>tfw my favorite chapter in Ulysses was the one where Bloom

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>>9103029
Literally writing as masturbation.

wtf I love Ulysses now

>>9103029
I had the same experience with the Cyclops chapter that's apparently a spoof on Irish epic poems.

I think Joyce just couldn't get something bad down on paper.

>>9103029

reminder that David Woster Fallace cribbed his whole style from Nausicaa and Eumaeus, the episodes known best for their deliberately terrible prose styles. Reminder also that he unironically believed it was good prose.

>>9103236
I just looked again at Eumaeus and a little at Nausicaa. These are actually hilarious, which I totally missed the first time and remember just being frustrated.

What bits was he actually trying on? Or which chapters, honestly, have the best prose?

>>9103284
Here's the secret: Ulysses actually doesn't have any good prose. People just say it does because they're scared of others thinking that they didn't understand it, and so they latch onto "the prose" to make it seem like they actually understood anything

Was Joyce a modernist at all? The intentionally bad writing that he apparently stuffed Ulysses with is a distinctly post-modern idea imo.

>>9103299
>A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme

>Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

Is this satire of two different things, or of one thing in two different ways, or is one of these honestly good?

Well, it's not nearly so straightforward. Joyce is never so straightforward. You must admit that the beginning of the episode is pretty stilted; but as the height of pleasure is reached (under circumstances that a late Victorian romance could never have tolerated), there is some strange ecstatic element that finds its way in. And the section after Bloom realizes she's crippled is simply gorgeous writing, some of the best in the book, and Joyce intended it that way.

>>9103284
right—it's funny in joyce because with him language is a tool, a medium, and a plaything, the vehicle of textual artistry, and an end in itself. with wallace it's pathetic and grimy, because in his work language is a means to overcoming its own ironic difference, a dismal, noisy channel, a distorting presence, an absent third in the interlocutionary space of reading that must be worked through and against to really "reach" the reader in a state of sincere encounter.

>>9103316

all the postmodernists—Barth, Wallace, Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover...—were reading Joyce. that we find postmodernism there is no surprise, but still, to call him postmodernist is not so much anachronism as it is showing the limits of periodization

>>9103371
>Ironic difference
What do you mean by this?

>tfw my fav chapter is the first one

good satirical prose is beautiful, even as satire of things that are normally bad

>>9103029
It's OK to like it ironically. Especially if you grow a beard.