Rewrite a line or so from your favourite author, in the style

>>9548357
describe that empty sinking feeling of rejection when no one replies to your post

>>9548357
What do I need to read before I can read and appreciate Ulysses?

>>9548406
/lit/ is a fairly slow board. The only threads that seem to get replies are decent bait threads, stacks threads, and bookshelf threads. Or like top X authors threads. Plus most people on here are shitposters who haven't even read anything except Harry Potter and Wikipedia summaries. I doubt any of them could write let alone mimic an author.

>>9548419
Read Portrait of an Artist as a Young man, (preferably twice, it's not that long). This will get you used to Joyce's writing. Also find a cliff note type book for Ulysses or a Ulysses companion book to read the summary/analysis of every section after you read it. You can't prepare yourself in the sense that you will get everything. You'd have to be a literary scholar. And you won't get everything on a first read. It will take 3-7 reads to truly grasp any book.

>>9548357
Outside, they could hear a skull getting caved in. This is never a good thing to hear in the streets. It's never "THUMP we've made pancakes" or "THUMP we've adopted a golden retriever.

>>9548447
>You'd have to be a literary scholar.

I understand that, but are there allusions that I should be familiar with beforehand? Using a cliff's notes to explain the references would be less satisfying I think.

>>9548434
Being on a slow board is never a good sign.

>>9548458
I don't think you understand the breadth of allusion in Ulysses. There is a 100 page section or somewhere there about where Joyce imitates and satirizes the writing style of English from Beowulf to present day. You would literally have to be extremely familiar with the entire history of English prose to understand all the allusions in that section alone. You're better of with cliff notes/companion books where a body of scholars have already unearthed and explained the allusions. Most of them will probably pass over you without you even realizing it even if you've read the work before. Do you honestly remember everything you've read well enough to find allusions to it in texts? Scholars out there have already done the work for you. Take advantage of it.

>>9548486
What is the point of reading a book where the only way to "understand" it is to have others explain every word to you?

>>9548497
What is the point of learning if others have to explain it to you? Do you realize how dumb that is? If you apply this thinking to other subjects you will understand how stupid that thought process is. Think about mathematics. You're asking people to discover things that have already been discovered over again for no reason. You find new knowledge by building on the discoveries of others. If you read those analyses on Ulysses' sections it will open your eyes and perhaps you will even find something on your own or never noticed before. This is literally how you build knowledge. It will be counterproductive if everyone was forced to start from scratch themselves. Plus a lot of these scholars that discover these allusions tend to be experts on the text they discover allusions to.

>>9548497
I should also point out that "understand" had multiple meanings. You can easily understand any book on a surface level, understanding the plot and story progression. And maybe even the surface level of the deeper meaning without resources. But if you want to have deep understanding of a text you are going to have to engage in accessory scholarly sources. Otherwise you're looking at years of study of other texts to understand a text.
If you want to understand plot of the book you need not prepare yourself. But if you want to dig under the surface you're going to need to read other scholarly sources on the text. It's even what other scholars do when they do their own analyses! They consult the body of work around the text, and then build off it with their own ideas and contributions.

>>9548497
The short answer is that Ulysses is written in a different language, and you need a Joyce-English dictionary in the form of a scholar's commentary to properly read it.
The same applies to Finnegans Wake, obviously.

I'm going to go ahead and post what I wrote up during the last Ulysses thread for people who want some info before diving into it :


Ulysses is a monstrous son of a bitch and it's difficult--for reasons that are interesting on their own accord-- in knowing even where to start talking about it.

Ulysses started as a short story, and at the end of the day it really is a simple little day. All the events unfold naturally and are all interconnected with one another in such a dense little tapestry of causality that you just sort of...."trust"... the hyperealism of the setting. I don't know all the streets in Dublin; I don't know which apartment was on what street or who was a well known surgeon at the time or god knows what else. (I DO remember Dalkey was a street but that might be on account of the publishing company).

Another thing to remember is that there are really only three central characters, and whenever you feel lost in the sea of moving characters and voices, try to remember their relationship to Bloom or Molly or Stephen.

(I'm going to continue in a response to this post)

>>9548687
Track objects, especially in the more disjointed sections like Wandering Rocks, where the narrative is told from the point of view of objects, being passed back and forth between characters, their conversations overheard and contradictory. Then there are objects like Blooms hat and jacket and the possessions in his pocket. Also we have Stephen's walking stick. And a million others I can't remember off the top of my head.

Read slowly, then reread quickly. Some parts of the book move by so quickly it's amazing; Cerce especially does this just in how fast the night moves along, and the dancing and switching partners in the little whorehouse just makes it delightful. Ulysses really is meticulously enjoyable as well. There are little pockets of mood and tone that sometimes come into a perfect focus--"what is the age of the soul of man"-- before falling apart again. This is one of the reasons why the text is not so easy to "quote" in the traditional sense. You can't really pull a random sentence from Ullysses (as opposed to literally anything by Beckett) and hold it up to stand on its own. It's all intertextual.

And back to the mention of Circe: Ullysses itself can arguably be said to have a subconsious of its own. Information comes from sources that are at times extremely private and even unnamed (like the antisemite dude), or much more fluid and seeming to acknowledge and absorb all thoughts at once.

>>9548694
If you don't understand a little phrase in french or latin or greek, look it up. This is called doing your homework.

It's useful to have read the Odyssey (and honestly you probably just should for a million other reason), but not absolutely necessary. I don't have the energy right now to explain its relation to Ulysses but you should be fine with reading the wiki summaries for the episode in question through google. You'll end up running into helpful analysis probably in the way anyway.

(the next part is from further down in the thread)

The real mystery of the book is the identity of the man in the macintosh, who's this dude who appears throughout the novel always haunting bloom's thoughts. Nabokov supposedly taught his students that the man was or had to be Joyce himself, while other people might say Bloom's shadow or projection or some other character from dubliners. I'm stealing from here:

http://lithub.com/the-man-in-the-macintosh-one-of-literatures-great-mysteries/

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of

Other interpretations go with Hamlet's ghost? especially with bloom's dad showing up in his hallucinations? More on this here (You'll need jstor access)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25476199.pdf

>>9548703
And the last thing that comes to mind (at least for now) is to pay attention to temporal details, or at least little references to how far along in the day it is. The order in which you read it may not be the actual one in which they unfolded, so this becomes this whole little casual mess. It's hard to think of examples off the top of my head but I'm pretty sure Oxen of the Sun (the beheamoth that it is) where you're dealing with that girl's birth you're kind of thrust into the scene wheras later on you get a much more casual conversation about her having been made pregnant. The meaning of this statement changes depending on if it happens before or after the birth. Side fact: think of oxen of the sun as the birth of the english language and its evolution to whatever the hell it ends with.

>>9548419
i could be an eternal list but I'll try

(list 100% based on MY opinion)

>100% essential
portrait of the artist as a young man
the odissey
hamlet

>not that essential but will help quite a bit
the bible (though it is a chore for many people, it is of great value)
the divine comedy
dubliners
read some introductions about the ideas of plato and aristotle
read the ireland's war of independence
read a bit about parnell and ireland between 1875 and 1920
(the last 3 items can be read on wikipedia or some other site, no need to read whole books on it


however, friend, the most important advice I can give anyone who wants to read ulysses is: if you made it all the way through (which for me was a great pleasure), read it again. seriously, can't stress this enough, you get SO much more from it when you re-read it, its absurd. also, try to enjoy the ride, try not to be obsessed with trying to understand it, just read it, its supposed to be funny and comic, not something to be taken seriously. I don't suggest reading annotated versions or taking notes on the first read too, just read it and leave it for when you reread it

>>9548357
How about no.