>>25592662
just a manlet

>>25592662
No, he is not. He is also sexy as fuck. I wish I could suck his dick, but alas!

>>25592662
Funny how stout and stocky he looks here, compared to his lanky older self.

>>25592662
Yes, he was overrated. Doesn't mean he was bad - just that he was overrated by people who have poor aesthetic tastes.

I'd say his biggest flaw was that he mistook mundane boringness as evidence of erudition and skill. He didn't have much to say that was profound. Ulysses could have been better if Joyce was a better thinker and bothered to give Ulysses some kind of interesting narrative. Also, the idea of 'yes' being some kind of unique word that affirms life, so Ulysses should end on it, was a cringe idea. So was deciding to create a new version of Homer's Odyssey. Just dumb ideas for a book.

Source: Someone who read all his works, studied him in depth, and read thousands of pages of secondary sources.

not everything in life is under or overrated, zoom zoom. somethings in life are rated perfectly fine

>>25592722
i am 61 unc

This current brigade of Joyce hate reminds me of the Pynchon one about 6 or so months ago. Anyway, yes, I think he probably is a little overrated for reasons an above anon has already stated and that it seemed as though he lost sight of what makes literature compelling as a whole by leaning too deeply into language experimentation while eschewing many other components.

>>25592719
>Ulysses could have been better if Joyce was a better thinker and bothered to give Ulysses some kind of interesting narrative.
Such as?

>>25592719
>mistook mundane boringness as evidence of erudition and skill.
A little bit disingenuous no? He displayed skill quite often with how he could make these mundane situations exciting to read with his style and playfulness. He exhibited his erudition with the scale of knowledge regarding literary history, cultural history, psychology, language and even science as shown in chapters of Ulysses like Cyclops, Oxen, Hades and Ithaca. Other than that I do agree with you.

>>25592719
>Source: Someone who read all his works, studied him in depth, and read thousands of pages of secondary sources.
I know for a fact you don't even know the names of all his works. Also worth noting:
>deciding to create a new version of Homer's Odyssey
This is absolute peak midwittery hahahahahaha. Into the trash. Reading *page count* of secondary sources tells us everything else we need to know about what you don't know.

>>25592719
Falseflagging troon. Go back to your video games

>>25592755
anon is measuring the slow moving eternal beauty of ulysses against lolita
to each their own but as fun and zing bang boink sexytime wow part one of lolita is it aint no joyce

>>25592755
Not saying he lacked those things. I'm just saying that he, for some reason, thought he was a better artist if he made his work more mundane and less imaginative.

He came from a Latin priest background and focused on rigor. For whatever reason, he wasn't able to imbue his works with real spirit.

>>25592757
Nothing you said addressed anything of substance that I said. You just focus on extraneous details that don't have any relevance to anything.

>>25592753
Do you not know basic plot mechanics? There should be some overarching force that drives actions, as well as character development. Joyce basically thought he could do away with those pesky constructs. And what he replaced it with doesn't work.

>>25592777
>Nothing you said addressed anything of substance that I said. You just focus on extraneous details that don't have any relevance to anything.
Unfortunately it cleared out anything you thought might have been a contribution to the discussion. Entertainingly, this is lost on you.

>>25592777
>There should be some overarching force that drives actions, as well as character development.
Okay, you didn't read Ulysses. How did you come to think you could comment on the novel? Was the focus on thousands (two thousand? five thousand?) pages of secondary slop? If the drivers of the action, of the plot of Ulysses, and its character development is this lost on you—ah fuck it telling you all this will just help you pass as someone who knows anything about Joyce and Ulysses. Kill yourself.

>>25592737
felted

>>25592777
>There should be some overarching force that drives actions, as well as character development.
Modernism isn't for you. In fact, maybe Art in general isn't for you.

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>>25592670
>5 foot 10 is manlet status
it's so over

>>25592662
A little overrated, in the sense that:
>Dubliners and Portrait are just ok
>some people think Ulysses is the absolute pinnacle of prose fiction by a massive margin and nothing else even comes close
Ulysses is a brilliant book, clearly a work of genius, but try saying that you prefer some other author's approach and aesthetic judgment, and you'll be hounded by a bunch of people (a samefag?) calling you filtered and illiterate. It reminds me a bit of Tolstoy threads in that regard, those are always a shitshow for some reason. Or maybe that's just how modern internet discourse works.

>>25592831
I'm a fan of Joyce and Tolstoy and I agree with you. I think they are the masters of modernist and realist prose respectively. But there are other masters out there, so yeah, acting like they're untouchable or flawless does seem a bit uppity.

>>25592843
Forgot to add that I think Dubliners is decent and Portrait is great, but that's not really here or there.

>>25592827
It's funny how your brain jumps to these ideas, rather than the idea that Joyce is in some way flawed.

>>25592815
>Okay, you didn't read Ulysses. How did you come to think you could comment on the novel? Was the focus on thousands (two thousand? five thousand?) pages of secondary slop? If the drivers of the action, of the plot of Ulysses, and its character development is this lost on you—ah fuck it telling you all this will just help you pass as someone who knows anything about Joyce and Ulysses. Kill yourself.

This is a very typical refrain from Joyce "fans". They will claim the person didn't get it, and possibly didn't even read it. No, I got it. The issue is that it's not that great.

Now I ask: Did YOU get it? Or are you just liking Joyce because that's what everyone says is the best thing since sliced bread? In my case, I kept liking Ulysses because I wanted it to be a DIFFERENT book - an urban modern prose epic full of life - and for its potential. But when looked at as what it ACTUALLY is, it's flawed.

>>25592815
>>25592827
Um... Joycebros? Which one is it?

>>25592777
>There should be some overarching force that drives actions, as well as character development
Bloom grows massively through his internal stream of consciousness and standing up for Stephen, having found in his own mind, a son figure angter the death of his own, even if Stephen doesn’t see it that way. Helping him assert himself somewhat when he arrives home. This is all explicitly shown. Come now!
>>25592831
>>25592843
Agreed here. Melville actually did it best if you were to ask me, trumps both Tolstoy and Joyce, because he’s the novelist who got the closest to epic poetry without explicitly writing a poem in MD.

>>25592857
after* my bad, spasm or something.

>>25592857
Moby Dick is definitely another obvious work of excellence and genius, agreed. I do prefer Ulysses but it still brutally mogs 99% of lit I've read.

>>25592857
Bloom doesn't "grow massively". Shut the fuck up. Stephen is not Bloom's son any more than you are mine if I randomly see you on the street, help you out a bit and walk around with you for a few hours, and then go my separate ways. It's not a meaningful surrogate-son relationship in any way; it's retarded.

>>25592864
>wahhhh retard retard retard!
go back to dolls and saturday morning cartoons, timmy. the adults are busy.

>>25592857
Melville is just incredible. The fact that MD, which took him <2 years, is even able to contend, and is some regards even exceed Ulysses (which took Joyce like a decade) is astounding. And then there's Pierre and Confidence-Man...
Melville, Mann and Pynchon are the three that consistently leave me awestruck even in their lesser-read works.

>>25592662
Literature itself is missing from Joyce’s supposedly giant works. None of the defenders of Faust, Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy, or even Woolf has to hide behind style of writing (supposed stream of consciousness) to call their works the greatest. But Joyce’s apologists defend the novel’s bad, pervasive structure in the name of innovation and genius, and the difficulty of representing consciousness. Literature itself is given very low priority, while experimentation with psychic structure and linguistic developments takes centre stage.

Again, as I have already said, the pervasive desire to represent every microthought and every development stems from Joyce’s Catholicism, and his supporters see him as the culmination of the history of English literature, which is wrong and amounts to cultism. All this brilliance exists only because Joyce’s students and scholars create a retrospective teleology leading towards Ulysses, starting with Homer. But, taken in abstraction, it is a weak, rather shallow, and extremely tedious work of literature.

Sure, you can keep calling him an artist of language or whatever.

>>25592874
Moby dick was literature's greatest book, a giant of sorts. It wasn't obsessed with breaking genre or representing human consciousness when it shits and piss, but some faggots (mostly linguists and psueds) that somehow representing a day in Dublin is bigger achievement than writting a modern epic with great depth and prose just because of it doesn't talk about shit and piss and the consciousness associated with it.

>>25592884
>a giant of sorts
A Leviathan, even

>>25592877
>>25592884
Obsessed

>>25592662
Good book bad literature

>>25592864
Now now, no need to get angsty. I never said this was mutual. I’m saying that Bloom develops this subconscious feeling of wanting to protect Stephen throughout the book and you see the results of that in the second half of it. I think Stephen sees it for what it is, some middle aged Jew helping him out for some reason; Bloom subconsciously sees it as his redemption for failing as a father, in his own eyes. That is how I see it. I do think it’s overrated but it doesn’t mean I don’t see the greatness in it. >>25592889 sums it up nicely though lol

>>25592874
2 years. Fuck. Compare that to Redburn and White Jacket which are very nice in their own right but MD is a work of genius of almost Miltonic proportions. The fact that he went from Redburn to THAT in two years… insanity. For me, it’s chapter 135. The chase - final day. Might be a basic pick but that final confrontation is just perfect. Mann and Pynchon, two other greats. Though I only ever read Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon.

>>25592662
Bad book, perfect art

>>25592890
Chapters 132 and 135 are by far some of literature's greatest moments.

Begin again, Finnegan

Joyce is for people that enjoy and understand life more than art. That's ultimately what his books are about and why they are constructed the way they are. He got fed up with poets and writers caring more about perfecting artistic styles and disciplines over portraying life in more meaningful ways. This is part of why Ulysses encompasses so many styles. He wanted to perfect or "end" literature so that writers could exit this kind of strangle-hold they were putting on themselves; the only way "out" is "through", in other words. At the end of the day, completely irrespective of how many references and techniques he employs, his literature is a literature in service of consciousness, of bodily and sensory experience, not "tradition" or "rules of the craft".

>>25592916
Yes and how many people living the life did he served? 0 because he wrote most incomprehensible shit and piss analysis which no guy living real life ever gonna read, so his project failed and became another scholar farming book

>>25592920
I'm glad people like you are mocked in his books. On a semi-related note, it proves Eliot correct: "Only people who have a personality knows what it means to want to escape from it."

>>25592921
>People like me
Too bad the only ones reading his books are people like me and not life affirming humans he wanted to dedicate his works to. Too bad Joyace will never serve the common man like shakespeare or homer did, no matter how much he describes actions of neurons in a day in Dublin.

>>25592877
>woolf
X'"""""""""""")
sides punted into orbit thank you anon

>>25592662
>spends most of his life being a fucking teacher of esls

But... why?

>>25592719
Epic troll.

>>25592877
>one usage credit has been deducted from your Claude account

>>25592662
He's wanking in that photo, isn't he?

>>25592925
You don't read. You scan. Kinda like how a redditor doesn't "live" but intakes sense data.

I find all of the meme trilogy authors to be quite adolescent. They seem nice if you were bored with format and structure. I'm not from ireland and I imagine Joyce feels nicer to read if you are part of the Irish culture.

>>25593216
I'm not sure about DFW, but the other two have it all. Form, style and substance.

>>25592877
It is far more important to engage with Joyce by bearing in mind the creation of impulses, rather than the creation of forms. In this sense, he has less in common with Homer or Shakespeare and more with Dante and Flaubert.

>Ulysses
overrated
>Finnegans Wake
underrated

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>>25592974
Unlike you, I can write without Ai. Stop projecting your insecurities pajeet

>>25592827
It's funny to me how many people are against experimentation or against just anything that deviates from a formula/convention that they've decided is good. Any convention was at some point done for the first time, and at that point it was experimental. I'm just surprised that people aren't more interested in seeing what happens when somebody tries something else. Formulas or genres can be great as a base to work and play with, it's sort of required if playing with expectation is of any interest, but unless the execution is great I usually prioritize fun/interesting ideas over sticking to the script for the sake of it. Any time anybody says that good art needs X, I just assume they have very narrow taste or just haven't experienced all that much art

>>25593750
'Experiment', in this context, boils down pretty regularly to 'obtruded oddity’.

>>25593763
in my context or in Joyce's? I haven't read Ulysses lol so I don't mean to talk out of my ass a bit but I was meaning to speak generally. There are reasons to use a formula, but they become so common that they define people's entire idea of a medium. Writers end up using them when they don't actually have a good reason to, and readers end up getting confused when they're missing. There's no good reason why a single formula should always be present. Books are just words on pages and I'd like to see the full extent of what people are capable of accomplishing with that. I'm interested in writers and writing, sometimes that means seeing how they can navigate common plot structure, sometimes it doesn't.
Likewise, if you're doing something experimental it should probably be justified. There's nothing wrong with experimenting for the sake of it, but you can usually tell when someone is just trying to be different and not accomplishing anything interesting

>>25593777
>Likewise, if you're doing something experimental it should probably be justified. There's nothing wrong with experimenting for the sake of it, but you can usually tell when someone is just trying to be different and not accomplishing anything interesting
Have you even read the thread? The debate is about if Joyace should be regarded as the greatest english novelist of all time or not, not that artists shouldn't experiment.

>>25593777
It's true that an unusually difficult problem can force a writer to find himself making personal variations on accepted forms, but innovation in this sense is not experiment. Experimentation is all very well for a scientist, but literature cannot be called a science. Science works on a calm intellectual level with proper safeguards against imaginative freedom.

>>25593783
I started a tangent conversation with the person I replied to, about the post I replied to. At the time of replying, I read up until that reply. Not a weird thing to do lol
>>25593785
>but innovation in this sense is not experiment
fair, but it seems like we're just disagreeing on the use of the word "experiment". If your concept and goal for a piece of writing doesn't require a particular formula and you don't decide to use it just because that's what people tend to do, then maybe that's not necessarily that experimental, but whatever you wanna call that, that is the thing that I'm critical of people not being able to accept.
I approached literature from a weird angle though, I was already deep into music and art for a long time before realizing I love books too, so I do recognize that I have a bias towards art that "breaks the rules" because I think once you go deep enough into an art form that starts to be the most interesting stuff. That might not translate so directly to literature, but I already had it in my head as I approached it so I am stuck with this bias. From this angle it's hard to not feel like people are being ignorant when they need things to be exactly 1 way.

>>25593813
There’s a Robert Conquest quote ‘everyone is conservative about what he knows best’.

>>25593839
nice, that's pretty good. I try my best but I'm not completely immune to it either. For some genres of music that are/were very important to me, it's easy to hear the new generation trying their hand at it and feeling like it's missing the mark or something, like they don't get "the point" of it. It's in direct contrast to the period of my life that was really transformative with music, where I was discovering all kinds of new stuff and it was really exciting. I try my best to not let my passion become too protective. I'm in my mid 30s now so I'm seeing a majority of my friends stop developing taste and just decide that the stuff they liked in their teens/20s was "the good stuff" and nobody's making good stuff anymore. I've made a solid effort to not let that happen to me and it does genuinely pay off.

>>25593417
>underrated
Most responses I've encountered are simply confused. Little read books are bound to suffer this, super involvement, or complexity, aside. Both Glamorama and Vineland are underrated, as instances.

>>25593417
Overrated how?

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>>25592687
I wish i could suck his farts

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>>25594599

>>25593523
>being insecure enough to post this

>>25594616
kek

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>>25593785
>science
>calm and intellectual
good one, rousseau