This is unreadable.
ever heard of manga or anime
>>25301623im doing my masters in English lit rn and this is unreadable man. I know Latin, Greek, French some Sauerkraut and this text is not normal.
This is a fairly accessible novel
>>25301631It's not normal but it's quite readable
>>25301631Oh man, you're one of those students
This is more your speed OP
It's not even one of Joyce's more difficult works. I didn't know community colleges had masters programs.
>>25301643My English Programme is exalted above all others upon this Old Continent. Be silent weasel.>>25301637I am standing Cum Laude what is your issue>>25301636no it is not
>>25301576Unreadable in what way?
>>253015764u
>>25301631flimsy excuse. i read this as an undergrad and thought it ruled. either your teachers suck or you are subhuman, simple as.
>>25301649ayo this guy cums loudly
>>25301576Que? This isn't anything out of the ordinary, Melville's Pierre was way weirder. And that's not to mention TSATF, AILD, Ulysses, FW...
>>25301576The entire first part is incredible and the part with the sermon is also very good. The last two chapters are pretty weak though with only short glimpses of genius like the epiphany at sea. It's a very simply book at the surface level and not at all challenging to read. Its complexity comes from the multiple allusions from a person at least 10x more well read than you. Just read more literature and come back to Joyce later if you think you have to "get" every single reference to enjoy a book.
You could at least post an excerpt or something and show us what’s giving you trouble, you know? Unless you’re just baiting of course
>>25301576I had the same impression. I suspect everyone is just pseuds pretending to understand it. I will leave open the possibility that I've been filtered but I can't imagine this (or Joyce's other writings) is actually comprehensible except to a highly specialized audience.
>>25301576Did a bunch of bots accidentally activate intended to post about Ulysses?This book is straightforward and a traditional narrative structure.No stream of consciousness. No long hundreds word run on sentences. No weird grammar formats. Punctuation is the same as normal except quotes start on a new line with a dash instead of "" which is no more difficult than reading a play punctuation.
>>25302934>no stream of consciousnessIsn't the first chapter entirely stream of consciousness? That's what I've only read thus far tho, so I dunno how the rest of it is like.
>>25302927Joyce differs greatly from book to book. Here's a random sentence from:>PortraitHe turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy.>UlyssesBut with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is, if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy’s scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian!>FWThe fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur — nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
>>25303108And Dubliners for good measure:But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life. If you can't see how drastically the style changes from book to book then you must be blind. Ulysses and FW are difficult, but what's difficult about Dubliners? And Portrait is flowery, but hardly more difficult than other classics. Hell, I had more problems with Moby-Dick.
>>25303115>Moby-DickNor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
>>25301649Your titles don't mean anything when you struggle with basic undergraduate literature. It only reflects poorly on your school.
>>25301649STEMtard here. How bad is your programme that you're struggling with fucking Portrait? I breezed through that one. Try reading Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow.
>>25302906just read the first page. It is just nonsense
>>25303160Kek, good one, that activate Windows is just the cherry on top.
>>25301576I read this as a high school sophomore and while some of it went over my head I still enjoyed it overall. Just add some more skill points in INT, it and Dubliners are by far the easiest to read of Joyce's works.
>>25303160My one piece of advice for you is to fully immerse yourself in the mind of a child (for the first chapter at least) and not to be overly concerned with understanding EVERYTHING in a text (picrel, the author of the quote is talking about Finnegans Wake, but the message is universally applicable to any work of literature). Basically, you are an outsider looking into the mind of young Stephen, seeing whatever he is thinking at the moment, no matter what it is, a "stream of consciousness" if you will. Not everything here has to make sense, like not every one of your waking thoughts has to make sense.
>>25303160You need to go post this on Reddit. It really is outdated "comedy."
>>25303290>wothe botheth>>25303287the writing doesnt make me feel like a child, it makes me feel like a retard kicking me out of the stream of consciousness. I genuinely can not place what is happening it is just hopping from place to place
>>25303296The first section, which seems most confounding to you, contains Stephen's earliest memories, so of course, it will seem disjointed and kinda schizo, since his brain is literally in the earliest stages of development. And since he's still just a boy, his internal language is not yet developed, so there will be a lot of repeating allegories and blunt statements. A huge part of the enjoyment of Portrait is to see Stephen, along with his use of language, grow over time. And also, read aloud, or just subvocalize if you're not used to that yet, and just let the rhythm of the words carry you to the end. Seriously, don't scrutinize it so much. The first read is always going to be incomplete. You can only grasp a work fully on your second, even third or fourth read.
