No there’s plenty of bad stories in Dubliners. Start with An Encounter, as story that’s not only bad but gross. Ulyses only demands to be ignored completely, it’s a stupid book. Just because a book keeps getting published doesn’t mean anybody other than the literati reads it, the literati are just like any other group of super nerds, they keep finding a way to get new members in spite of their lack of sex and new members need new copies of those crappy books. And the literati have the added advantage of controlling school curricula, even if no human being ever again voluntarily reads a single word of Joyce he’s going to keep getting published for at least another 50 years because people will still be forced to read his pap.
I figured this out last night. The literati are the first wave of uber nerds. You’re trekkies. It explains everything really, especially explains why the literati so strenuously thumb their noses at SF/F, because all brands of uber nerds hate all the other brands. Just like the trekkies you obsess on stuff that 99% of the world doesn’t give a rip about, you look down on people that don’t give a rip about your obsession, you think your obsession makes you special, you think it really had a dramatic effect on society, you wear funny clothes, and you even periodically gather together in groups of like minded obsessors. And probably like most uber trekkies (and Jedis, and Ringers, and whatever the heck anime dorks are called) if the literati had gotten laid young enough it all could have been avoided.
Then Chaucer and Rabelais are gross too. Bodily fiction like that has been around for eons. The Greeks had it too. Ulysses is probably the most tightly constructed work of literature since The Divine Comedy. There’s nothing stupid about it. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey using every stylistic mode that Western Culture has seen since Homer. It’s both an Epic on the head of a pin and a summation of Western Civilization since the Greeks.
People can be ignorant of it all they want but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still called Ignorance. Without Joyce, the history of 20th century lit is incoherent. Especially Anglophone Lit. He’s the Literary Einstein.
No ‘literati’ I know thumb their nose at SF. They thumb their nose at bad fiction. Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G. Wells are very much taught at the school level.
‘Literati’ is just a snotty word for scholar. It’s like calling chemists or physcists ‘Sciencerati’; a facile reduction of an important field of study. Who do you think should make up school curricila for English classes? The local grocer? How about just reading the contents of the best seller list and leave it at that?