Fun Stuff > ENJOY
James Joyce: What say you??
bujiatang:
but other languages can be more precise. remember, we don't know how to speak. I spent twenty minutes explaining to a grandmother that having "Baptismal 12-09-06" was grammatically incorrect. A language is only so precise as the people accepting usage. Sure, being lazy, we can still communicate a point but without paying attention and being purposeful the language loses strength.
Yeats, Heaney and Obrien are my favorite Irish writers. I like Portrait but otherwise... eh.
ScrambledGregs:
I guess my main problem with 'difficult' writers is....well, let's take Finnegan's Wake, for demonstration purposes. If there's this 'great work of literature' that even most modern ENGLISH PROFESSORS can hardly read, let alone understand, what good does it do for literature as a whole?? It's an interesting experiment on paper, but in my view it's a failure if the average person can't make hide nor hair of it.
Of course, this raises all sorts of questions as to what the average person is, and is capable of reading. It also raises questions about whether the English language is constantly changing, such that when we try to read older books, they become slightly more and more difficult with time. Frankly I think it's pointless to study Shakespeare in high school because not only did 90% of my classes not even bother trying to read it, the 10% which did could only grasp half of it.
Narr:
My teacher today, prompted by my spinning off on some long tirade about how awful it is having to read stream of consciousness writings in general, basically said that Joyce is challenging the reader. In a roundabout way, that is saying "You have to work to understand this story."
I'm sorry, English World?, I don't think that's appropriate. The greatest writing is something you can grasp conceptually the first reading, while deeper meanings start to crop up in further exploration of the work. It doesn't work the other way around. I refuse to search for a story. In "Portrait" for example, there is no story. All the action is implied, unless it's some observation Stephen makes of what other people are doing. I have to consciously work in order to understand ON THE BASIC LEVEL of what is occurring in the story, and frankly, that's bullshit. That is hardly enjoyable, and literature is *gasp* a form of entertainment. ALL literature is, in some level, a form of entertainment. People only seek knowledge because it entertains them. (This is my own personal philosophy, anyway.) I understand that there are some knowledges that need to be learned in order to function in the world, but the knowledge we ACTIVELY seek is something we find entertaining.
I've heard Joyce praised in so many classes and in so many other forms of media. Now that I've tried to read him, that literally angers me. I am angry people think that this guy is worth reading, let alone that he is "the greatest twentieth-century author." I don't think I've ever been quite so disappointed in an author before. I didn't exactly like Jane Austen, and it's commonly accepted that Dickens can't write worth a damn but simply has beautiful stories to tell, but this stream of consciousness bullshit is not the art of literature. The analogy I made in class today was that it's like modern art: you throw up in a bucket and splatter it on canvas and hey! you've got some deep art shit going on there.
ScrambledGregs:
Weirdly, though, I love Burroughs and hate Kerouac.
grrraham:
Narr: Sparknotes does fairly basic straightforward analyses of texts. Certainly, be wary of critical writings which try to overanalyze, but if you're finding that sparknotes are getting too much out of something it probably means you're not getting enough out.
Sparknotes are just what the name implies: notes. They aren't in-depth analyses, they are notes on texts, they summarize the ideas and content of the work, and often explain some of the references, but that is all they do.
edit: this is directed more at supersheep, sorry Narr.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version