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Having read the article, I downloaded Ulysses, which I have bounced off before, and tried again. Nope, still not my idea of fun. Tolstoy is not my idea of fun e
by Tloewald 14y ago
Having read the article, I downloaded Ulysses, which I have bounced off before, and tried again. Nope, still not my idea of fun. Tolstoy is not my idea of fun either, but more fun than this. Of all my friends, the only one who has read Ulysses (and claims to adore it) cannot articulate its virtues. He also loves Umberto Ecco -- I suppose for similar reasons.
I just don't see the point. I love how when writer who knows a huge amount of obscure crap and wraps contorted references to it into an unreadable mess is considered some kind of genius of erudition if the obscure crap involves, say, dead languages, religion and literature, but if it were dungeons and dragons and Harry potter it would be considered at best pop culture pastiche and at worst pathetic.
- jseliger 14y ago>I just don't see the point. That's in part because Joyce had synthesized the previous couple hundred years of literary history and the movements within literature, and he very consciously wanted to do something very different from what had been done before (he also wasn't interested much in what readers of conventional novels would think). If you don't have a lot of context regarding, say, literature from Paradise Lost and Shakespeare to 1921, you're going to find the point very hard to see. If you do, then the novel can be sublime. Joyce was writing during the time we now call Modernism, and the Modernists really broke the link between popular and critical success / pleasure, and we've been living with the results, as a culture, ever since. If you're curious about these issues, Peter Gay's Modernism is a decent place to start.
- Tloewald 14y agoSo you're saying that I do see the point. Excellent, I can move on.