/lit/ - Literature

Joyce steadily gets worse throughout his career. He peaked with Dubliners. Portrait has its moments but you get a bit concerned. Ulysses is vastly overrated and Finnegans Wake is gibberish and dogshit.

He got so caught up in trying to be innovative, trying to push the English language to its limits, that he forgot that at his core he's supposed to be a storyteller. Fuck, the entire reason you can like Ulysses AT ALL has nothing to do with Joyce's playing around with words and language, and everything to do with the fact that Bloom saves Stephen's life in a very meaningful way, and that Bloom recovers his household and rekindles his relationship with Molly. But this very moving story of a day in the life of two men gets obscured by Joyce's linguistic nonsense.

Joyce got so caught up in trying to be this great writing genius that he got too far away from the true heart of genius in literature, which is to tell a story that moves the hearts of men.

"Proteus" in Ulysses is an enormous pleb filter, that's the first true dose of weirdness the book throws at you and it's turned off many a reader.

>>16922672
I can think of MULTIPLE famous writers who would have come to 4chan if it had existed when they were alive.

In fact, given the nature of the world these days, I'd wager that huge amounts of great writers would have been on here. Think of it through the lens of what the modern world is like. The internet is ubiquitous. Social media is everywhere and the world is worse off for it. Everybody lives a kind of double life, partly in the real world and partly online.

If famous writers had to deal with all this shit, I feel as though a huge amount of them would eventually find their way here. Because 4chan soaks up oddities, deviants, autists, and freaks. And that's what a ton of great writers were.

Proust would absolutely have posted on 4chan. Probably Joyce and Kafka, too. And that's just for starters.

Go read James Joyce's short story "A Little Cloud." It's about becoming aware of your own mediocrity and hating yourself for it.

So, uh, who else thinks he peaked with Dubliners? I feel like in his quest to be more experimental, and play around with language and words, he lost something essential about storytelling, starting with Portrait, increasing with Ulysses, and of course reaching its nonsensical crescendo with Finnegans Wake. Dubliners is the most "normal" thing Joyce wrote, and I actually think it may be the best thing he wrote precisely BECAUSE it's so normal.

Unironically Ulysses. It's fundamentally an atheist work, written by someone who was raised as a Christian but came to reject the Faith. It's the perfect atheist epic.

>>15647157
>>15647167
Real talk: was it a good idea, in the long run, for Joyce to write those letters? They have kind of poisoned the online discourse about him. I get that he was a pervert with vile fetishes and he wanted to share them with his beloved, but it might have been a bad idea to write that down in a permanent way.

At the very least he should probably have had them burned before he died. He had to know that if they were kept around eventually they'd become public knowledge.

This thread is yet more proof that Ireland is the most miserable nation in the world, and Joyce was right to despise it.

>tfw slowly starting to come around to the idea that Joyce is overrated

I have read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. I'm in grad school and am actually writing my exit thesis on Ulysses. But I'm starting to think that Joyce just isn't as great a writer as he's made out to be. He's a very intricate, very crafty, very careful writer. He's very good at tinkering and constructing with writing. But I'm not sure he's as great a writer as everyone makes him out to be. I think Faulkner is better, and so is Borges, and that's just in the 20th Century. Joyce doesn't awe me. He doesn't spellbind me. There's something muddy and gummy about his works, if that makes any sense. They don't soar. They don't tower. I realize this is imprecise but this is how it feels to me. I read Moby-Dick and I'm awed. I read Absalom, Absalom! and I'm awed. I don't feel awe reading Ulysses.

If we're being totally objective and looking at great literature, it's clear that cuckolding is the most /lit/ fetish of them all. It shows up throughout the Western Canon, from the plays of Sophocles to the plays of Shakespeare to the Bible to Joyce's Ulysses. Over and over we see an obsession with a man having his wife fucked by another man. Cucking is the most /lit/ fetish.

But that doesn't mean you should have it.

Let's also not forget that it's not just philosophy, it's actual literature that lives in the shadow of the Church. So many of the greatest works of Western literature are overtly Catholic in their worldview; many more are directly reacting to, or rebelling against, the Church and what it teaches.

Think of the Divine Comedy, or the Song of Roland, or Brideshead Revisited, or The Power And The Glory. All are overtly Catholic works. And think of authors whose experiences with Catholicism permanently influenced them. Joyce wouldn't be Joyce without Catholicism. Neither would Tolkien.

>>14170918
Is there a single writer or poet who was GOOD with money? Being financially inept seems to be something every single great writer has in common. I can't think of a single one of them who didn't get into debt. The only ones immune to this are the ones who were born rich, and even some of them pissed their funds away.

>>13451370
I think you may have a point. But this may, in turn, be the reason why cuckoldry is the subject of so much brilliant literature, like Ulysses or Much Ado About Nothing. If you're a genius, like Shakespeare or Joyce was, then you don't have that naivete about women; you're a good enough artist, and correspondingly a good enough student of human nature, to be somewhat cynical and suspicious of most people. One might therefore say that a fear of cuckoldry is, perhaps, a sign of intelligence.

>he pretends to like Joyce even though he isn't nearly well-read enough to properly understand his works
Why do people do this?

What should I read next which is highly "aesthetic", and classic? I love Shakespeare, I love Homer. I've read Hamlet and The Odyssey. I didn't quite care for Dante's Inferno, because I don't like his religion, I don't like how it would have been beautiful in Italian but I read a translation, he's just walking from person to person asking about their sins and it gets tedious, and it's anachronistic as hell and requires notes to understand.

I'm basically looking for fun high tier literature. Preferably something in English so I can appreciate the phonetics instead of just the ideas. I plan on reading Joyce, and more Homer and Shakespeare eventually, but not right now, even though he would likely be the prime choice. Thank you.