Joyce was perhaps the most gifted writer in English in the last 100 years. Is there a better short story in English than ‘The Dead’? I’d love to hear about it. There’s not a single poetic phrase in all of ‘Anumal Farm’ and ‘1984’.
Sorry, but I think Joyce was a grossly self-indulgent novelist and his novels drove the postmodern novel into a literary cul-de-sac that some would argue it never recovered from. Joyce and his fans, imo, confuse self-indulgence for erudition. And his novels crippled the novel with what the writer Colin Wilson has called ‘the narrow vision’.
Greatest of the last 100 years? Better than Steinbeck, Bennett, Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Faulkner, Orwell?. I cant agree at all.
And to suggest either AF or 1984 has no great lyrical use of prose, again I cannot agree. Many of the famous lines from both novels have a (dark) lyrical beauty and immense power. Subtlety and density. Yet lean and empassioned. Those lines are perhaps the most descriptive yet spare lines of 20th Century literature.