Stealth, cunning, and exile : Is Dedalus precocious or pretentious?

So Stephen Dedalus enters college, and James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" moves into a new phase, this time a day in the life of a precocious (pretentious?) undergraduate, told mostly in dialogue - not surprising that Joyce's next work would be a play. On the plus side, there's a lot of undergrad-ish ribbing and humor, and Joyce aptly captures and skewers the tone of repartee among smart guys in a boys' school, which hasn't changed all that much in a century, though there are no more boys' schools (at the college level, anyway), and he gets to showcase a bit: his love of aracana and ability to recall (or research) details and info from a huge range of subjects (the guys rib one another in Latin as they engage in talk of politics and aesthetics, but the lecture they're attending is on physics), as this section a clearly a prelude or rehearsal for the narrative experimentation and the range of ideas in Ulysses. On the minus side, even if it's Stephen Dedalus/James Joyce, the natterings of a precocious/pretentious undergraduate can become awfully tedious. How seriously are we to take, or care about, Dedalus' theory of aesthetics (tragedy and comedy hold us in stasis and other art forms are kinetic?) - is Joyce setting forth his own theories, or just letting a smart kid prattle? I couldn't follow all the lines of reasoning and don't think I was expected to do so. We do see further signs of the emergence of the artist, particularly in Dedalus' refusal to sign a peace petition and his scorning of Irish nationalism (an echo from the great story The Dead) - instead, devoting himself to art, individualism, and in the memorable phrase from later in the book, stealth, cunning, exile.