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[tfunk]

I like dinosaurs and things eating each other. Joyce doesn't deliver, even after 100 pages.

Sure half the shite Joyce shites on about I see everyday on my way into town for a hamburger.

How do you measure a good book?

By giggles? There's no objective measure for a good read, so all these people, like the OP, trying to justify Joyce are just stuck-in-the-heads that would rather read about a street than walk down it.

[Craven Moorehead]

I have to admit that I seriously enjoyed both The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I read them as an undegraduate. The Dubliners was read as part of a narrative theory course and I read Portrait because I figured all good little Lit majors should have some grounding in one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. However, both of these works are his most accessible, and therefore, most easily read and understood.

I Have attempted Ulysses on a number of occasions, and generally after two or three hundred pages have given up, mostly because of a sense of hopelessness and the inevitable dread of drowning in a stream of consciousness. Because of the experimental style of the writing and the myriad of obscure references, I'm of the opinion that the later of Joyce's works (Ulysses, FW) need to be read within a classroom/ academic setting, much like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, merely because a good professor and an avid class can provide guide posts along the way towards a better understanding of he text.

That being said, I find it interesting that one of the most influential of 20th century writers and one of the most influential of the 19th century, Wordsworth, both rely on the writing conceit of expounding upon the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling": Wordsworth's spots of time and Joyce's epiphanies. Examples of this abound, specifically when Wordsworth writes of his schooldays in Tintern Abbey, and when Joyce (Stephen Dedalus) writes of spotting the girl standing in the river with her skirt hiked up in Portrait. Absolutely beautiful writing, but certainly not for mass consumption.

Interestingly enough, Portrait was originally serialized in a periodical entitled The Egoist. So there you go, whoever posted the "insightful" message earlier about Joyce's rampant egotism. And PGF, why bother posting if you admittedly have nothing to say about the posted topic? Are you posting just to hear yourself post?

Harold Bloom wrote an interesting article in his book The Western Canon entitled "Joyce's Agon With Shakespeare", and in it he speaks of how Joyce saw his writing as an Irish national in direct competition with the Englishman whose writing is considered to be the cornerstone of all Western literature. Not that I take everything Harold Bloom writes as gospel, mind you; although his rant against his nemesis "the schools of resentment" (feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, any ism really) is good for a laugh.

[mistermasan]

most all lit goes out of style. joyce's esoteric style will park him next to james fenimore cooper sooner than later.

daresay- he is too difficult to bother with.

[tomato]

Molly Bloom, I don't know whether Joyce is awesome or overrated, but he is certainly one or the other.
Literary critics love him so much that they mention his name no matter what the topic is.
I wish I could figure out what the word "Joycean" means; I can't find it in the dictionary.

[eamo]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is my all-time favourite book. But maybe that's because I was educated by Irish Jesuits in the the same way as the protagonist and can relate to most of what he experiences.

I've read Ulysses twice and can't honestly say I understood any more than about 60% of it.

Looked at Finnegans Wake and gave up in 10 pages. The only person I know who loved FW is a very talented man who has mental problems. Literally! He read it about 20 times.

Dubliners is great and can be enjoyed by anyone.

Overall, Joyce was a great writer. Some of the imagery in Portrait is spellbinding and unrivalled.

[MollyBloom]

[MollyBloom]

[Dome Vans]

I remember studying Dubliners at school and loved it. Even now I remember this passage from Eveline:

[MollyBloom]

[JMO]

My family would go off the tv every lent, so I had a tradition of reading a different big book every year at that time. I read Ulysees one year and War and Peace every other year(because I fell in love with that book).

I liked Ulysees but it was hard to read. Otherwise i havn't read alot of Joyce. In situations like this I tend to follow the establishment. The overall consensus of the literary establishment is that Joyce is a genius and one of the greatest writers of all time. There must be a reason why he has stood there for 80 years with no waning in popularity it seems.

I guess my main point is, that a literary opinion is something you probably should be qualified to have. Or at least to have one that is worth a lot. My opinion is more of the layperson and whilst important to me, won;t really tell the world anything worth hearing about Joyce.

[MollyBloom]

[Craven Moorehead]

^ hee hee, you can just see her lips moving as she's reading...."ineluctable? What the hell does that mean?"

[MollyBloom]

[Craven Moorehead]

She's probably vainly looking for a glossary.

[mrgiles]

i know a few people that are rabid joyce freaks - they generally carry ulysses around like a bible. not that i don't understand - i think the first word that springs to mind when joyce is mentioned is "Important" (since, at the very least, possum's essay on him). he's a modernist, which really also translates as being elitist - the modernist project wasn't a grass-roots, inclusive kinda deal. this is obvious thruout esp his 2 best books (imho), ulysses and finnegan's wake. if u care about literature, u've gotta know abt joyce's sh.it. of course this is different to enjoying it, but still...

i don't claim to know what's goin on thruout ulysses, but really i don't think that was one of modernism's aims. in fact, the opposite would be more to the point - just think of the dripping irony of eliot's contemptous footnotes to one of the other Important Works of That Time, the Waste Land (that, ulysses, and ep's cantos are the touchstones of at least 1st gen modernism). ulysses has such enthralling patterns of structure, and joyce's prose does amazing things - things that haven't and won't be done again. don't even get me started on fw - which is turning in2 one of the most important texts for thinking about contemporary literature.

and if u just like great, well-written stories, dubliners is a wonderful place to look.