In his lectures on Joyce, Nabokov said it was a waste of time to look for allusions and parallels to the Odyssey in Ulysses. Was he right? Isn't that one of the biggest appeals of the book?
both Nabakov and Joyce were abysmal shit-tier critics with awful taste in lit
how they both managed to write prose with such skill is a mystery
If you notice them you notice them, but you shouldn't LOOK FOR them.
They are barely allusions and parallels when they are that blatant. I think his point is that you lose sight of Joyce's book if all you do is see it as a rewrite of Homer's.
There's just as much symbolic significance in them as there is in anything else in the book
>>6395441
on the one hand recognizing the contrast between homer's epic journey and joyce's minute detailing of one man's day is a crux to understanding the theme of ulysses, but on the other if you focus on that too much you lose sight of the whole thing all together and turn a great literary work into a needlessly complex, inartistic puzzle
I've been reading Ulysses lately and have been obsessing over the allusions. What do?
If you have the chapter titles you've more or less understood every parallel (provided you've read the odyssey of course.
More interesting is hamlet, Telemachus, Steven and Odysseus, Dante, Shakespeare, bloom cuckolding parallel (no meme, joyce was fixated on apostalism and the forms legitimacy in paternal succession)
>>6395499
start obsessing over that sweet, sweet prose
>>6395503
I have.
>On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
Orgasmic.
>Trusting what a notorious troll had to say about another notorious troll
>>6395441
i would say he's right. i remember taking a class on Joyce when i was an undergrad at Columbia, and our very esteemed, well respected professor didn't dwell too deeply on the Odyssean allusions, and only used it to augment what was going on in the text itself. to believe that to understand the book one needs to track it alongside the Odyssey is to miss the point entirely, and be a poor reader besides.
Nabokov had eccentric opinions about literature.
>>6395441
Did he say it was a waste of time? Where did he say that?
I remember reading that he gave a student a C on his essay because it was just an explanation of the allusions without further analysis.
