetic concentration to achieve literary
innovation by exploring new fields of human experience and developing new means
of artistic expression in his focus on individual, primarily psychological, existence.
The present study argues about the link between the protagonist and the chronotope of
the city as a factor of synthesis of the formative experience which in this novel ends in
departure and search, whereas the Bildung (self or identity) is still to be acquired and
asserted.