/lit/ - Literature

Finnegans Wake was designed to entrap literary critics, like amber, in a pointless industry of paralysis, as the Bible snared the finest minds of many centuries (for want of better fodder for intellectual labour).

>>17279756
>James Joyce chose to write and research a book through failing health for nineteen years as a prank
When will this mindset end

>>17279878
Its so clear that anyone who's read Joyce's work would never think it a prank or trap. Its obviously the next step in the evolution of him as a writer. Its just Ulysses pushed further.

>>17279878
Never. It's the kind of smug meme the midwit mind craves.
>actually, I don't have to read Finnegans Wake because I read that it was all a prank on literary critics!

>>17278633
>I don't even consider Ulysses to be literature.

>>17278633
I dont give a single fuck about fart-sniffer James Joyce or his mundane ramblings.

>>17279878
What is FW actually...about...or doing or whatever? I 'read' through it once and have revisited parts of it over the years, and I have read like 4 or 5 little essays about it but I still don't really get it apart from the obvious connection to dream associations.

>>17278633
*its

>>17280623
Filtered, maybe stick to Harry Potter

>>17280641
a professor of mine once described finnegan's wake as joyce taking virginia woolf's efforts to create "word-paintings" to the furthest extreme. it does seem to be about 'something' and here and there you may get a glimpse of that 'something', but it was clearly written with the understanding that the reader will not pick up on everything. when you look at a painting, you can take it all in in an instant. this is because a painting exists spatially. but a novel exists temporally, you go word-by-word on the author's track over time. if you skip to the middle of a novel and pick a sentence at random to read, you'll comprehend the sentence, but not in the context of the larger work. finnegan's wake challenges this. i believe that you could read finnegan's wake by jumbling up the sentences into a new order and reading it that way.

>>17280602
Did he really said that?

>>17280623
>hasn't taken the fartpill

ngmi

>>17280641
Dreams and Irish geography mixed together. Anna Livey is the River Liffey for example.

>>17278633
Based post, anon.

>>17281843
>Joyce
>Inspired by a fucking woman that wrote shite
Yeah, right

>>17281843
Your professor does know that Woolf sperged when Ulysses first came out and called it absolute shit only to release Mrs. Dalloway a few years later in a seethe induced copy of Ulysses?

>>17281843
Very interesting take. The fact that the last sentence reconnects with the first seems to go in this direction
>>17278633
I think this is very interesting, anon. Do you think any author has attempted this, to a certain extent? A short story that sort of reminded me of FW in terms of linguistic experimentation was Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko in DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
The only problem I would have with this is that, in being architect of your own language, isn't there also the option of adopting a simple, communicative language? I mean, if my priority, in terms of expression, is quick, straightforward, pragmatic communication, wouldn't my personal language coincide with the language that is understandable to most readers?

>>17282671
Probably not, desu. Academics tend to be clueless.

>>17278633
Ulysses is shit.

>>17278633
>We must finish the wake
Congratulations on missing one of the most basic tropes of Finnegans Wake. It's a cyclical book that never finishes.

>>17282659
Woolf's novels are fantastic. Only female author I would recommend to someone here, Jane Austen is alright though

>>17280641
It's about Ireland.

That sounds like a massive waste of time

>>17281843
>i believe that you could read finnegan's wake by jumbling up the sentences into a new order and reading it that way
You really couldn't. Context is everything in this book. A single sentence may be baffling in itself, but meaning steadily bulids up from the cross-references and reiterations of ideas within paragraphs and longer sections.

>>17282766
You're shit.

>>17280641
>What is FW actually...about...
It's about the reader's massive, galaxy-sized pseud ego.

>>17282819
Yes, and? I'm not claiming to be le best writer of all time with my shitty brainlet stream of consciousness non-book.

>>17282893
Stick to Japanese comics.

>>17282919
Modernism is the 22-year-old's version of the 16-year-old's edgy animu. ("But it's not just for kids, mom!")