Literature and commitment : the formalist model in James Joyce’s a portrait of the artist as a young man

الملخص EN

James Joyce had always been described by Marxist critics as an apolitical writer.

These critics claim that Joyce’s artworks express an absolute detachment from the socio-political issues of his time.

The present paper, however, operates a redefinition of the issue of commitment in literature, and presents a critical re-reading of his autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by relying on Roland Barthes’s aesthetic theory illustrated in Writing Degree Zero (1953).

In re-reading A Portrait through Barthes’ aesthetic approach, Joyce’s text demonstrates commitment through form opposing Sartre’s Marxist model based on meaning