The Perils of Experience: Sensation in Joyce's a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Two conceptual distinctions form the basis for this paper. Firstly, a distinction I extract from Foucault's late work, between experience as, on the one hand, an everyday background to our mode of being in the world, and experience as, on the other hand, a punctual, transformative intervention in the former. The second distinction is the one classically made within German philosophy between experience as erlebnis (immediate lived-experience) and as erfahrung (an integrated life experience). Taking Joyce's characteristically modern, and Irish, bildungsroman as my point of focus I will try to answer two questions. In the first place, to what extent does the distinction I find in Foucault's late work help us to give an adequate account of the transformative potential that occurs within the shift from erlebnis to erfahrung? Secondly, what can a novel such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through its representation of the shift from erlebnis to erfahrung, tell us about the tranformative potential in experience? And, more particularly, what does its presentation and enactment of sensation tell us about the relation between sensation and experience - both that of the reader and the protagonist?