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/lit/ - Literature

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4607822 No.4607822 [Reply] [Original]

Are there any reading exercises that'll help with my comprehension? I tried picking up The Portrait of a Young Man to read sort of a long time back, a couple months ago honestly, and I could hardly understand what the fuck was going on. I consider myself to have a fairly strong grasp of grammar and vocabulary, but just how the sentences were structured made it difficult to pay attention. Am I just stupid?

>> No.4607841

Read more and ask questions.

Nice dubs m8

>> No.4607842

i think all of james joyce's books are like that, take a long deep breath before you start reading hard op

>> No.4607846

Sounds like you're just uninitiated in the kind of narration that became very common in the last century. Portrait of the Artist isn't even particularly difficult in this respect in my opinion.

My suggestion would be that you consciously try to suppress certain expectations you have, for example that sentences move chronologically forward, that characters will be explicitly identified, that descriptions will be concrete or objective, that ambiguity means you're not reading something correctly, etc.

There are lots of ways in which things "don't make sense" but either have their own underlying logic (such as being unchronological to suggest remembrance) or challenge the importance of certain things taken for granted (such as needing to know who is speaking when reading dialog.)

Hope this helps.