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Ad Mundo Exteriore,
I hate analyzing Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong! I find Shakespeare to be a highly talented playwright. That does not mean that there is some subtle meaning to the contradiction between Lear's enlightenment as he is thrown out into the storm (i.e. the forces of nature) in act II, and Edmund, the wicked illegitimate son of Gloucester, claiming to embrace nature in act I. It just means that Shakespeare has been confusing the two different cultural connotations to the symbol of "nature," i.e. as wild and untamed and chaotic or as pastoral and innocent and, well, natural. Nor is it significant that Lear holds a looking glass to Cordelia's mouth to check whether she is alive. It is a convincing action, not a symbol of his greater enlightenment and sudden self-knowledge. Face it, Shakespeare wrote plays not as grand commentaries on life and human existence, but to make money and to entertain people. His scripts were hobbled out of partially improvised rehearsals! I concede there is some archetypal meaning and perhaps social commentary to be found in his plays. But he is not anticipating modern nihilism when all form of justice disappears in King Lear. It just means that he wanted to write a more heart-wrenching tragedy.
I needed to rant about that.
Because Joyce is so much more analyzeable than Shakespeare. There really is symbolic meaning to his writing, because he's excruciatingly conscious of form and structure. He wrote for a literary intelligentsia, so he peppered his works with hidden meanings that wouldn't be apparent to the noneducated reader. Thus, it is not so farfetched or as difficult to say that the last name of Stephen Dedalus is extremely significant and indicates Joyce's status as a particular type of artist. Nor is it so mind-twistingly annoying to suppose that the rest of the novel can be summed up or at least foreshadowed in the first two pages. So, why did we have to write a comparative essay of all things for King Lear, but are not required to do any major analytical writing for Joyce?! Not that I mind doing a creative project on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--it's actually a pretty interesting project that Dr. Miller came up with--but I feel that it's unfair to expect critical analysis of Lear, which feels like pulling teeth when you try to analyze it, and not for Portrait, where it is actually a meaningful and interesting activity.
Anyway, James Joyce is simply fnxoopy. Or was it fxnoopy, L.D.? I forget. Anyway, I didn't quite realize how fnxoopy (or fxnoopy) he was before, so I'm putting him on my interests list. ^_^
...Tari
I hate analyzing Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong! I find Shakespeare to be a highly talented playwright. That does not mean that there is some subtle meaning to the contradiction between Lear's enlightenment as he is thrown out into the storm (i.e. the forces of nature) in act II, and Edmund, the wicked illegitimate son of Gloucester, claiming to embrace nature in act I. It just means that Shakespeare has been confusing the two different cultural connotations to the symbol of "nature," i.e. as wild and untamed and chaotic or as pastoral and innocent and, well, natural. Nor is it significant that Lear holds a looking glass to Cordelia's mouth to check whether she is alive. It is a convincing action, not a symbol of his greater enlightenment and sudden self-knowledge. Face it, Shakespeare wrote plays not as grand commentaries on life and human existence, but to make money and to entertain people. His scripts were hobbled out of partially improvised rehearsals! I concede there is some archetypal meaning and perhaps social commentary to be found in his plays. But he is not anticipating modern nihilism when all form of justice disappears in King Lear. It just means that he wanted to write a more heart-wrenching tragedy.
I needed to rant about that.
Because Joyce is so much more analyzeable than Shakespeare. There really is symbolic meaning to his writing, because he's excruciatingly conscious of form and structure. He wrote for a literary intelligentsia, so he peppered his works with hidden meanings that wouldn't be apparent to the noneducated reader. Thus, it is not so farfetched or as difficult to say that the last name of Stephen Dedalus is extremely significant and indicates Joyce's status as a particular type of artist. Nor is it so mind-twistingly annoying to suppose that the rest of the novel can be summed up or at least foreshadowed in the first two pages. So, why did we have to write a comparative essay of all things for King Lear, but are not required to do any major analytical writing for Joyce?! Not that I mind doing a creative project on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--it's actually a pretty interesting project that Dr. Miller came up with--but I feel that it's unfair to expect critical analysis of Lear, which feels like pulling teeth when you try to analyze it, and not for Portrait, where it is actually a meaningful and interesting activity.
Anyway, James Joyce is simply fnxoopy. Or was it fxnoopy, L.D.? I forget. Anyway, I didn't quite realize how fnxoopy (or fxnoopy) he was before, so I'm putting him on my interests list. ^_^
...Tari
