ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Stephen Dedalus renounces his community, refusing to accept the constraints of political involvement, religious devotion, and family commitment. However, at the end of the novel he states that he will “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”.

Detailed explanation-2: -Stephen defines art as, “the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (182). The implications of this statement will be fully examined in the next section, but, for now, the latter part of this definition is especially significant: the esthetic end.

Detailed explanation-3: -Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce’s literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and an important character in Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses.

Detailed explanation-4: -The reappearance of Emma Clery, the object of Stephen’s first verse (written more than ten years ago), inspires him to write a villanelle, which incorporates all of his conflicting emotions concerning women-his worship of them, his desecration of them, and his need to feel fulfilled by them.