Did you like it?

imagine a book intimidating you this much

go back to goodreads

no

Imagine blindly regurgitating scholarly opinion while being utterly incapable of discerning that the emperor is, in fact, not wearing any clothes.

But sure, I'll dance. What's so great about Ulysses? Tell me in a couple of paragraphs, I'm willing to change my perspective if good reasons are provided, but they never are.

I was really enjoying how you wrote until

>But sure, I’ll dance

You might be a fedora tipper - but if not, you actually seem to have a gift.

love loves to love love bruh. you're a brainlet.

This. 100% agree. Joyce is a big meme. Only Finnegans Wake is worth checking out.

What do you dislike about Ulysses?

I understand the allusions can appear impenetrable at first but the research is kind of half the fun of it.

Of course you do it with other books to a certain degree, but Ulysses is packed so it kind of feels like a project. There's a kind of satisfaction in unpacking it.

Thanks for stopping by, reddit. Have a safe trip back.

I don't understand how can people hate Ulysses. How can you dislike Ithaca

I don't think that what is great about Ulysses can be paraphrased. But a few things I like about it are (1) its humour, (2) its psychological realism, (3) Joyce's experimentation with different prose styles and narrative voices, (4) its focus on the mundane, and (5) the use of classical allusions.

Its inaccessibility makes it a lot of fun to muddle through and has spawned many interesting critical interpretations, so I would recommend reading some of them if you're having trouble (i.e. Gilbert, Budgen, Burgess, Ellman).

>the book of a self-taught working man
bourgeoisie swine!

I'm

See what you wanna see but you've got it wrong. As much as I tried I didn't like the book. It's a vociferous epic about an ordinary day: literally much ado about nothing. Despite how inventive the prose, how complex the witticisms and criticisms of life in modernity, the scope of human history, and the entirety of the literary tradition, it all felt shallow except for maybe Penelope (maybe other parts too that I'm probably forgetting) it was a pointlessly rarefied read and maybe I didn't enjoy it because I am a brainlet since that IS the canonical position, who am I to say otherwise?

will i be a big guy if i read it?

Joyce saw Ulysses as being
1. A puzzle to be sorted out by scholars for years (a strategy he used to secure his longevity)
and 2. a style compendium for new modernist writers, where he showcased numerous and even contrasting methods of breaking from traditional prose.
In both cases I think he was undoubtedly successful. As a writer its instructive to, at the very least, peruse Ulysses in order to see what's on offer

lmao, Woolf owned a printing press, that's how she got published.

Yes, I liked it, studied it for school, but I never 'loved it.' His characters come across as an accumulation of facts. Some of it I actually disliked. The stream of consciousness felt more like an idea than a natural recreation. When you're hungry, you're not necessarily thinking of food, or in culinary metaphors. We don't need to write every form of english throughout history before we get out of this hospital.

It's highly aesthetic, so Nabokov could read it and not see it as 'literature of ideas' but it came across like he had all the ideas, then pushed himself to fill it with prose styles. The resulti s the same to me. But I'm not Nabokov and I'd much rather read Balzac's Lost Illusions than anything by Joyce again.

The first chapter is beautiful -- the apotheosis of the lucid, realist style he employed in Dubliners. Indeed, it could be a freestanding short story, and a very good one.

The rest of the book is uneven. The stylistic devices frequently seem labored rather than inspired, eg, Gerty McDowell's stream of consciousness written in the style of second-rate romantic fiction ("a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy" style).

In sum, Joyce floundered in the absence of a genre form in which to set his muse. By contrast, in his middle period (roughly, 1950-1960), Beckett was able to develop something like a new genre, given its most indelible expression in the world of Waiting for Godot, with his other works from this period set more or less in that same world, or in the emanations and penumbras of that world. Within that world, that form, Beckett's creativity flourished.

In short, Joyce suffered from the problems typical of the genre-less artist, and never really overcame them. Beckett, finding or creating a form or genre that corresponded with his muse, devised a body of work that will likely stand the test of time better than his former master.

>A moment's reflection should be sufficient to convince anyone that the existence of established genres is enormously beneficial to the artist and that almost all the greatest art has been built upon the strong and familiar foundations of genre: Shakespeare's plays, Mozart's symphonies, and Renaissance painting offer obvious parallels. Of course, what we ultimate value in Mozart and Shakespeare are great personal qualities; the genre does not create these, but it does provide a means whereby they can find the fullest and freest expression. The genre-less artist is in fact less free, because he is continually preoccupied with the problems of inventing his own framework, a task which makes, among other things, for extreme self-consciousness.

oxen of the sun is great

First third and last fourth is great. But the middle 300 pages are pretty boring.

it was great!

Do you think I got through the first chapter?

but then quite obviously linling hunger to culinary metaphors is a literary device not focused on mimesis, it's rather about complex narrative style. stream of consciousness makes it hard to distinguish "narrative" parts and "monologue-based" parts, but there is a certain narrative. Also, Joyce was a concept nut, and so each chapter has a mythological figure, an emotion, a theme, even a colour - it seems to go way deeper than linking hunger (theme) with culinary metaphors (narrative concept) simply because the former might imply the latter; it's a perfect whole, a map of meticulously knotted links, and that's why reading it is so fun

And I must say that stream of consciousness, when first introduced, was absolutely shocking to people, and it felt a million times more like a natural recreation of life than the ever-boring 'he woke up, he saw the sun, it's beautiful, he thought to himself'.

Joyce re-defined mimesis for years to come and even if his characters feel like clusters of ideas, they're absolutely enjoyable, imo. Huge most of them remains human, and that is the key here.

>the emperor is, in fact, not wearing any clothes

this again

>liking Penelope
>the worst chapter in the entire book
Truly a pleb
Rank them
Hades > Wandering Rocks > Cyclops > Ithaca > Oxen of the Sun > Aeolus > Calypso > Telemachus > Nestor > Proteus > Lestrygonians > Scylla and Charibdys > Eumaeus > Circe > Nausicaa > Lotus-eaters > Sirens > Penelope

no

Just remind yourself that Joyce leaked two (2) copies of his Ulysses cheat sheets to his friends. Anyone referring to the titles of the chapters is doing it solely because Joyce had to fucking tell them, outside of the novel.

>Aeolus not at the very fucking end

Hehe, look at all the newspaper styles I am referencing! Isn't it clever? Hehe.

>But DUDE, the headlines is a modernist masterstroke, it makes the text self-conscious

Cervantes did it 300 years before it was cool.

Man, she was the worst type of class-based snob which only England produces to the highest specification and in such large quantities.

>Eumaeus, Lotus-eaters and Sirens that low

Completely fucking unreadable. Utter shit that only fags think is great.

a complete pain in the ass to read to the point where it was unenjoyable even on the "well, it's difficult so it's good" level, so no. i liked the prose though

I didn't put it that high because of the newspaper styles it covers, but because of the events that transpire in it.

I'll give you Eumaeus, should have put it a bit higher, but Lotus-eaters and Sirens are some of the weakest chapters, why did you like them so much?

literally tl;dr
also i dont read literature

I was confusing lotus-eaters with calypso, sirens is cool because of the musical references/structure, i.e. the overture at the beginning.

what a hack

>As a writer its instructive to
>to
So,you're a writer, huh?

>we will never get r34 of bloom fucking the two female bartenders from "Sirens"
Almost makes me want to learn to draw