Word: joycean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics will never shut up about the beauties of Joyce's fiction, and one could ramble on just as interminably about those beauties that Strick has transplanted intact into his film. But Strick has created beauties more or less on his own, Joycean beauties intensified. The proximity of opposites is dramatized sometimes in his images as they could not be in prose, as when a beautiful girl Bloom ogles on a beach stands and limps off with heartbreaking awkwardness. A row of sandwich men, at another point, file down the street, each wearing one letter of some product's name...
...with formidable problems. Ulysses is one of the most complex literary compositions of modern times: a short story that exploded into a veritable summa of 30 centuries of Western culture. Most of the leading European languages, ancient and modern, and 18 different literary modes are merged in the amazing Joycean jargon-all of them so repetitively punctuated with wordplays that the book resembles a giant pun cushion...
...demonstrate that Finnegans Wake is more than just a grammarian's funeral. He has reduced the text by about two-thirds, added an introduction that is admirable for clarity, good sense and erudition, and has placed commentaries here and there to help any dog-Latinist through the Joycean style. Even so, the plain reader (if such exists) will soon find himself in waters deeper than the River Liffey...
...structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from sleep, or beginning life again...
...recite Shakespearean verse or the kind of phony political speeches with which they harangue each other in the supposedly real theater of Arthur Miller. Of course people do not speak in asides ("I'll have her yet!"), which were accepted on the stage for decades, nor in a Joycean stream of consciousness, which is accepted today. People do not mumble their disgust with the universe while sitting in ashcans, as do the characters of Samuel Beckett. Nor, Composer Gian Carlo Menotti has pointed out, do they have faces half a block wide, as they do on movie screens...