Surprisingly enjoyable

Just roll with it senpai, Joyce is a lot of fun if you stop caring about plot and just roll with what's going on. Use a summary if you're unsure of what the fuck just happened (this happens a lot).

Is it worth shit to read a translation?

for u.

Everyone says "oh muh [insert ethnic author] is unreadable in translation" but you quite literally will get nothing out of a Joyce translation, the point of the work is to deconstruct and reconstruct English as a language.

Alrighty then

Sorry senpai. Joyce translations are works of art in and of themselves because of the sheer task they have set for themselves.

No.

The book is so inextricably linked to its style of telling I can't imagine it being anything other than English.

>heheheheheh
>hohohohoh
>heeheeheeheeheeeee
>let's all pretend Ulysses is God-tier dogmatic literature even though the objective fact is that it's a bunch of bullshit.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Cult of "Genius"

How old are you?

why?

32

>objective fact is that it's a bunch of bullshit.
This makes me sad. Ulysses has so much to offer, strives to be a book for both the scholar and the everyman, incorporating high- and low-brow culture and "breaking new ground" (for the time) with its explicit depiction of shitting, masturbation and sex. The whole point of naming the novel after a greek hero is to say that yes, even you, the literally nobody in your mothers basement who's being cuckolded by someone better than you, is in some way a hero.
But its written weird so its bad.

have you read any of these books? tell us what you didn't like about them

I read it in translation and then tried listening to the re:joyce podcast. It was a completely different experience, so im planning on reading hamlet and the odyssee before reading the original.

>hamlet

Dude, get off the board and read Hamlet.

>Hamlet

Quite similar, I always found the first couple of chapters with Stephen rather draining, but once the day gets going the 'gimmicks' (I don't mean that to sound as critically harsh as it does) each chapter keep the whole thing enjoyable. I hope a good re-read will change my way of thinking though, especially of those initial chapters which Woolf championed above the rest of the novel.

What a silly post

Yeah, wish people would get past the start more often.

>explicit depiction of shitting, masturbation and sex.
Why would anyone want to read about that?

I think it's pretty clear this guy has not read much that wasn't posted in a reddit thread.

>not reading a chapter's analysis on Sparknotes/Shmoop BEFORE reading that chapter
this isn't the pleb shit you're used to reading, this is James Joyce, every single word written was debated in his mind for almost an hour when he wrote Ulysses. It is such a vastly complex yet perfectly synchronized piece of art, rivaled only by the universe which God created

>"it's just frustrating and feels like a waste of time"
Check your ego. There are few things in life better than reading Ulysses by James Joyce, and based on the stupidity you've shown in your fucking post, you likely are not doing any of the few things that are better than reading Ulysses by James Joyce.

Bc it's hot

>There are few things in life better than reading Ulysses by James Joyce

Underrated comment.

I put it down after the first chapter, it seemed like it was trying so hard to be meta-narrative and I just don't see any novelty in it. Though if after reading Steppenwolf I may have developed a certain forbearing towards fiction in general so maybe thats my problem

>people who say its shit

>checked
>certain forbearing
please explain

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies, and a self-respecting author should not omit (at the close of any exposition) to dissipate these lies so far as may be in his power.

When Harry feels himself to be a werewolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological simplification. He is no werewolf at all, and if we appeared to accept without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes in, and tried to regard him literally as a twofold being and a Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was in the hope of being more easily understood with the assistance of a delusion. The division of wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a plausible yet erroneous explanation of that contradiction which this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be the source of his sufferings.

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as a judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty...And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from these unfortunate persons.

Every ego is a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. The delusion rests upon a false analogy. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. In literature it is offered to represent the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes us think that the characters of the play are manifold entities by lodging each in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once and for all. It is a cheap and superficial aesthetic philosophy, though this may be resolved by regarding the characters as various facets and aspects of a higher unity, that being the author's soul.

Come back to it when you're older lad.

>Though if after reading Steppenwolf I may have developed a certain forbearing towards fiction in general
For your own sake you had better be 15 years old because this is meta stupidity

Why?

holy shit is that really what zizek writes about

great thread

ill read ylyssys someday

>this isn't the pleb shit you're used to reading, this is James Joyce, every single word written was debated in his mind for almost an hour when he wrote Ulysses. It is such a vastly complex yet perfectly synchronized piece of art, rivaled only by the universe which God created
You sound like a pretentious cunt

Its just another part of being human.

But the first chapter isnt even meta in the slightest.

>You sound like a pretentious cunt

You sound like you actually need a caretaker.

what else would he write about?

>I didn't understand so it must dumb

fuckin ur ma

he's obviously already written about that
>I was in fact accepted by my Albanian friend when we left the superficial game of politeness and respect behind, and greeted each other with formalized insults. The first move was made by the Albanian: one morning, instead of the usual "Hello!", he greeted me with "I'll screw your mother!

Is this a joke? This has got to be making fun of overly intellectualized analysis right?

Happened to me with One Hundred Years of Solitude. The ending was poetic and worth the hassle.

lol hands running around in buñuel films?

huh

What's a film?