who is the most overrated writer ever?

[neilgee]

If you read Ellman's biography of Joyce you will see that it is not critics who, initially, heaped praise on Joyce, but fellow writers, including 'popular' writers like Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells, as well as modernists like Eliot and Pound. (When Bennett praised Joyce in a review, Pound cheekily sent him a note saying "You have heard your master's voice"!) In "Top ten", the best books as chosen by a herds of modern authors, Joyce also does well.



Woolf was the only great writer to criticise Joyce (read Ellman's biography...) Every top writer has at least one other great writer who somehow manages to miss their genius -- Shakespeare had Shaw & Tolstoy (and even Shaw praised Ulysses!) Just because you are a great novelist doesn't mean you are a great critic, in fact Joyce admitted to not being a great critic...

Because Woolf was an English snob, or at least hung around with a bunch of English snobs, she was exactly the right person to get Joyce wrong... Not a critic to be trusted here...

So I'm not to be trusted either because I agree with her

Seriously is this biography you recommend as educational about the literary establishment as it seems to be because I might add it to my reading list if it is as obviously I don't know as much about that fecund period of history as I would like to, but as I've already said I'm not the biggest Joyce fan in the world.

[DanielBenoit]

I respect you more as I read more of your comments, Daniel [that's not to say that I don't respect everybody else - he hastens to add!] though like you say it's each to their own and we'll agree to disagree on Joyce.

Why thanks

I think you're right about Joyce pushing the limits but he wasn't the only one and I don't think he did it the most effectively, but he was certainly rated the most highly when I was growing up, though you don't hear it as much nowadays.

Yes, there were plenty of other writers during Joyce's time who were revolutionizing the medium; Faulkner, Proust, Hemingway, etc.

[kiki1982]

@Neilgee and Mal4mac:

The question, too, is if critics are to be trusted... There have been several critics who had their own agenda and criticised literature for its melodrama and other features because it didn't fit their theory... I have serious doubts about that. Who criticises a writer for his writing style or his style of telling a plot? Clearly then you have missed the point because a writer does not write if it isnot necessary. But then agan, their theory was probably threatened or something.

At any rate. Joyce has his supporters and his enemies. I am of the opinion that a writer should convey his message. How does he do that? By language. If he cannot write language (as in some passages of Ulysses where he relinquishes punctuation or where he just adopts the most horrendous annoying writing style with short sentences that not even a baby would dare to use) he fails in his profession of writer. A carpenter will also not make good things if he has no skills, or chooses not to use them. That said, he could write properly when he started.

Woolf, a snob.. She belonged to a higher class than Joyce, that is true. Whether she was a snob is another matter. Woolf specialists might have more to say on that, but it is not because one moves in the highest intelectual and cultural circles that one is a snob. The word has a very clear meaning and I don't necssarily agree wth it.

[neilgee]

Daniel I love William Faulkner, he was an inspired novelist. I'd forgotten that he was writing about the same time as Joyce.

Kiki I recently heard a recording of an old radio broadcast by Virginia Woolf and I was shocked to hear how posh she sounded. Why she makes the Queen of England sound common!

Of course as you point out that doesn't necessarily make her a snob [although it is known from her diaries that her attitude towards "servants" was not particularly liberal] and she did write what's regarded as one of the earlier works to champion women's rights in A Room of one's own.

Yet I think above all Woolf had an extraordinary talent for self-effacement in her novels. You rarely get a judgemental tone in Woolf. She lets you make up your own mind.

[mal4mac]

Seriously is this biography you recommend as educational about the literary establishment as it seems to be because I might add it to my reading list if it is as obviously I don't know as much about that fecund period of history as I would like to, but as I've already said I'm not the biggest Joyce fan in the world.

Many critics rate "James Joyce" by Richard Ellmann as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, and it's certainly one of the most entertaining and interesting biographies I've ever read. It's definitely an education about the most admired writers from the early period of the twentieth century, and of the literary establishment - not altogether the same thing! It's also (perhaps surprisingly!) a very easy read. Also, Joyce had very interesting experiences, friends and family.

I wasn't the biggest Joyce fan until reading this, reading "Dubliners" and re-reading "Portrait" (the Wordsworth classics version is recommended it has "just enough" notes. The publishing event of next year might be the Wordsworth Classics version of Ulysses in early January. No money left after Christmas? It's only £1.99!)

@Neilgee and Mal4mac:
At any rate. Joyce has his supporters and his enemies. I am of the opinion that a writer should convey his message. How does he do that? By language. If he cannot write language (as in some passages of Ulysses where he relinquishes punctuation or where he just adopts the most horrendous annoying writing style with short sentences that not even a baby would dare to use) he fails in his profession of writer.

Of course Joyce can write language! If anyone can. He can write "normally" when he wants - read Dubliners or some of his letters. I just read a passage in Ellmann of his without punctuation writing that is extremely beautiful and reflects the kind of stream of consciousness thinking that we all do without punctuation and sometimes we do baby sentences as he's just reflecting the way we think and not showing himself up as a bad writer as if but this kind of writing is very difficult just compare what I'm doing here with Joyce!

Whether she was a snob is another matter. Woolf specialists might have more to say on that, but it is not because one moves in the highest intelectual and cultural circles that one is a snob. The word has a very clear meaning and I don't necssarily agree wth it.

She was being a snob when she called Joyce 'underbred' and Ulysses 'the book of a self taught working man'. She also called Joyce's editor Miss Weaver a 'woollen-gloved missionary for a book that reeled with indecency'. The (wonderful) Miss Weaver asked when a friend read this critique responded 'What is wrong with woollen gloves?" Exactly. Nothing is wrong with woollen gloves. It's just Woolf being a snob again...

Note I'm not saying Woolf isn't a great writer! My opinion hasn't been formed about that, and she may only be a snob now and again... I like several of her essays and must get round to reading her best novels someday...

[kiki1982]

Of course Joyce can write language! If anyone can. He can write "normally" when he wants - read Dubliners or some of his letters. I just read a passage in Ellmann of his without punctuation writing that is extremely beautiful and reflects the kind of stream of consciousness thinking that we all do without punctuation and sometimes we do baby sentences as he's just reflecting the way we think and not showing himself up as a bad writer as if but this kind of writing is very difficult just compare what I'm doing here with Joyce!

Exactly, you illustrated what I mean: writing without punctuation is unnecessary and obscures the meaning of that writing just to obscure it. It has nothing to do with message, but, maybe, rather with snobbery (to me). Art for art's sake which i very difficult to understand, and maybe even ununderstandable.

She was being a snob when she called Joyce 'underbred' and Ulysses 'the book of a self taught working man'. She also called Joyce's editor Miss Weaver a 'woollen-gloved missionary for a book that reeled with indecency'. The (wonderful) Miss Weaver asked when a friend read this critique responded 'What is wrong with woollen gloves?" Exactly. Nothing is wrong with woollen gloves. It's just Woolf being a snob again...

Correction: that is not being a snob, that is reflecting the ideas of society then. She came from a high-class family that occupied itself with art and intellectual knowledge. He came from a working-class family. There is a difference in perception of what is proper and what is deemed interesting. The woollen gloves might have had more to do with Weaver being a suffragette. I haven't been able to do enough research, but several accounts of suffregettes mention 'desguise' and woollen gloves as a part of that desguise. As women's hands were supposed to be small and delicate, they cannot have worn big bulky woolen gloves as that would have made their hands bigger instead of smaller. Not to mention the fact that by the 1920s gloves were hopelessly out of fashion. This was more or less the time when Woolf was speaking. If she was alluding to this then it is the question if she was a snob. People do not become snobs because they criticise someone's work.

Note that I am not saying that Joyce is in all his works a bad writer. He just got carried away at some point in my mind.

[Patrick_Bateman]

Dickens

[neilgee]

I read two of Dickens's novels and that was enough for me!

Many critics rate "James Joyce" by Richard Ellmann as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, and it's certainly one of the most entertaining and interesting biographies I've ever read. It's definitely an education about the most admired writers from the early period of the twentieth century, and of the literary establishment - not altogether the same thing! It's also (perhaps surprisingly!) a very easy read. Also, Joyce had very interesting experiences, friends and family.

Okay I will order this next time I get paid. You've convinced me!

[DanielBenoit]

At any rate. Joyce has his supporters and his enemies. I am of the opinion that a writer should convey his message. How does he do that? By language. If he cannot write language (as in some passages of Ulysses where he relinquishes punctuation or where he just adopts the most horrendous annoying writing style with short sentences that not even a baby would dare to use) he fails in his profession of writer. A carpenter will also not make good things if he has no skills, or chooses not to use them. That said, he could write properly when he started.

You're taking a far too conventional approach to this. What Joyce did was convey his message through his use of language. Not only that, but it serves as an expressive tone for whatever he is describing. The use of newspaper headlines in the Aeolus episode are meant to be a satirical take on the sensationalistic journalism of the day. The extremely long unpunctuated sentences in Penelope are meant to perfectly decipt a stream-of-consciousness, flowing and unpaced by periods. The Oxen of the Sun episode takes on a beautiful medium by going through the history of English dialect as he describes the birth of a child. One must truly have a love of language when reading these passages, or any part of Ulysses.

Exactly, you illustrated what I mean: writing without punctuation is unnecessary and obscures the meaning of that writing just to obscure it. It has nothing to do with message, but, maybe, rather with snobbery (to me). Art for art's sake which i very difficult to understand, and maybe even ununderstandable.

Leaving what I already said about long sentences aside; what about e.e. cummings? That's another example of a writer's idiosyncrratic use of language as a means to depicting what he wants to say. The unusual line breaks and spaces in his poems perfectly leads the eye down the page. Besides, writers have in fact since Joyce found ways to convey things through their use of language and puncuation. To take a simple and common example, when some writers use an uncapitalized 'i' in a first-person narrative. The letter on the page physically appears more irrelevant and inferior when compared to the all-powerful stand-out 'I'.

This was more or less the time when Woolf was speaking. If she was alluding to this then it is the question if she was a snob. People do not become snobs because they criticise someone's work.

From mal4mac's quotes I conclude that she's both a snob and reflective of her time No she's not a snob for criticizing Joyce, but for going about it in the way she did. It doesn't make her a bad writer though. Eliot and Pound obviously had unpleasant ideas concerning Jews and support for Mussolini by the latter, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they're both masterful writers.

[glover7]

What is UP with all this hate towards the modernists? Is it because they're difficult?

Hell, no. It's because Joyce does nothing for me. If I want to read about temporal disjunction, then there are plenty of other places to find it than Ulysses. If I want to explore stream of consciousness, I find there are better writers using that particular device.

My problem with Joyce, which has been so aptly demonstrated by the discussion following my comment, is that people praise him based purely on reputation.

As for "difficulty," I absolutely despise that people immediately single that out as the reason for disliking Joyce. I, for example, find that cultural translation of Kawabata's texts is more difficult to decipher than Joyce's dull prose, but I still think that Kawabata is an excellent writer. If difficulty dictated the measure of a text's worth, then the greatest work of literature is a string theory dissertation.

Joyce has become the hero of the intellectual elitist, especially in my field of study. Anyone who has not read Joyce may as well be illiterate because without having read and understood everything he says, you have no place in the world of literary academia. It's stupid. No study should hinge on such a piece of tripe as Ulysses.

[mal4mac]

She came from a high-class family that occupied itself with art and intellectual knowledge. He came from a working-class family...

He did not. His father was an upper-middle-class failure. He had a Jesuit school education & went on to study Modern Languages at University in Ireland's main city. He was as fully occupied in art and intellectual knowledge as any one in Ireland could be, and even approached Yeats and other leading lights to get comments on his work in embryo when he was barely into his twenties. In fact his education was probably more thorough than that of Woolf, who had the usual disadvantages of women in those days. Heck, it was probably more thorough than any English men of letters, given the reputation of the Jesuits & his own driven nature...

[kiki1982]

Well, it is not as straightforward as you put it. Born in 1882, he went into Clongowe's Wood College in 1888 (at the age of 6) and left, because his father could no longer pay the fees, in 1892, at the grand age of 10. A lot of art or intellectual education he cannot have had at that age. If he already knew arithmetic properly, could read and write, and had some basic knowledge of abstract mathematics (goniometry and Euclid f.e.) and could read some Latin and Greek it would have been a lot.

At any rate, his father ad grandfather married into a rich family but were bad managers. Although that might mean they had money, they certainly did not belong to the intellectual elite, like f.i. Oscar Wilde who was also an Irishman although in a little earlier period. Woolf already moved in intellectual circles when she was a child. Joyce started to move in them when he was going to university. That certainly shaped both their worlds and ideas. Woolf was definitely of a class that was not even concerned with money, Joyce was definitely so.

[FrankMarcopolos]

David Eggers

[DanielBenoit]

David Eggers

Why is it that everybody thinks my favorite writers are overrated

Just kidding. Eggers is not one of my favorite, but he's certainly one of the better contemporary writers. Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a hilariously depressing work of ironic bipolarism.

[FrankMarcopolos]

Eggers is all style and no substance. He has nothing to SAY. (Except maybe, Worship me, Hipsters!) Which is why I can't stand him.