/lit/ - Literature

>ha ha ha

with antifouling butter-scatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her ...

Once while thinking about drowning my ambition in mediocrity with a graduate degree, I scanned the guide book for the English GRE. One small paragraph was devoted to Joyce, where half a sentence said, "and Finnegans Wake, where the story of Humphrey Chimpden Earwick, an Irish innkeeper, is told through one night of dreams."

I don't think english phds should be required to read Finnegans Wake, but the lack of interest (at least in the grad students I've met) shows that their commitment to the field they study is quite feeble. Going through the academic motions and forking over $200k for a piece of paper that says feehpee is not something an interesting or original mind would do, though, so what can you expect?

>>2774531
heaventree of stars hung with humid blue nightfruit

>Reading montaigne
>wet like a teenage virgin
>have never seen so many references i haven't read

What other pre-1600 Latin thinkers are truly worth reading? Given we already know what they were about, who needs to be read in full, in context, as originally written, as it were?

Seneca? Cicero? Catullus, Tibullus, Lucan?

Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition.

someone on lit once said reading finnegans wake made their brain work faster. joyce will expand your capacity for thought, definitely, I think objectively the complexity of his prose outmatches any other writer.

Ulysses is definitely trying to reinvent English. Just as an experiment of trying to put an entire day's stream of thought into novel is requires expanding into describing parts of the subconscious that weren't in novels before. And as he was writing Ulysses he included those sections where he's talking a new gobblydegook, the hospital chapter and nighttown and penelope, specifically. Finnegans Wake, seen properly, is the carefully planned conclusion to the problems apparent in Joyce's earliest works.

>ctrl+f
>no michael robbins
>wtfamireading.jpg

his book was just released, and it's breathtaking, gorgeous, magical, sparkling fucking living breathing divine poetry in our midst being created in and of the present moment like nothing else I've read.

check it out. you'll thank me.

Anthony Burgess' ReJoyce has some really good chapters building you up to read FW.

Other than that, there's no real substitute for the text, you just have to read it. The guides can't help you much if you don't know what they're talking about.

I'm up to my neck in FW. Never loved a book so much. It really accelerates your mind to these terrific speeds like no other book does. I don't know how else to describe it.

I find that FW is readable if you can finish the first chapter. That's the most difficult part but it will teach you the language of the book. It might take you years or months but you could also do it in less than a day. So. From there the story accelerates really rapidly, in an absolutely unprecedented, incredibly unique way, into the most incredible dream-adventures you ever heard of.

Roland Mchugh says that no fw reading guide is actually useful, because it stops you from interacting directly with the text.

I'm gearing up for a re-read this summer and may try to write on the book.
So far the most important books I've read related to it were:
-the book. (ppl sometimes forget this)
-Books at the Wake, Atherton. FW Experience, McHugh. The Sigla of FW, McHugh. FW Census - Glasheen, Concordance, Hart, Book of the Dark, Bishop. Ellman's Joyce biography. Annotations, McHugh.

Most recently I've been reading Wake Rites, which presents a really really convincing theory that much of the book is structured after an ancient Irish pagan holiday festival.

>Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me... oh, I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... and Willie Mays, and... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and... Louie Armstrong's recording of 'Potatohead Blues'... Swedish movies, naturally... 'Sentimental Education' by Flaubert... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne... the crabs at Sam Wo's... Tracy's face.

>>2448676
it's my favorite book, out of many. compared to war and peace, anna karenina, infinite jest, in search of lost time, ulysses, don quixote, it really is just by far the most fascinating.

everyone should just proceed dubliners>portrait>U>FW, but FW is so much better than all of them. Its an exponential leap forward on the other works.

Really not that complicated, just dense. If you can read the first chapter, you can finish the book.

fucking hated this book and put it down after 100 pages. willing to blame that on the translation, not willing to learn spanish right now.

Jesus litfags never read shit.

Between Salinger the question is Hapworth 16, 1924 or Finnegans Wake. At that point both artists evolve into a crystallization of all previous themes in their work that is perceived by the rabblement as unreadable.

Their both such geniuses it's impossible to compare; I'd rather read Catcher than Portrait, but that doesn't mean much.

>ah up?
>! dhirypith
>down. oh