>not being able to intepret a book of commonly-themed short stories on your own

yep op is certified retard

>doing all that work for a book where the last line is "i guess we all truly were dubliners"

>dude know when Joyce made that one reference to someone else's work?
>I really felt that part

>>24853588
checked your dubs

I liked that story where the guy looses all his money gambling after the race

>>24853196
None of the stories require secondary literature, except possibly Ivy Day in the Committee Room

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Genuinely one of my favourite chapters (or short stories) I've ever read. Masterful.

I found it rather dull.

the irony is that if you learn the references from some sort of companion text, or even if you pre-emptively study the references, as preparation to read the esoteric text, either way you’ve completely missed the effect, which emerges from the stimulation of a well-stocked memory, not from mechanical prodding with the intellectual equivalent of pornography: cherry-picked lists of references organized by their appearance in some other book.

>>24853196

I'm in progress with a detailed comparison of all the stuff. The stories were crafted to connect to each other via certain details, which is amusing when you pay attention.

>>24854111

I wasn't crazy about it, honestly. A personal favorite was "A Painful Case", which depicts an atheistic bachelor with stable employment who has a younger woman briefly come into his life, but then he pushes her aside and he ends up totally alone. Let's just say that it hit a little to close to home.

>>24854318

And yet Joyce in particular seems to stimulate exactly these sorts of lists, which undermines your observation because he is obscure and specific to his period. I have two of them on my shelf at the moment. When I first read Portrait as a teenager, I made the terrible mistake of flipping back to the disconnected end-notes every single time, thus breaking up and ruining the reading. What the hell is a fan for Parnell, and so on. You are of course just suggesting to keep reading and get the point, but this tends to get lost otherwise. I was able to read to my mother at age three and I have a hard time with it (Joyce in general) precisely because the historical context stuff. What hope does some illiterate zoomer have, and why would they care. Joyce really did disappear up his own asshole with the abstraction. This endears him to the /lit/ set who want to do the smart stuff, but he's exceptionally obscure.