billybookblog

*contains spoilers* Where to start with this rich tome… Let me begin by saying that ‘Ulysses’ is a text that simply oozes allusions; whilst it is clearly a postmodern work that bends and breaks the rules of common literature, it is a structuralist’s wet dream – Joyce expects us to have read and understood all the works to which he refers, and in doing so the reader can then fully grasp what Joyce is trying to achieve in this here masterpiece. It is a book about books, a story about stories, but unlike his countryman Yeats, who is adamant that the heroic must remain as a core quality of literature, Joyce both understands that the heroic stories exist as didactic texts for the common person and believes that the common person must now take their place at the centre of the heroic text – so that they can explore the big questions for themselves. As a result, Joyce places the story of Odysseus’s journey (Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus) in 1920s Dublin, and places the heavy crown of ...

*contains spoilers* I shall start this blog as I mean to go on: I think this book is awesome. And I am in good company – Virginia Woolf once remarked that ‘Middlemarch’ is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. This is true: George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) has a way of writing that assumes the reader is as clever as she, and each word is imbued with an experience and an understanding of the truth of things – we feel assured that we are in the hands of a master. Only recently I have been inwardly debating the power of the signifier and the effect of the signified (thank you, Ferdinand de Saussure), and Eliot, with barely a sideward glance during the consideration of a character’s knowledge of surrounding events, relates her viewpoint on this matter as a freebee; “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable…” The place, Middlemarch, is itself a boundary that is always crossed by its inhabitants and outsiders, local or no – from pen...