/lit/ - Literature

Okay, /lit/, what's the consensus on James Joyce?

>>7801126
Because what Joyce does with language is more beautiful (in my personal opinion) than Shakespeare's undeniable mastery

This isn't to belittle Shakespeare in any way, as a wordsmith and poet he is arguably unmatched in his native tongue and his plays can easily be called the height of the format.

Despite all this Joyce is better.

Dubliners is one of the greatest, most subtly theophanic short story collections ever written and an achievement unto itself, but I agree that if this was all he had written I would have to concede to the Bard.

His collected poetry is again, fantastic, but Bill has got him beat on that front as well

and then it begins

Portrait is the greatest Künstlerroman ever penned. Hands down, case closed. It also marks the genesis of the Chiastic structure that would find full expression in Finnegan's Wake with the first two pages foreshadowing the structure of the rest of the novel, as well as the rise and fall structure of each chapter (which was predicted with the Icarus reference in the Ovid quote at the beginning). Structurally (and arguably in content as well, with the last chapter especially standing testament) this is more sophisticated than anything Shakespeare ever penned.

Ulysses is the culmination of modernism. Each chapter shows Joyce practically playing with established literary techniques while simultaneously outdoing any previous work done in such a manner (it's a damn good novel as well). None of that matters. The really incredible thing about Ulysses is that it is an unprecedented semiotic powerhouse. Reading and really comprehending Ulysses is unlike anything I have ever experienced before. You feel like you're seeing the entire history of man and myth stretch all the way to the city streets of Dublin, and it leaves you in literal awe. Shakespeare is good, but this is Joyce, the greatest literary mind of his generation, firing on all cylinders and utilizing all the tools that nearly three hundred years of literary progression could afford him.

Finnegans Wake then takes all pretext of popular appeal and finds Joyce using language to express more than just material reality or even present ideal reality, but a comprehensive ideological history of the linguistic man that will still be studied and misunderstood centuries from now. Comparing anything Shakespeare wrote to this would be like comparing the Dardanelles Gun to a nuke.

I reading Ulysses and I'm enjoying the beautiful imagery/prose and the dialog, especially all the jokes between characters.

I'm like 150 pages in and I'm not catching any references. If I stretch my imagination I can make some parallels to other stories, but I feel like someone seeing faces in fallen leaves.

Am I a super pleb? Should I just keep going even if I'm not "getting" it?

>>7759117

>>7408108
>What are some overrated "classics"
Ulysses

Yes.