do people actually find this shit enjoyable? it's just fucking

>>9036357
>do people actually find this shit enjoyable?
Yes, they do.

Nobody actually likes the meme trilogy, but you have to read it, it's a rite of passage here.

>>9036357

>Unmusical mind not capable of aesthetic appreciation tries Joyce
>predictably fails

>>9036357
I'm Irish and I haven't read it yet but I assume ye (people who aren't Irish) don't have a clue what he's own about for a lot of it

>irish """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""culture""""""""""""""""""""""""""
fucking lel

>>9036395
Better than yours desu bet you're fun at ceilis

>>9036357
You really don't like this? Bizarre. I love Joyce's playful brilliant language games.

Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them...

>>9036554
This isn't good prose. This is somebody tripping words.

>>9036557
Horseshit. It's evocative poetic prose, and you're not fit to judge Joyce's writing.

File: 1401603353134.png (34KB, 223x223px) Image search: [Google]

34KB, 223x223px

>>9036388
Is that it? Is it just so Irish that other anglophones dont get it?

Glad I never read it then

>>9036565
>evocative
There's nothing evocative about writing a shitload of words in a longass sentence. It's childish and stupid. The greatest writers could always invoke a picture in your mind with just a few words places in the place in right order.

>>9036586
Nah I doubt that just much easier to empathize seeing as we're part of the culture

>>9036557
But you're wrong.

>>9036601
>a shitload of words in a longass sentence
Oh yeah I forgot that after a sentence breaks the nine-word limit all emotional content is lost
If only somebody had told Joyce when he was still alive

>>9036770
>lol punctuation is for faggots!
I bet The Road is your favourite

>>9036557
>>9036601
>My literary understanding is too superficial to appreciate it therefore it must be garbage
http://writingexplained.org/evoke-vs-invoke-difference

>>9036776
How fucking retarded do you have to be to think James Joyce's style is even remotely comparable to The Road?

Finnegans Wake > Dubliners > Ulysses > A Portrait
d e s u

—Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

>>9036357
Well I think it's a safe assumption that some people like it, but it's really not for me. I don't know how it's for native English speakers, but it takes a lot of effort for me to follow up on what's happening (usually it doesn't require any effort) and it's pretty exhausting to read stuff written like that. I feel like it's too incoherent, but that could be by design or just because English isn't my first language (I'm not all that familiar with the books itself, but I've heard about its cultural impact).

>>9036395
In what way do you define culture that it excludes Irish culture? Or do you consider it as a subsection or a indistinguishable part of some other culture?

single passages don't really capture what makes Ulysses great, since part of the appeal of the book is Joyce's supernatural ability to flit across wildly different styles of thought/writing and thereby recreate the huge psychological and experiential variations of the inhabitants of Dublin (and, in turn, the world), and only a few of these styles could be described as 'aesthetic' according to typical prose conventions (e.g. Stephen Dedalus's POV; certain passages from Oxen of the Sun; the Romantic-era style used when Bloom jerks off on the beach).

for anyone struggling to enjoy it, i recommend first reading some of the other, more accessible stream-of-conscious works like Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury, Woolf's The Waves, or Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which employ similar techniques without requiring the same degree of perseverance. if you don't enjoy those either, then this 'genre' of literature is fundamentally not for you. if you do enjoy them, though, then all Ulysses requires is a bit more concentration, something you should give it because, however one may ultimately feel about it as a success or a failure, it is--in terms of the author's technique, of his love for writing--the most impressive novel ever written. though i may be somewhat partial, i would go so far as to say that it is the crowning achievement of all human art thus far.

(before someone points out Finnegans Wake; while The Wake does show an even greater level of creative expression, its failing in my opinion is that all this expression has been funnelled into largely worthless avenues, even more so than in Ulysses).

>>9036357
I haven't read the book, but I understood what was being said in the passage and found the prose interesting. Maybe I should try the whole thing.

>>9037560
>in terms of the author's technique, of his love for writing--the most impressive novel ever written

Proust wants to have a talk with you

>>9037625
Proust is my favourite author, but i think Ulysses is on a-whole-nother level in terms of its artistic merits. In Search has a major weakness in that it was never completed, resulting in a drastic decline in quality for all the post-posthumously released books (most people never see this because they never read past the third or fourth). and even had Proust lived to give those later episodes the same immense degree of care and attention, i still don't think it would have been as good.

i will say though, that one of the relative strengths of In Search is that the areas in which Proust expresses his creativity--in his word choice, his grammar, his psychological insights, his ability to invoke powerful nostalgia whenever he returns to the present from his long asides--these are all much less opaque than those employed by Joyce (e.g. obscure double-meanings in reference to past works, stream-of-consciousness, historical and cross-linguistic wordplays), meaning that, although Proust might have instilled the work with slightly less artistic power, say 70 'artistic units' vs 80, the reader can very well walk away with the impression of there being more.

as an aside, if you like Proust, at the moment i'm reading a book, A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, which shows clear influences from him. i highly recommend it, if you haven't already read it.

Those are random words. I bet you dipshits think "Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?" is high literature too.

>>9037733
If you can't understand the paragraph in OP's picture you are probably retarded.

>>9036554
>Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.

The passage in the OP is nonsensical bullshit, and I think most of you are pretentious pricks. But damn, that's some powerful wording.

>>9037739
If you can't understand "Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?" you are probably retarded.

>>9037733
Random words? Are you honestly claiming you don't understand OP's quote? Christ, I read Ulysses as a teenager the first time and made sense of most of it (and I'm not Irish, either).

>>9037749
The OP paragraph actually makes sense. Stop being dumb and try to understand it. It isn't hard.

>>9036933
kys

>>9037756
The quote I posted actually makes sense. Stop being dumb and try to understand it. It isn't hard.

>>9037779
Hate to break it to you this way old sport, but ur dum

>>9037793
Hate to break it to you this way old sport, but ur dum

>>9037801
>brainlets are this buttblasted about not understanding Ulysses

>>9036357
Is this how Ulysses reads? That's awesome and not even hard to understand

>>9037820
>brainlets are this buttblasted about not understanding HARBFEDUEGWLML

Showed OP's pic to my 10 year old brother and asked him to explain what it was saying, and he understood it after reading it once.

>>9036357
I don't see how anyone can understand the first sentence, or who "her" refers to, without knowing the context.

Anyone claiming the contrary is just trying too hard to appear literate, when in reality they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

>>9037847
>Context is necessary to understand what something means

Take this tired meme back to high school where it belongs.

>>9037865
everything is words xd

Can someone explain the quote in op to me? English isn't my first language but I do most of my reading in English and I only have this problem with Joyce. Woolf for example I can read just fine.

>>9037843
I believe you

>>9038015
From window to envisaged is the part that doesn't make sense to me.

>>9038015

In the window of an antique shop, Leopold*1 saw candlesticks and an accordion-like instrument called a melodeon, which he thinks of as "an oozing, maggoty blowbag". The instrument costs six 'bobs' or dollars, which he thinks this is a bargain. He considers learning it. He thinks to himself that it is very cheap. (He notices a woman approaching along the sidewalk; he thinks that he'll need to let her pass). He thinks that anything can be expensive if you don't want it, and that what makes a good salesman is the ability to make you buy those things anyway. He thinks of a time in the past when a barber tried to sell him a razor that he'd just shaved him with by arguing that he'd need to pay for the sharpening of the blade*2. (The woman passes him by). He thinks of the price of the instrument again, six dollars.

*1. Here calls himself a bunch of nicknames which relate to an earlier part of the story; he's been secretly writing to a lover under the pseudonym "Henry Flowers".

*2. This is almost certainly a joke.

>>9038104
Thanks a lot anon, I'm happy that I get it. All but the part that was a reference that required context.

>>9038118
I'll add that I'm pretty sure the length of the character's description of himself reflects the character being side-tracked by his own reflection. Things like this are the main difficulty with Joyce's style in Ulysses; Joyce attempts to condense things down as far as possible, and it's made all the more confusing by the fact that Joyce is himself a strange person and he tends to impose his oddities on his characters (like only an author would think "oozing maggoty blowbag").

>>9038142
I didn't really get what he's thinking about when he says oozing maggoty blowbag desu, but the picture painted is quite vivid to be honest. I like it a lot.

>>9038149
I'm actually scared. I never wrote desu, not once in my life. Why the fuck did my cell phone put that word. I DON'T EVEN HAVE AUTOCORRECT ENABLED WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

>>9038155
4chan has an filter that automatically translates certain words

T / B / H = desu
F / A / M = senpai

it's part joke, part the administrators annoyance at words/phrases that get used too much

>>9038165
That's ultra weird. I wrote to be honest after that and don't use abbreviations. A typo and a coincidence I guess.

>>9037865
This is probably the worst post I've seen on this board

>>9038165
desu senpai

Let's see!

>>9038192
My work is complete

>>9038149
Look up what a melodeon looks like. It makes sense if you think of an old, rotting one sitting in an antique shop.

>>9038176
Ok I'm actually freaking out and I'm not joking. After posting that i felt something on my pillow. Grab it with my had not really thinking about it and when I looked I had a maggot in my hand. I'm not joking but how far can coincidences go before you freak out? I know I'm doing it right now. What the fuck is happening.

>>9036357
I seriously don't even know what he meant by this passage.

Does the MC have autism

>>9038226
>>9038104

>>9038218
Jesua fucking christ I can't cqlm down. I'm super stressed but that actually happened and I can't believe it.

wait, THAT is what this board considers good literature? lmao its the most autistic le so random quirky xD thing I've ever read.

this is like when I actually listened to what /mu/ considered good music and had to sit through some blind whiney guy-with-a-guitar-at-the-party indie faggot sing I LOOOVVE YOU JESSSUUUS CHRIIIIST FAGGOT

>>9038246
it's an experimental novel and that specific passage is written in that way as a reflection of that specific character's thinking style. what makes the book so impressive is that joyce does this with about 40 people, using hundreds of different writing styles. some of these characters sound like retards, others sound like geniuses.

>>9037560
>single passages don't really capture what makes Ulysses great
This is the main thing to take away from OP's post; the quote itself has some contextual things that you won't get if you're reading it in a vacuum. Furthermore one of the best aspects of Ulysses is Joyce's mastery at writing in different styles. Everyone has chapters they like/dislike more than others and it's one reason I like talking to others who have read it, to get the wide array of opinions. Because of this it also really rewards rereading

Why does reading Joyce feel like someone is itching my scalp with perfectly sharp fingernails

>>9038346
could be because he's difficult and he makes almost no effort to assist the reader.

could also be because his typical writing style abandons all consideration for the 'rhythm' of grammar and information flow. we naturally expect sentences, clauses, noun phrases etc to be of a certain length--not too long, not too short--with the most important information being assigned more syllables and positioned near the end of the sentence. fucking this up as much as Joyce does creates a slightly nauseating feeling, as you're forced to constantly adjust your reading speed and return to things you miss. he's actually completely capable of doing this properly (you see it more so in his Dedalus chapters), he just doesn't seem to bother with it most of the time for whatever reason.

>>9037693
>post-posthumously
Huh

napoleon. accordion. napoleon. accordion.