#TOOLE_John | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whattoreadnext · 2 years

Text

JOYCE, James

Irish novelist and short-story writer (1882-1941)

Although Joyce settled in Italy at 27, and spent the rest of his life there, he never left the Ireland of his memory: his work is a ceaseless exploration of Irish scenery, education, history, religion, habits of thought and patterns of daily life. His early writings -- the short stories in Dubliners (1914) and the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915), based on his own school and university life -- are stylistically straightforward. They are also notable for precise evocation of sensation and atmosphere. By giving a mosaic of tiny impressions (the feel of wooden desks in a schoolroom, the taste of mud on a rugby field, the smell of gas-lamps in student digs) Joyce builds up a detailed picture which is both factually and emotionally compelling. (Proust used a similar idea in the childhood sections of Remembrance of Things Past.) In his two long novels, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce developed this mosaic structure further: Ulysses relates the events of a single day, FinnegansWake a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. Parts of these books are stream-of-consciousness monologues, a tumble of apparently unrelated sentences threading a path through the maze of one person's mind. Joyce often seems to be collapsing language itself: syntax splits apart; words blur into one another; each page is a kaleidoscope of puns, parodies, half-quotations, snatches of song and snippets from half a dozen languages. Some people find this style unreadable; for others it is endlessly rewarding, a mesmeric impression of the jumble of thought itself.

ULYSSES (1922) The book follows two people, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, from dawn to midnight on a single day in Dublin in 1904. At one level what they do is ordinary: they shave, go to the privy, eat, drink, argue in bars, go to a funeral, borrow money, flirt with girls on a beach, visit Dublin's red-light area. But Joyce also shows us their thoughts, the fragmentary responses and impressions evoked by each real incident. The book ends with a 60-page interior monologue', the inconsequential, erotic reverie of Bloom's wife Molly as she lies beside him, drifting into sleep.

Joyce's works are Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (based on an earlier, unfinished novel, Stephen Hero, which has also been published); Ulysses; Finnegans Wake; Chamber Music and Pomes Penny each (poetry).

READ ON

To Ulysses : see also pathway

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds where both Joyce's experimental writing and the whole concept of Irishness are spectacularly sent up Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (a multi-volume work which provides a female stream of consciousness to match the very male version served up by Joyce) John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces is a kind of comic Ulysses set in New Orleans Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

more :Tags Pathways Themes & Places

#AUTHORS #JOYCE_James #ELLISON_Ralph #LOWRY_Malcolm #OBRIEN_Flann #RICHARDSON_Dorothy #TOOLE_John #WOLFE_Thomas #WOOLF_Virginia

0 notes

whattoreadnext · 2 years

Text

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

(seventeen-year-old escapes stifling upbringing, on the run in New York at Christmas)

Families (relationships between the generations)

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Roddy Doyle, The Commitments

John Updike, The Centaur

John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle

François Mauriac, The Nest of Vipers

Growing Up (young adults coming to terms with their own needs and desires - and with the world at large)

William Golding, The Pyramid

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (adolescent orphan goes to live with deranged puppeteer-uncle)

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (young Australian, 1910s, preys on follies of European bourgeoisie)

Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse

Philip Roth, Portnoy"s Complaint

Antonia White, Frost in May

New York (the city as a vast, all-engulfing landscape)

Jerome Weidman, Fourth Street East

Martin Amis, Money

James Baldwin, Another Country

USA (seen - by adults as well as the young - as a kind of theme-park on the borderland between reality and fantasy)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1860s Mississippi: boy"s adolescence on river and in riverside communities)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Patricia Highsmith, The People Who Knock on the Door

John Irving, The Cider House Rules

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Garrison Keiller, Lake Wobegon Days

Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)

0 notes

whattoreadnext · 2 years

Text

The Trial

Franz Kafka, The Trial

(Josef K. is arrested and forced to fight - for his life - against charges which he is never told)

A Mad, Mad World (just because life is Kafkaesque, it doesn"t have to be serious)

André Gide, The Vaticans Cellars

John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

Richard Condon, The Final Addiction

Tom Sharpe, Riotous Assembly

Inside the Skull (making nightmares for ourselves)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Bein

Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno

Paul Bailey, Peter Smart"s Confessions

Jersey Kosinski, The Devil Tree

Society as Hell (humans invent a society, which then goes mad)

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Wyndham Lewis, Childermass (first part of the Human Age)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity"s Rainbow

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Trapped by the system (individuals caught like flies in the spiders" webs of circumstances they can"t control)

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler"s Planet

Alejo Carpentier, The Chase

Max Frisch, I"m Not Stiller

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk

Joseph Heller, Something Happened

1 note · View note