Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Chat

Join the discussion and chat with other Mumsnetters about everyday life, relationships and parenting.

Original poster

Have you read Ulysses?

205 replies

ValentineGreen · 29/05/2023 17:46

Or War & Peace?
I read Ulysses a few years ago but since then I've read a lot about it & now feel like I would like to reread it..

Just wondering if many others have read it?

OP posts:
SerafinasGoose · 01/06/2023 19:24

LeonardCohensRaincoat · 01/06/2023 16:20

@SerafinasGoose

sound and modernism is quite a big conference theme at the moment so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already done it.

Ahem! I did it! 30 years ago. 🧐😆

but sadly my brilliance was unappreciated.

Interestingly enough I was challenging the view that it was about sex ( although Nora’s yes, I said yes, I said yes, stream of consciousness at the end of U is clearly so but my point was that, like Eliot in The Waste Land, Joyce had alluded to the tiniest chance that there may be more, on a spiritual level, out there and I thought his epiphanies, musically inspired ( almost divinely so) were his link to that.

But as I say, my view was not shared by my professor.

That's what I can't fathom. Your view doesn't have to be shared by your Professor, not if you've made your arguments stand up. Their job isn't to sit and listen whilst others parrot their views back at them. I'd be quite pleased to see students going off in independent directions of their own. That said, there were some big egos in the Joycean community 30 years ago! Thankfully I find (most) modernists today are a pretty friendly, accommodating bunch.

Putting it really crudely, the modernists still tended to think there was some form of unity behind fragmentation, a reality behind and beyond material surfaces and if they just used their art to dig deeply enough, they might find it. As language itself is material such a reality remains beyond it, which is why there's so much elliptical syntax, unpunctuated prose, etc., to gesture toward what they can't reach.

The SH epiphany is undoubtedly voyeuristic and that theme goes to the nth degree with Bloom. An old lecturer of mine died recently at a very old age - he studied in Cambridge under Leavis he's THAT old - and we remained in touch until his death. He was horrified by my reducing the JJ's cosmic spiritual revelations to sex (very surprisingly for him!) We had some wonderful disagreements and downright spats about it. That's what a good lecturer should be like, IMO. I could have my own views, but my goodness I had to justify them. He really made me think on my feet.

Lovely bloke - I miss him.

LeonardCohensRaincoat · 01/06/2023 19:37

@SerafinasGoose

That's what I can't fathom. Your view doesn't have to be shared by your Professor, not if you've made your arguments stand up.

this was undergrad and I don’t think the tutor thought that. He told me about another lecturers book on Portrait, said read that and follow the structure. Of course, I had my own ideas, headed off to Dublin and totally threw myself into everything Joycean.

I can’t believe you knew someone who knew Leavis🙂 that sounds like a fantastic relationship with your old tutor. I can only imagine how much you would feel the loss of such an intellectual soul mate.

Can you believe I had the chance to have a pint with Pinter? I’ll never forgive myself for turning that down to STAY IN AND FINISH AN ESSAY😐

Interested in this thread?

Then you might like threads about this subject:

Books
LlynTegid · 01/06/2023 21:05

Haven't myself. Only Irish literature has been poetry (one of my regrets is never getting to hear Seamus Heaney before he died) and theatre.

LeonardCohensRaincoat · 01/06/2023 23:26

@LlynTegid

I did have a pint with him, Lynn.

Lovely, lovely man

New posts on this thread. Refresh page