“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her...

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

This is a passage from Ulysses.

Can someone please explain what makes this good writing? Because all I see is purple prose

You just value different things because you're a slave. Enjoy analytic philosophy

Are you blind? There's only one full stop, it's genius.

It's not the same if you don't have the preceding question:
>What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

>pretending to be retarded to sparkle discussion
how passé

>only one full stop,
But how is that good, though?

This passage is from Ithaca, where the arranger (the narrative voice of the episode, that for the most part changes with every episode) is set on giving a wide variety of extraneous detail. Joyce uses many sorts of scientific diction to give the episode a level of obfuscation, where simple ideas are described with very complicated language.

it's also a reference to the little poem stephen thinks about on the beach near the beginning of the novel. i think it might be a joke on a long drawn out explanation of the poem.

>her nocturnal predominance
>better than all your writing

For real though, I personally like poetry, I dont know if it necessarily follows that I like/love purple prose. I seek to read purple prose, I seek to write purple prose. This may b b8, because the whole novel is pretty much purple prose.

Purple prose = bad I suppose in the standard common narrative novel.

Can someone please explain what makes this good writing? Because all I see is purple prose

Could one not say the same of Shakespeare

it moves forward in the plot

like a good dump

/thread

Because it shits on the norm and the product is something better. You write a paragraph without punctuation, see where that leads you, fagboy

>fagboy

its the axiom of Joyce my friend. Joyce is GOAT, if you don't believe that all literary criticism just kind of breaks down. This is good because it was written by Joyce, and any reason you can think as to why it's good is something you can apply to other works. Joyce is good, get over it.

Do you have schizophrenia, or do any of these sentences relate to one another?

>Can someone please explain what makes this good writing? Because all I see is purple prose
Could one not say the same of Shakespeare

That (what is now greentext) was technically supposed to be greentexted.

If that does not clarify things for you, in what way do the sentences not make sense?

>Could one not say the same of Shakespeare

I think the difference is most of Shakespeare was understandable to a lower class audience at his time, the language barrier is more due to language having changed since the time he was writing.

Joyce's prose - at least in that except, I haven't read Ulysses so I'm not going to generalize - isn't really accessible to plebs in the way Shakespeare would have been at the time.

Shakesphere was not necessarily so understandable to lower class, Shakespeare probably invented more words than average pleb then knew, and his complexity is not necessarily due to language change, his complexity is complex, and stylistically 'superfluous',decadent, obscure for 'beauties'/expression sake

Shakesphere isnt complex because ye olde language, or at least that is a very minor part of it

And people in the future will look at how many copies Ulysses has sold, and figure that a large number of common folks understood it all

lol Have you actually read the rest of Ulysses? It's written in loads of different styles for each episode.

And besides this barely even counts as prose, it's just a detailed list. But it fits so well into the narrative style because it's the answer to a question:

What special affinities appeared to him [Leopold Bloom] to exist between the moon and woman [Molly Bloom, his wife]?

By listing so many things in so much detail, it shows how much Leopold really cares for Molly (despite the fact that she's cuckolding him).

Purple prose usually has SOME value in its formalist virtuosity, this shit on the other hand...

You cut off the question (what affinity appeared to him to exist between the moon and women?) which that paragraph answers so it loses all its power.

It isn't purple prose, he's actually saying a lot. You're just used to seeing long descriptions and assuming they drivel on nothing. Not your fault, honestly.

Read it rhythmicaly, even musically. Listen to it cascade and crescendo, listen when different instruments come in and out, keys change, new melodies arise and fall; it's musical poetry, aesthetically brilliant writing.

...

>he thinks that this pretentious dribble makes him look smart

Don`t listen to these guys, just take five mins of your life to actually understand what he said and appreciate the structure.

What makes this not poetry?

disagree: shakespeare could push the limits of language beyond what an ordinary person would be capable of for the simple reason of acting. if you read shakespeare's works in comparison to say Bernard Shaw you'll quickly notice that the stage directions are minimal. e.g: [Hamlet and Polonius fight] We know that shakespeare himself was an actor, and no doubt oversaw the visual storytelling taking place on top of his written text for his plays. Theatre at the time is comparable to early film; there's more of a reliance on what is perceived by the eyes than what is appreciated by the ears.

Joyce? I see him as more of a modern, near-democratic author. his story concerns a jewish advertising canvasser; simultaneously an outcast, a hero, and an everyman. Contrast with Odysseus, one of the most revered and depicted heroes of antiquity. Joyce was writing sure, for the avant garde/experimental side of literature, but he was also in a sense a champion of the everyman. The first scene, which I recommend everyone read, regardless if you read the rest, is not hard at all.

Everyone should listen to frank delaney's re:joyce and at least glance over some secondary literature. it can be really illuminating.

also, two of my favourite gems from shakespeare and joyce:

>But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill

>The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Sometimes art is worth the little bit of work.

If you didn't know many of those words while reading this passage the gentle rise it makes is lost, and needs time to pick up again, but then you don't know another word so then it just becomes this clumsy mechanical annoyance.