All Program Dates

• October 15, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

• October 29, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

• November 12, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

• November 26, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

• December 3, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

• December 17, 2025 | 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ET

Registration

• Tuition for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.

• Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.

• This program is for those 18 and older.

• Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, August 22, for Rosenbach members on Friday, August 29, and for the general public on Friday, September 5. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.

Description

What is published as Stephen Hero is a manuscript fragment of the first version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which once ran to around 1,000 pages and was rejected by many publishers. It is in many ways a conventional Künstlerroman, or artist’s novel, that defends the protagonist’s unusual views and even, as the title suggests, presents him as a hero. When, according to the story, Joyce threw the manuscript into the fire and started over, the new version was much more compressed and even inscrutable. Gone is the third-person omniscient narrator; the presentation is more like a narrative drama, divided into acts and scenes, and the narrative voice is hewed to mimic Stephen’s own idiom at each stage of his development.  

What we will see in this course is what Joyce accomplished through this revision. Instead of defending himself, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he reads his younger self. He allows readers to access Stephen’s own experience from the inside, while also providing various external clues that invite readers to understand what Stephen doesn’t yet realize. The tension between Stephen’s perspective and that of the novel itself produces an irony that at points is humorous. Most first-time readers don’t appreciate the way Stephen is being “framed.” 

We will read what remains of Stephen Hero (edited by Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon) and then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Relevant extracts will be provided from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Sponsors

James Joyce’s “Lying Autobiographies”: Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Course with Vicki Mahaffey is sponsored by Lenni H. Steiner and Perry A. Lerner.

Instructor

Vicki Mahaffey’s new book is The Joyce of Everyday Life, published by Bucknell University Press. She is also the author of two other books related to James Joyce, as well as two edited collections and fifty articles. She received her PhD from Princeton University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania for almost 30 years. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation (currently serving her third term). While at Penn, she taught courses at the Rosenbach and was involved in the planning of the annual Bloomsday celebrations. (She is proudest of introducing musical performances, although she was also part of the team that chose the readings). She is currently the Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. Recently, Dr. Mahaffey has led courses on Ulysses, Yeats’s Poetry, Finnegans Wake, and Dubliners for the Rosenbach. You can read an interview about The Joyce of Everyday Life here.