Posted on 01/21/2022 2:02:01 PM PST by Borges
James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in 1922, just over two weeks after the British handed over the keys of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins and his new Irish government. The other great literary event of that year was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Joyce’s novel had much in common with Eliot’s long poem — it dealt with the rawness of urban life using competing narrative forms, including pastiche and myth and different kinds of voices. The Waste Land sounded a sort of death knell for the narrative poem, just as Ulysses set about killing off the single-perspective, the all-knowing authorial voice — firing the starting gun for a wave of “modernist” writing, from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett, that comprehensively rewrote the rules as to how literature was approached and presented.
Ulysses, now celebrating its centenary, has grown in importance over the past 100 years, during which it has repeatedly been declared one of — if not the — greatest novels of the 20th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
April 27 will be the 200th anniversary of Ulysses S. Grant’s birth.
And the head coach wants no sissies,
So he reads to us from something called ‘Ulysses’.
Allan Sherman at his best.
Gawd, that book was sooo difficult to get through!
Great minds think alike—though you either had at your finger tips or bothered to look up what I merely mused about.
And a far better writer than James Joyce was he.
It figures that the academics would pick one of the most difficult books ever written as the “best” one.
Virtually impenetrable. I'd sooner read Proust than Joyce. If you absolutely must read Ulysses, bring to it a stout rope and a three-legged stool.
Well not just Academics. Other writers. It’s very influential.
It may also be the greatest unread novels of the 20th Century. So many people have that book in their library still in mint condition because the pages were barely opened.
It's the kind of book people like to have to show others how sophisticated and well-read they are.
Another book in that category might be "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. I got 40 pages into it before I shelved it forever. I think the footnotes alone in that book are longer than most other books. Maybe I'll make another attempt when I retire.
I didn’t mind reading it, a lot of it I just sort of scrolled through. To me the very best part was when the man sings in the bar, or pub I should say. Si-pold!
I had a distant cousin, born in 1864, who was named for Ulysses Grant. Another cousin, born in 1871 in Ohio, was named for Robert E. Lee.
I would rather watch ULYSSES with Kirk Douglas and read the poem by HOMER.
My Great-great-grandmother, born in the late 1850’s in South-Western Missouri, had a younger brother born in 1861 by the name of Jefferson Davis Scott. If the family was forward thinking and wanted to be involved in fewer fights, they would have named him Sue.
Fortunately I didn’t have to study it in school, I had bought the book not knowing how challenging it would be to read, luckily the Omaha public library had it on tape and I also bought the annotations. So I was able to follow along with the cassette tapes. Very interesting book, not one I would re-read but fascinating.
***It’s the kind of book people like to have to show others how sophisticated and well-read they are. ***
My thoughts exactly. Write something unreadable then foist it on your students. Probably why so many College professors have it. Wonder if even they have ever tried read it.
No, I have not read it and don’t intent to. HOMER’s Ulysses is the one I care to read about. The Iliad, Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid are great!
I had to wade through that tripe in a university summer class. Made it about 80% through.
“It figures that the academics would pick one of the most difficult books ever written as the “best” one.”
Of course! How else are they going to prove to themselves that they are the smart ones.
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