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James Joyce: What say you??

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ScrambledGregs:
Over the past 4 years, I've read Ulysses, along with bits and pieces of Finnegan's Wake and Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. I both love and hate James Joyce. Maybe it's just that I feel as though I only 'get' half of what he's doing, but mostly I think I just can't decide if writing willfully complicated and obtuse literature is an evolutionary leap forward or the last dribblings from a crazy writer's pen.

supersheep:
ARGH MY BRAIN IS MELTING WHAT THE FUCKASS ARE YOU SAYING JAMES.

That was pretty much my response to Ulysses - I think I got halfway through the second chapter and I haven't been back since. It certainly is not something you can just pick up and read. As for wilfully obtuse, I don't know. I've often read that kind of "arty" thing and had it be much easier to read, although admittedly usually in short story form.
Ulysses is still on my "Things to Do" List.

Narr:
We're supposed to be reading Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man for my English 215 class.

I use the words "supposed to be" because I read about ten pages of it and felt like rinsing my brain.  I read the Sparknotes for the first chapter and was blown away at all the stuff that was supposedly happening in the novel I didn't even remotely see.

The English Major-In-Waiting in me is screaming that I'm going into the wrong studies for loathing reading Joyce.  But then again, I was just about the only person in my entire class that understood and thoroughly enjoyed the stuff of Kafka we went over, so maybe I'm not as out of my league as I feel.

In short, I dislike Joyce.

supersheep:
Maybe it is because the sparknotes people are doing that English thing of reading so much into EVERY fricking detail of the story? That is one of the things that I kinda dislike about English - the way that they construct a superstructure of possibilities over what may have been written just as a bloody story. AGH.

Narr:
That depends on the story.  The stream of consciousness stuff that Joyce wrote was meant, I believe, to be read like we English students tend to do.

When people try and give me deeper meanings to be found in stuff like, say, Huckleberry Finn?  Then I get angry.  Mark Twain said, IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK, that it was meant to be taken purely as a story and that he would be angry with anyone who searched for deeper meanings.  Which, of course, means the Great Minds Of English Studies? go and do exactly that.  "Twain was just being sarcastic."

*hits head on his desk*

I wonder if students of other languages have to deal with the same bullox we put up with when we study English literature?

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