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CasperTheFriendlyGhost
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
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 Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 8:42 am Post subject: |
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Three of the best pieces of literature written in English, IMHO, are Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Fitzgerld's Great Gatsby, and Joyce's The Dead.
I guess the King James Bible is up there too, but I'm not a Christian.
I think Joyce was an early post-modern, to reply to the first responder. |
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tomato
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: I get so little foreign language experience, I must be in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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Casper, any time you want to start a thread on Catcher in the Rye, I'm game.
I used that book with a middle school student, so I went over it with a fine tooth comb. |
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blanko
Joined: 15 Oct 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 4:22 am Post subject: |
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| isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste? |
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tfunk
Joined: 12 Aug 2006
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 4:27 am Post subject: |
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| blanko wrote: |
| isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste? |
Blanko's lover: Hey Blanko, what did you think of that meal?
Blanko: Isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste?
Hey Blanko, what did you think of that song/movie/dress/country/person/sunrise/essay... |
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tomato
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: I get so little foreign language experience, I must be in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:45 am Post subject: |
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| blanko wrote: |
| isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste? |
Interesting question.
One might say that a person who understands a work of art is the most reliable judge.
The negative comment most often levelled against the operatic medium is that "I never know what they're screaming about."
But I've known Italians who don't like Italian opera, and an Italian should be able to understand an Italian opera as easily as we can understand Rodgers & Hammerstein.
One could argue that a person who has read the critical analysis about James Joyce is the person best qualified to judge James Joyce.
However, one could counter-argue that the only person who would make such a study would be a person who is interested in James Joyce in the first place, so the test would have to be biased. |
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tfunk
Joined: 12 Aug 2006
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:53 am Post subject: |
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| tomato wrote: |
| blanko wrote: |
| isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste? |
Interesting question.
One might say that a person who understands a work of art is the most reliable judge.
The negative comment most often levelled against the operatic medium is that "I never know what they're screaming about."
But I've known Italians who don't like Italian opera, and an Italian should be able to understand an Italian opera as easily as we can understand Rodgers & Hammerstein.
One could argue that a person who has read the critical analysis about James Joyce is the person best qualified to judge James Joyce.
However, one could counter-argue that the only person who would make such a study would be a person who is interested in James Joyce in the first place, so the test would have to be biased. |
Not at all. It all depends on what you are judging it for, the context. A person that has read the critical analysis of Joyce isn't in any better position to argue whether or not the book is enjoyable. |
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Pink Freud
Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Location: Daegu
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 6:12 am Post subject: |
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| tfunk wrote: |
| tomato wrote: |
| blanko wrote: |
| isn't it all relative and depends on personal taste? |
Interesting question.
One might say that a person who understands a work of art is the most reliable judge.
The negative comment most often levelled against the operatic medium is that "I never know what they're screaming about."
But I've known Italians who don't like Italian opera, and an Italian should be able to understand an Italian opera as easily as we can understand Rodgers & Hammerstein.
One could argue that a person who has read the critical analysis about James Joyce is the person best qualified to judge James Joyce.
However, one could counter-argue that the only person who would make such a study would be a person who is interested in James Joyce in the first place, so the test would have to be biased. |
Not at all. It all depends on what you are judging it for, the context. A person that has read the critical analysis of Joyce isn't in any better position to argue whether or not the book is enjoyable. |
But he or she would be in a much better position to determine HOW the book is enjoyable.
Back to the original question.
Both awesome AND overrated. |
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DrunkenMaster
Joined: 04 Feb 2008
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:12 am Post subject: |
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| tfunk wrote: |
The painter chap was telling me a joke from the book, something about a slip of paper from the bookies being called something and everybody else misinterpreting it as something else...they thought he'd won the lottery and wasn't sharing any money with them. He was Jewish, I think, and there was anti-Jewish sentiment at the time that Joyce was highlighting.
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A ticket? Not from the bookie, but from the pawn shop maybe?
Modern Library (the academia arm of Random House) voted Ulysses the number one book of the 20th century. Why? Probably not for its pleasurable reading.
Ulysses, the most talked about/least read book of all time, shattered the artifice of the preceding literary era, and opened up for prose the 20th century.
It dismantled the flowery aesthetic of Victorian tripe and took the novel places that Hardy, for example, could never have gone simply because Joyce wasn't writing a narrative that had ever been written before. His prose was not quotidien formula. It was new. It was unprecedented. Yet it was steeped in tradition and myth. It opened doors. And just as it opened them, it summed up the previous two millenia in its homage to the masters. Joyce sits with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, and Homer at the head table because he dealt with the essential core of the legacy passed on from the Greeks and everyone who came later that had been judged to be "Great."
Joyce mirroed Ezra's Pound's belief that the world had changed and that the previous two millenia were about to become left-behind. Joyce and Pound wrote what is perhaps the last notable homage to the Odyssey, and they did it by imbedding it in the world around them. They fused the ancient canon with the modern world, they created and paid homage, and they critique the artifice of the previous literary generation(s).
The fact that none of you has mentioned Ezara Pound yet makes me wonder how serious you are about this conversation.
I'm sorry if I ranted. I've been drinking. |
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MollyBloom
Joined: 21 Jul 2006
Location: James Joyce's pants
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 11:50 am Post subject: |
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| DrunkenMaster wrote: |
The fact that none of you has mentioned Ezara Pound yet makes me wonder how serious you are about this conversation.
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Come on, you know better than that. That's opening up a huge can of funky worms. I was going to mention Pound in the original post, but I took his name out because I think Pound is in an even different category than Joyce.
I realize that they hung out and talked lit and whatnot, but as you need a knowledge of Greek, Latin, French and Italian to understand some aspects of Joyce, you need a working language of many languages to read Pound! I studied Pound in a few classes and understood a lot of what he was saying, but then when I got to the Japanese and Chinese, my rhythm was all messed up and it disrupted my thought and learning process. For Pound, you also need to know some Spanish, Italian, ancient Greek, Latin...)
I think Joyce (Ulysses and FW), Pound, and Eliot for that matter, are writers that you need to study to fully understand. For example, the first few times I read Ulysses, I needed the Annotated Notes by Gifford to truly understand what was going on. Yes, it is a pain and quite disruptive to stop reading and go to another book to find out the definitions. With Pound, it's the same thing. In my publication of the Cantos, you need to reference the notes in the back of the edition to find out the meanings. Same thing with Eliot's The Wasteland (which I adore as well): he wrote up a key for the reader and slapped it in the back.
I'm not saying readers of Joyce, Pound, or Eliot cannot read and just enjoy...but to start to grasp the fullness of what is going on, you need to study and go a bit out of your way than just read the work of literature.
I'm really pleased with the turnout and the plethora of comments! Let's keep it up! This makes me really want to start a classic literature club when I get back to Korea!
This is one of my favorite pictures from expat France in the 20th century:
r-l: Ford Madox Ford (fat ass), James Joyce (nice and calm), Ezra Pound (cracked out) and John Quinn (confused)
http://www.creativewritingglasgow.co.uk/data/pg/pg05/pg05img01.gif |
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kangnam mafioso
Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Location: Teheranno
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 2:51 pm Post subject: |
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| I still think Joyce's masterpiece is Dubliners and Portrait. I can appreciate his experimentation in Ulysses and Finnegans, but accessibility need not be a bad thing! Sometimes less is more (excuse the cliche) and simple, concise sentences can often be the most powerful (look at some of Hemingway's prose, for example.) So many writers tried to veer off into the avant garde and that's fine, but often their more egalitarian work stands out the most in my mind. I think of other writers -- the Beats, for example, and see how Burroughs went from simple prose novels like Queer and Junkie into surrealistic narratives that one can barely read like The Ticket that Exploded and so on. |
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Don Gately
Joined: 20 Mar 2006
Location: In a basement taking a severe beating
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Love him, but I admit to liking Dubliners and Portrait better than Finnegan. I think he kind of semi-lost the plot at some point in there. Very ambitious but I'm not sure it came off. |
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