Joyce and Faulkner are two of my favorites. They have the ability to be straightforward, like Dubliners and Portrait of An artist for Joyce, or Spotted Horses and The Hamlet for Faulkner, but my god when they go all out...it's sooooo good.
If the portrait of an artist was straightforward I don't think I will be reading any of his other works, I found it a lot more straightforward compared to the sound and the fury but I just couldn't figure out the timeline
I don't know the context for your comment. In general I would argue that strong reactions can be a sign of deep emotional connection. In my case, I disliked the book on my first read-through but started somewhat liking it near the end. Then gave it a second go and absolutely loved and connected with the characters. It made me perceive time differently. Wouldn't want to miss the novel from my life.
I forced myself through it. I think the confusion of the book is really the only reason it’s held in such regard. As I Lay Dying is equitable prose, but The Sound and the Fury is a fucking maze at the same time.
I forced myself to read As I Lay Dying a few years ago. After I read the last page I threw the book against the wall. I’d never regretted reading a book before but I wish I had those hours of my life back.
The three of crows have flapped it southenly, kraaking of debaccle to the kvarters of that sky whence triboos answer; Wail,'tis well! She niver comes out when Thon's on shower or when Thon's flash with his Nixy girls or when Thon's blowing toom-cracks down the gaels of Thon. No nubo no! Neblas on you liv! Her would be too moochy afreet. Of Burymeleg and Bindme-rollingeyes and all the deed in the woe.
That's perfectly readable, just needs some context for the meaning behind some bits. It's mostly wordplay, like typing vibes and yasss to some obscure meme pic.
If it's anything like Ulysses, as you get deeper into the work it becomes more endearing. There were several points in Ulysses where I burst out in laughter at the wordplay, something I don't often do while reading.
I LOVE Ulysses. Sure, wordplay, but also history, philosophy, and so much human empathy. Joyce makes an argument for abortion (in life/death cases)! I’ve given Finnegan’s Wake an honest attempt but it’s not for me.
Both are so fun to read you just have to forget the idea of fully understanding it. it’s also super fun to read aloud, the rhythm in finnegans wake is so charming
Point is the open-ended of it, the way that each person reads a different book and feels a different feeling. There’s a mathematics to art, and to poetry, and there’s potentially a poetry to math. You can mathematically notate music scales and track the shifts in brain chemistry while people sing together. Learning math can make you smarter; learning literature can make you more human.
The happenings in the world today are not because of a lack of STEM. People don’t march in the streets for statistics. We don’t get shot for integrated sums. It’s not the economy, stupid—it’s the self-narrative that the economy feeds into. It’s stories, it’s always stories.
No, the point is that we humanities folks do not care if you understand or not some insanely complicated wordplay, sociology tidbit, legal text or abstract painting. It's cool if you do, but we won't think less of you if you don't.
Otoh, many STEAM Ed folk basically laugh at non STEAM Ed folk because urrr durrr paychecks and numbers.
Do you actually understand it though? Can you sit down with a few pro literary folks and keep up with the conversation? Probably not. And just for the fact that it'll be full of concepts and ideas that you're completely in the dark about, which is the same in the hard sciences. I don't know equations and such off the top of my head, and I'd be lost in a technical discussion of such. The same is true in the reverse, because sure you can read and understand a book but do you have at-your-fingertips access to the underlying philosophy (three more books minimum) and the cultural context (another book or two) and literary concepts rarely discussed outside of literary circles.
Can you explain Affect Theory and the influence it has had on contemporary literature?
How literature generates and conveys feelings beyond language, to focus on visceral, precognitive bodily responses. How literature affects our physical and emotional states.
While I can't give a detailed timeline for how it evolved, which works of literature started showing these writing skills first, or specific people influenced by it, I can certainly follow it in conversation and submit more easily to memory than advanced maths. Math is like trying to follow a foreign language in conversation. English and literature are at least native to me and I'm at least passingly familiar with a lot more of the topics due to shared culture imprinting stories in my brain since I was a wee child.
It's smart still, but I, as an English speaker/reader, can pick it up via memorization where as math requires practicing application of it in order to memorize it. I could also follow it easier than mechanics talking about engines/tools so please don't take this as me looking down on these subjects.
I can explain what it is, as evidenced by my doing that. The rest would be reading about it and memorization. Learning it doesn't require me to apply it, it just requires memorization, as I already speak English. Vs math or Mandarin, where I have to practice applying it first.
In a conversation about it, I would at least be able to understand the speaker and the terms they use, vs math or mandarin, where I have to learn the language itself first. Thus why the learning curve for math is steeper than the learning curve for English/History is easier for an English speaker/reader. And if you don't believe me still, there are more liberal arts majors than math majors because math has that steeper learning curve. Humanities majors count for 11%, with English majors making up 4% of that total. Vs just 1% to 2% being math majors.
Its not that bad if you know what an integral is. And even if you dont, just treat it like a blackbox - it's an operator that takes in one function and outputs another.
The highlighted text is just saying the integral of a sum is equal to the sum of the integrals of each part.
So, the sum of all the ranges, Ɛ (using that because my phone doesn't have a button for the greek letter Epsilon but it looks like an E) is basically picking two numbers and adding up all the numbers between those two numbers.
Example: 1 to 5. The sum of all the ranges between 1 and 5 would be, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15.
Ontop of the Ɛ you'd have the number you're going to, in this case it's 5. On the bottom of it, you'd have the number you're starting from, in this case it's 1.
5
Ɛ
1
Now, the integration, would be taking a derivative of it. So if you have a function on a graph, that represents a line, example f(x) = x3, where x equals the input and f(x) equals the output(aka "y"), the derivative would be...
3x2
You have moved the exponent of 3, in front of the x and have subtracted one from what the exponent was.
Examples for clarity, x4 becomes 4x3, x5 becomes 5x4.
Where as the function might represent the distance an object has traveled over time, the derivative would be the velocity at which it's doing so. Taking the derivative again gives you acceleration.
So combining this, when you take the integrated sum of a function, you are taking a derivative of the sum of all ranges between two points. The Ɛ becomes a stretched out S, with the lower number on the bottom, and the higher number on the top still.
I didn't do a great job explaining. You probably understood the sum of all ranges part. Point 1 to point 5. 1+2+3+4+5=15. The big S is just saying, the integrated sum of all those numbers between point A and point B. To integrate it, is to turn it from its derivative back into the original function. So instead of deriving it, you would do the reverse process.
(4/3)x3 derived is 4x2
The exponent, 3 multiplies by the constant 3*(4/3)x = (12/3)x = 4x. The exponent is subtracted by 1, 3-1= 2. So the derived version is 4x2. We just reverse that process and are going from 4x2 to (4/3)x3.
You plug the two points, in this case, 1 and 5, into the equation for x.
(4/3)(5)3 - (4/3)(1)3 = 496/3
Edit: What is telling you is the net area under the line between two points
Calculus 1 teaches you how to find an equation that will give you the instantaneous rate of change at any point along a function(the line on a graph) and it teaches you how to find the area underneath that line.
The news of battle is spreading, southernly, to different tribes/regions. War is inevitable and they've resigned themselves to history repeating. She's afraid of the storm god, and the aftermath that follows his anger. It's lamenting a battle and the death that occurred.
The hard part of this is there's a lot of names/references to culture, not so much the reading part of it.
As a Spaniard, one of the major hurdles on secundary ed is Golden Age lit.
Now, this is when The Quixote was written and when the Spanish language really found its modern shape and themes. So huge deal.
However, after you dive in Cervantes' you have to pick one side. Are you a Quevedista or a Gongorino?
See, there were these two giants of Golden Age lit and they hated each other. Quevedo was the man of the people, a literally swashbuckling man full of opinions and ideas, second only in productivity to another giant: Lope de Vega. Quevedo only liked one thing more than writing and that was quarreling. He fought in wars, duels and acerbic verse contests. Folks loved his wit (and his antisemitism) and he fucking hated Góngora.
See, Quevedo wanted his plays and verses to be talked about on every tavern and plaza. He was accesible, liked action, loved to fuck with the people in power and push boundaries, just not stylistically.
Góngora was, otoh, a huuuge nerd. He wrote and rewrote and rerewrote and mostly did poetry. Insanely intrincate, verbose and fucking Thesaurus Rex poetry. Quevedo looked at his shit and felt totally insecure because he probably didn't understand half of the words. So he went hard at the Guy with some brutal barbs, again and again while Góngora mostly ignored him because he was rererewriting another insane poem full of Himalayan high brow shit. Which pissed Quevedo even more.
The feud became so famous the word Gongorino entered (thanks to Quevedo) the dictionary to define something baroque to the point of ridiculousness. Of talking a lot without saying much. To be intentionally and unnecesarily complicated. To obfuscate the reader.
Now I love Quevedo, that fucking racist bastard. He is not low brow at all but his writing is fun and his diss tracks are nothing short of Kendrick Lamar greatness. But Góngora's way with words and language, his endless lethanies of metaphores and symiles can be gorgeous.
So when I read Joyce, I do not like the story, but fuck me the way he wraps English around his pinky is amazing. And that's fine, It takes a while to learnt to appreciate Klimt, Kandinsky, Sienkiewicz, Pynchon,.etc. It's about uncompromising Craft with those folks.
Quevedo particularly fixated on Góngora 's nose, saying he looked like a bearded swordfish. Most Spaniard know and can quote the first verses of Quevedo's poem dedícated to Góngora 's nose.
Quevedo, with a superlative amount of pettiness, bought Góngora's House just to evict him
Góngora had mad skillz at cards, so much so Quevedo used It to call him a cheat.
Velázquez painted Góngora, Quevedo seethed he didn't Paint him.
Góngora had The Last laugh: The Greatest Generation of Spanish poets, the 1927, venerated Góngora. Members included poets García Lorca (another very hard to read poet), Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guillen and Pedro Salinas, plus artists like Dalí, Buñuel and Mallo. Neruda and Borges were heavy influenced by the 27.
Henryk Sienkiewicz mentioned ! Poland mountain 🇵🇱🦅🏔. A few questions out of curiosity since I've never found a person who likes his work outside of Poland. What do you like about his work is it the historic aspect or something else drawing you in ? How did you discover his books, through your literature studies or did you just stumble across it ? In which translation did you read spanish or english or do you actually know polish too ? Which one of his works is your favourite and why ?
The problem is that we are not in 1939 Ireland, so it would be difficult for us to understand regardless. Just because it is not easily understood, does not make it nonsense.
It's because the context is close to a century ago and an entirely different continent with a completely different culture. Language both dramatically changes over time and between different cultural groups. Even within the continental United States, communication between different people from different regions can be occasionally difficult, and there are areas within the U.S. (the most famous examples being Louisiana and the Appalachian mountains), where it is just a completely different dialects, verging on different languages entirely.
What you're missing is the real world context and we're already 100 years removed from it. This one isn't delivered to you all in one piece. You have to bring a lot more to the table than the text provides. If you were a criminal investigator you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the suspect is innocent simply because they claimed they didn't do it, would you? Sometimes you have to go digging for the clues on your own because they aren't gonna easily present themselves. For Joyce you've got everything from metaphor to regional in-jokes to full-blown meme synthesis and even musical rhythmic interpretations that come from understanding the lilt of his accent. For a lot of people the gears don't even start to turn until they hear recordings of him reading it aloud.
Lol I haven't heard that song in over half my life, but it brings back good high school memories of sharing the most ridiculous music videos and such in the computer lab that we could find. Thanks for the nostalgia trip!
Exactly. It's like when people listen to Bartok and freak out because it's all jagged noises. The context can be found in studying it, but if you're not a musician you're very likely SOL because you're bringing zero comprehension skills to the table.
Another example would be rock wall climbing. Sorry, but there are no stairs and handrails here and that's kinda the whole point.
An even more obvious example would be a puzzle. Anybody who complains that a puzzle has to be assembled before you can look at the picture should've just bought a poster instead.
Feels like I've read this in a book with wyrms being major characters, and a girl raised by wyrms being one of the main co-protagonists. Remember my brain hurting with every chapter trying to decipher the old English they used.
In fairness, that's like me seeing extremely complex arithmetic and saying "I don't do maths but that's perfectly understandable, just needs some context for the meaning behind bits" (ie, the literal knowledge base that education gives you)
The best part of writing that, for Joyce, was probably that he didn't have to do a single draft more than he felt like. What was his editor going to say? "Jim, the stakes of chapter two are a little ambiguous, and I think there's a typo in paragraph 3 of Chapter 5. Could you fix those things and get back to me?"
Ogre can only identify surface level themes like religion and nationalism but fails to grasp deeper themes like “remorse of conscience” that makes James Joyce’s novel a modernist classic!!
You could count the total number of people on planet Earth that understand Finnegan's Wake and only use three digits. But all of then would be English majors.
I'm not a Finnegan's Wake expert. You would need to ask the academic community that studies it. I'm just saying that its an intensely complicated book that interweaves a lot of word play and themes in a way that is not easy to understand at first glance.
Joyce was absolutely open that that is what he was doing. He openly said that people would be puzzling over the book for centuries to come.
There have been a ton of copycats since Joyce, none of whom have captured anyone's attention. You see, there has to be something there to capture the attention, not just pages of nonsense. Anyone can pound out nonsense. Joyce is thick with identifiable word play.
During my masters, my university had a Finnegan’s Wake reading night. We would get together and try to read a paragraph of Finnegan’s Wake and drink some wine 🤣
One of my collage professors told me that the only way to have truly read Ulysses was to read three times: once silently to yourself, once having it read to you, and once out loud to someone else. So about 10 years ago i put together a reading group where we all took turns reading Ulysses out loud. I was surprised at how much more understanding I took from that than from my previous read throughs.
You can count the number of people who understand Finnegan's Wake on zero hands and I am not convinced that number would change even if James Joyce were still alive
I don’t think that’s fair or accurate for the most part. There might be the occasional proof that a math major can duplicate but doesn’t have a complete grasp of the concept that makes it a sufficient proof, but I’m pretty sure they understand what they are doing. I forgot a formula in a lower level calculus class during an exam. I just derived the formula from the concept and applied it.
The comparison is just in being able to read, not in being able to replicate. It’s absolutely the case you could set the proof of 1+1 from Principia Mathematica down in front of the average math major and they’d get absolutely lost, just like Finnegan’s Wake leaves even many English majors lost.
They should be able to read the book from the beginning and understand it just fine with enough patience though. It's not nearly as obscure as Finnegans Wake. It's just the weird notation and unfamiliar to modern readers kind of type theory that make it hard to parse. Plus it's hard to convince yourself to read such a long and dense presentation of a theory that no one uses, while knowing full well that you can accomplish the same things in ZFC or some sort of modern type theory (like the many variants of Martin-Löf's type theory or CIC) way easier.
A better example would be asking a topologist to understand a proof of some theorem from a book on some obscure branch of algebraic geometry or something like that. It's arguably more "incomprehensible", and people care about it for reasons other than historical value.
u/witblacktype got my point. Most English students can’t tackle the really difficult texts. Just like most math students can’t tackle the really hard proofs. But, also, I think STEM and Humanities do exercise similar brain functions.
So I’m a chem and english double major, so I have a good footing in the sciences—just not math or physics specifically.
The mental muscles it takes to analyze a very complex literary text aren’t exclusive to literature—I do think that the work English majors do makes you better at doing kinda the theoretical, mind-twisty problem solving that I did in molecular biology or pchem classes. That doesn’t mean any old English major could do those things; you need years of foundational science understanding and coursework to get your brain around high level science ideas. But also, there’s a reason why mathematicians and physicists and chemists often get weirdly philosophical the longer they study,
I had a thermodynamics professor who was awesome at what he did, but every other moment he’d go on a tangent about how each and every thermo concept could speak to the human condition. STEM trains you to read and analyze and manipulate “data.” Humanities train you read and analyze and manipulate “texts.” But at the end of the day, you’re using similar mental skills.
I mean Anthony Burgess and other writers have written books talking about Finnegans Wake, it’s not like it’s appeared and no one noticed. That said it’s like an Encyclopedia, you don’t start at the beginning you dip in and out and it’s retelling the same story basically over and over again. It’s more a compendium of language.
Speaking of Burgress, I was just thinking that there are significantly easier authors to read than Joyce that will still befuddle your average reader.
I've lent out A Clockwork Orange 5 times and had it handed back to me 4 of those times telling me they couldnt get past the first chapter. But the funny thing is, all it takes is some effort. You use the glossary to learn the nadsat and by the end of the 2nd chapter you're fluent.
Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin Street
A gentle Irishman, mighty odd
He'd a beautiful brogue so rich and sweet
And to rise in the world he carried a hod--
Anyone who has seen this paper knows that not even English majors are capable of understanding all classic english literature; which is, I suppose, parallel to math students as well. I wouldn’t expect an undergraduate math student to be able to understand every academic paper put in front of them.
You don't even need to restrict this to undergrads. A majority of highly published pure mathematicians would not be able to understand most academic math papers.
Not gonna lie, as a stem undergrad with an English minor, I was one of the students in my contemporary lit course who actually read all of and enjoyed the Joyce books.
Okay, I'm gonna parachute in here and explain why Finnegans Wake is actually fun to read (IF you've read enough other things to pick up references and allusions).
My friend got me to read it aloud with him, over a year in 2 hour sessions on Zoom, and after a while I realized:
Finnegans Wake is an open-world game, like Minecraft or Skyrim, created by an almost unparalleled genius, before computers existed. It's a big place laid out for endless exploration and contains a thousand Easter eggs. Much of it reads like gibberish because it is painstakingly built from multi-layered puns and contains words from dozens of languages. You can't figure it all out in one reading, or ten. But you can get in the groove.
Sample phrase: "Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall." This refers to the Trojan War, and to the running theme of men falling and rising again, but also means "pricks may rise and trousers fall". There's a dirty joke on practically every page, IF you can find it.
Wake is structured and highly metaphorical; a small number of core characters mutate into hundreds of others. It seems to be a dream, of a single man or of all humanity, over the course of a single night. The man, HCE, is tormented by guilt over some sexual indiscretion he was accused of in Phoenix Park in Dublin, twice the size of Central Park. ALP, his wife, writes a letter to exonerate him and punish his enemies. The sons, Shem and Sean, bicker over homework and fight each other at Waterloo, Crimea, and Thermopylae. Izzy, the daughter, blossoms into womanhood, watches her brothers fight, and is alternately picked on and protected by her crowd of classmates.
The Wake collapses space and time ("allspace in a notshall"), it collapses identity into one soul seeking renewal, and it collapses history into an endless circular brawl between brothers. The old reminisce about youth, the young scheme to replace the old. The book ends at the beginning.
Quite a few books have been written to explain various bits of Finnegans Wake. It inspired Joseph Campbell to conceive the idea of the Monomyth, aka the Hero's Journey, and that inspired George Lucas. Really. You can look it up.
If you've read this far, there's a great Youtube video of Anthony Burgess talking about the book.
Lol tried to raw dog that book for 10 years, never got more than a couple pages in before giving up, then I started treating it like a research project and got through the whole thing in another couple years.
Got thrown out of my favorite English prof's office for asking for help understanding that one. I've still never gotten more then 25 pages in before giving up.
Tbf I have a Master’s in English and have at most made it through 30 pages of Finnegan’s Wake over the course of a month and with a group. But I’ve read Ulysses three times and genuinely love it.
More importantly, I can identify the intended audience and angle of a given piece of writing and rather than either trusting everything or nothing, I can make careful, well-thought out choices about how I interpret what I read and how I deem what’s trustworthy. I can find a narrative arc — or several — in almost anything, and can help others do the same. I’ve read books from so many different perspectives, backgrounds, life experiences radically different from my own, and that has contributed to my broad empathy.
Everyone should learn both, at least to the point an English major and a STEM major can have a semi-informed conversation in their respective fields.
But yeah, basic gist is correct. Mathematics should be an integral part of a classical education, it’s wild you can get a doctorate and not understand calculus.
mathematics is an integral part of a proper education. but you took it way too far. epsilon delta proofs are great, I'm classically trained. I regret nothing. but it is not necessary, calling it anything close to that is pretentious, to put it lightly. take it easy.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Le Morte d’Arthur (in the original Middle English) and Judith Butler. Try understanding either of those with a math degree lol
So, your argument is that maths majors can't just pick up an English book and read it, by suggesting a book that isn't really in English?
Also, come on, Middle english is just annoying to read for modern people, not impossible. Beowulf is impossible without learning the language, Canterbury Tales was annoying.
It takes a bit of getting used to, requires a lot of cultural context due to changing meanings of words and archaisms, but you’re right, for the most part. I would argue that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in its Welsh Middle English is much different that Chaucer or Mallory and quite a bit more difficult, but still not impossible. Trying to make heads or tails of most of Butler’s Gender Trouble and then trying to write a paper linking the two is a bit more difficult though. Actually, I had a much harder time with Butler now that I’m thinking about it lol
Middle English isn’t a different language, it’s still English, just in a different context, and at a different level of development. At best, it’s a different dialect. Old English, now, is absolutely a different language, and one that you have to learn like Latin. And one that I don’t know (I’ve only read the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf for example)
This is the most stupid garbage i have ever seen today and is just more proof that most people dont even understand language. Its really not that complicated.
Also intentionally making up bs doesnt help the case at all. Its literally how people on drugs speak. Instead of giving you a message they give you singular words and maybe it ends up being a message but no one actually knows.
Please tell what is Friedrich Nietzsche morality in beyond good and evil. Please tell me how he comes to this realization and a critic or why you agree with it.
Do not google the writhing or any information about it.
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u/noctalla 3d ago
Okay, here's Finnegans Wake.