Joseph Buttigieg: A Portrait of the Critic in Different Perspective

Abstract

Joseph Buttigieg’s A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective aims at providing a critical reconsideration of Joyce’s work. Focusing on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it contributes to a radical revision of the central tenets of modernism as first established by T.S. Eliot’s conservative reading in the 1920s and reiterated by the New Critics in the 1950s. Buttigieg’s critical effort seeks to prevent Joyce’s work from being locked up in a literary museum, drawing on a dialectical and highly perceptive ability to unmask Western metaphysics and aesthetics as ideologies within which conservative criticism had framed Joyce’s Bildungsroman. Furthermore, his Maltese, English, Catholic roots made Buttigieg capable of identifying and demystifying high modernism’s irony and disinterestedness as instruments of the “higher” values on which the entire Irish social system was based. Together with Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd, Buttigieg was among the very first critics who realized the relevance of Portrait as an Irish national indictment against colonization because – as Deane maintains– it is the first novel to examine the distorted relationship between the Irish community and oppression and to focus on this oppression’s ultimate resource – cooperation with the oppressed. This Joycean experience informed Buttigieg’s study of Gramsci’s method and its application in various fields of the social sciences, a heritage that has influenced scholarship throughout the world.

Keywords:

• modernism
• colonization
• critical history
• historicism

Notes

1 Herbert Gorman quotes Joyce as saying that he “chose Dublin for the scene of Dubliners because the city seemed [to him] the center of the paralysis.”

2 “[William Kurtz] Wimsatt defines Stephen’s claritas as ‘the radiant epiphany of the whole and structurally intelligible individual thing” (in Buttigieg 1987a, 14).

3 See Beja 1971 22: “Just as epiphany is associated with the dominant themes of modern fiction, so it is one of its most useful and central techniques.”

4 See Buttigieg 1987a, 71-75.

5 See Joyce 1988, 131-133.

6 See Cheng, 1995; Attridge and Howes 2000; Kiberd, 1996 and 2005.

7 The dynamic character of A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective finds a correspondence in Criticism without Boundaries (1-2), which Buttigieg 1987b edited simultaneously: “It may, at first sight, appear odd that a collection of essays dealing with contemporary movements in critical theory and practice should be gathered together under a rubric that relies on a spatial metaphor. The term ‘boundaries’ evokes images of mapped territories, a panoptic view of artificial divisions replete with echoes of a renounced version of history. … [I]t helps to employ the boundary metaphor with all its attendant connotations of territoriality, sovereignty, domination, provinciality, and so on. The point of such an exercise, of course, is not to perpetuate a ‘boundary’ mentality in criticism, or in any other form of discourse, for that matter, but rather to reveal and recognize the existence of boundaries, their artificiality, their debilitating effects, and above all the interests they stake out.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mauro Pala

Mauro Pala is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cagliari (Italy), where he coordinates the P.h.D. program in Philological, Literary, Historical, and Cultural Studies. He has been a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Aarhus, Limoges, UAM (Mexico City), and Guest Professor at the University of Malta, and has published extensively on critical theory, cultural studies and postcolonial literature. He is currently working with Prof. Roberto Dainotto (Duke) on a monograph about literature and subalternity.