EPTThe Team Liquid Book Club - Page 3
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This week's #TLBC IRC meeting will be this Saturday at 10:30 AM PST | ||
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Charlson
Austria7 Posts
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babylon
8765 Posts
On April 26 2013 15:43 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: I'm down for Eco, but I have reservations about how well he'd work as the first one to get everyone accustomed to the process @_@ I wonder if we should start with his (allegedly) most accessible Baudolino instead and work up from there? Hmmm. Dubliners is otherwise a good choice, imo. Short stories, very manageable, and Joyce's style is quite nice and smooth. | ||
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
 By the end of tonight we'll likely have all the votes we're gonna get, so y'all look forward to having our book choice solidified in short order. If the current numbers are any indication, Dubliners will be our first selection, and I think it an excellent choice (I even voted for it  ). There's even a Project Gutenburg free source, so everyone can participate without having to worry about book procurement. | ||
Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21244 Posts
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
On April 27 2013 13:56 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: What's the voting end/target start date? We'll give it one more day, so the vote on book selection officially ends tomorrow (Saturday) night at 10 PM PST. If you haven't already, please vote here. Since it would appear that Dubliners is a shoe in, I'll plan on having an introductory post up on Monday with stuff for us to discuss during the first 2 weeks or so of reading: the state of Ireland at the turn of the century, some history of Dublin perhaps, and a cursory look at the literary scene that gave rise to Joyce's fame (I get to talk about my boy Ezra Pound ). Since the entire book can be found here,, I think it's fair to ask folks to have the first 4 stories, or "The Sisters", "An Encounter", "Araby", and "Eveline", read for 2 weeks from Sunday, or May 12th. I'm leaning towards this having longer reading periods as opposed to short, just so that we have plenty of time (and because I'm hoping the extra stuff piques folks' interest). If anyone has any concerns or suggestions, just PM me or ask in the thread! Edited the date lol, good catch babs. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
Other than that, no objections. Two weeks sounds good. I would also be fine with three weeks (but it may be too long for some people). | ||
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corumjhaelen
France6884 Posts
Dubliners seems to be the choice, I think I have a French edition somewhere, I'll try to compare both texts in case I need it. | ||
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Kamille
Monaco1035 Posts
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negativedge
4279 Posts
I'm a bit of an amateur Joyce scholar. Almost-but-not-quite enough to get me into PhD programs. If other people are lazy/busy, the most commonly read/discussed/written about stories in Dubliners are The Dead, Araby, The Sisters, and maybe Eveline. The Dead is reasonably long (by far the longest story in the book); the others are all quite short. For those with some working idea of Joyce but no experience reading his work, Dubliners is not likely to mesh up with your image of him. Joyce's chief literary influences when he wrote the book were the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, neither of whom one might traditionally think of as relevant to our perception of Joyce. Dubliners is a quiet, patient book. It is possible to see the root of Joyce's stylistics and idiosyncrasies in Dubliners, but only if you work your way backwards. To that end, the beginning Joyce reader might want to try to look at both the overarching narrative technique of the book, and how that varies or develops over the course of each of the stories. Joyce had an immense, broad intellect, but there were only three things he cared about in life: writing, Ireland, and his wife. You will find them all here if you look. Anyone who comes in or out of this with an interest in the young Joyce's aesthetics might want to look at the last third of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he establishes the goals and methods of the artist via his wayward pseudo-mouthpiece Stephen Dedalus, or his more formalized critical work from around the same time. It is possible that I will try to post some choice bits from those works as things to think about when you start reading. | ||
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
Prologue: Irish Nationalism and the Roots of Modernist Expression in Ireland. ![[image loading]](http://homepage.eircom.net/~polito50/family_history/assets/photos/Dublin/full%20size/Grafton%20St%20-%201880-1900%20x800.jpg) The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888), By W .B. Yeats I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. One cannot get a proper sense for the world in which Joyce first started writing without first taking the time to understand a bit of Irish history. We'll start with what is known as the Protestant Ascendency, a social and governmental system in Ireland dating back to the times of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) in which a select few Protestant Irish families were given de facto aristocratic status via penal laws which made it immensely difficult for Catholics and other non-conforming Christians to own land until they converted to the "one, true Protestant faith". Furthermore, the Protestant Ascendency insured that England maintained a degree of control over Ireland through what appeared to be "legitimate" rule by Irishmen; it just so happened that Protestants in power were more easily manipulated than Catholics in this regard. At one point (1750's), around 95% of Irish lands were under the control of the Protestant minority. Confidence among the "Ascendents" hit a historic high around the 1770s with the foundation of Henry Grattan's Patriot Party, a political group that would go on to take control of the newly formed Irish Parliament (1782) and repeal a number of the Penal Codes in the hopes that Irish patriotism might solidify enough to make independence possible. This fledgling, still Protestant led Irish Nationalist movement hit a roadblock in Parliament around 1795. Meanwhile, Theobald Wolfe Tone's founding of the Society of the United Irishmen (1791), a democratic organization which sought to end discrimination against Catholics and work towards a unified and independent Irish republic, began to curry public favor and take note of what was going on in France and the US. Inspired by the French Revolution, Tone and others would lead a rebellion in 1798, ending with losses for both sides (though the Irish bore the brunt of the casualties). In the chaos following the rebellion, uncertainty on the part of Great Britain in addition to an Irish Catholic desire to finally have their voices heard in in politics would lead to the passage of the Acts of Union (1801) and around the 1820s-1860s, a division amongst Irish nationalists began to take shape. On one hand, the more radically minded Irishmen subscribed to what is known as Irish Republicanism, and would go on to perpetrate violence in pursuit of a secular, egalitarian Ireland. On the other, the more moderate and landed Irish Nationalists, with the support of the Catholic Church, sought non-violent means of fighting English domination in addition to celebrating a distinctly Catholic Irish identity. Common to both aspects of the Irish Nationalist movement was a new found celebration and focus on Irish cultural identity. Centuries of repressive British rule had done their best to stamp out relics like the Irish language, relics that could only serve to further reinforce the notion that the Irish were indeed their own people, and though the Acts of Union did their best to solidify Ireland's ties to England, the 19th century would go on to be full of reinvigorated Irish introspection. What began as political movement spilled over into culture and the arts, as Irish scholars such as John O'Donovan, Eugene O'Curry and George Petrie began to make public a great deal of historic Irish culture that had been forgotten. Though the bulk of what is considered modern Irish literature would go on to be written in English, peripheral interest in the then almost forgotten Irish language informed a great number of Ireland's writers, including Joyce. The Gaelic League was founded in 1893, providing an important nationalistic venue with which to encourage native born Irish writers and poets to celebrate their mother tongue and write in the Irish language. So, now that we've a bit of distant background, let's get a tad closer to Joyce, his influences, and the literary world he wrote in. I've included the above poem by W.B. Yeats as an example of the Irish concern for the recognition of environmental connections/influence. Much of Yeats' poetry deals in the landscape, flora, and fauna of Ireland, naturalistic imagery that serves as a literary means of connecting the people of Ireland with the place they are from. Dubliners performs a similar operation with the people and city of Dublin; though he focuses on nothing in specificity, Joyce's mosaic of "people doing things" in Dublin operates as a sort of cultural consolidation. Very little had been written or expressed in regards to the general concept of Irish identity (save for Jonathan Swift and a few others), and the disparate tales in Dubliners give substance to the idea of a culture of Dublin. The lack of explicit direction in plot or narrative in Dubliners is an important tenet of Modernist literary technique, in that Modernism sought to respond to the unflailing certainty inherent to Literary Realism's narrative tendencies. Though Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Balzac sought to do their best to accurately portray the world for what it was, conventions of narrative structure and the perceived importance of foreground characterizations ended up "getting in the way" of an accurate portrayal of reality. That is, if we are to take what the Modernists say at face value. Worthy of mention here is the contrast present in the origination of Irish Modernism in Joyce as opposed to Modernism's beginnings in England and France. In a sense, Modernism in Ireland came about as part of Ireland's new found cultural identity; Joyce's writings served as powerful illustrations of Irish identity that came to fill in a gap that had simply never been filled, whereas the British and French literary canons are full to the brim with reflective representations dating back to the days of John Dryden and Madame de La Fayette. I'll post more background in the coming week, but in the meantime, get to reading those first 4 stories of Dubliners! | ||
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paddyz
Ireland628 Posts
I might try and catch up to you guys and read through all the books/comments when I have time. This looks like a great idea, I hope you all thoroughly enjoy every bit of it. | ||
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dirtydurb82
United States178 Posts
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negativedge
4279 Posts
On April 30 2013 10:13 dirtydurb82 wrote: Cool thread. I'm embarrassed to say I am not familiar with any of the titles. never too late to start | ||
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docvoc
United States5491 Posts
On April 30 2013 07:26 farvacola wrote: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888), By W .B. Yeats I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. This is my favorite poem by Yeats, even though he is remembered for others, like The Second Coming, Byzantium, Sailing to Byzantium, The Circus Animal's Desertion, etc., Innisfree has always been one of my favorite poems to return to when I need a little pastoral . Though I don't think I'll read along with the book club this time, I'd love to see how you guys progress. | ||
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packrat386
United States5077 Posts
On April 30 2013 11:10 docvoc wrote: This is my favorite poem by Yeats, even though he is remembered for others, like The Second Coming, Byzantium, Sailing to Byzantium, The Circus Animal's Desertion, etc., Innisfree has always been one of my favorite poems to return to when I need a little pastoral . Though I don't think I'll read along with the book club this time, I'd love to see how you guys progress.In reading that I was reminded of some of the poems of Patrick Kavanagh. I read some of his work during high school and I recall some of the same sort of pastoral feel to it. As to the book at hand. I just managed to get my e-reader to accept it off the Project Gutenberg file so I'm excited to start reading! When is our first target date and what do we want to have read by then? | ||
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corumjhaelen
France6884 Posts
On April 30 2013 14:27 packrat386 wrote: In reading that I was reminded of some of the poems of Patrick Kavanagh. I read some of his work during high school and I recall some of the same sort of pastoral feel to it. As to the book at hand. I just managed to get my e-reader to accept it off the Project Gutenberg file so I'm excited to start reading! When is our first target date and what do we want to have read by then? On April 27 2013 15:00 farvacola wrote:Since the entire book can be found here,, I think it's fair to ask folks to have the first 4 stories, or "The Sisters", "An Encounter", "Araby", and "Eveline", read for 2 weeks from Sunday, or May 12th. I'm leaning towards this having longer reading periods as opposed to short, just so that we have plenty of time (and because I'm hoping the extra stuff piques folks' interest). Thanks for your post farva, interesting read I'll start soon :D | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On April 30 2013 07:26 farvacola wrote: The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888), By W .B. Yeats I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. [...] So, now that we've a bit of distant background, let's get a tad closer to Joyce, his influences, and the literary world he wrote in. I've included the above poem by W.B. Yeats as an example of the Irish concern for the recognition of environmental connections/influence. Much of Yeats' poetry deals in the landscape, flora, and fauna of Ireland, naturalistic imagery that serves as a literary means of connecting the people of Ireland with the place they are from. Dubliners performs a similar operation with the people and city of Dublin; though he focuses on nothing in specificity, Joyce's mosaic of "people doing things" in Dublin operates as a sort of cultural consolidation. Very little had been written or expressed in regards to the general concept of Irish identity (save for Jonathan Swift and a few others), and the disparate tales in Dubliners give substance to the idea of a culture of Dublin. I would never have guessed this at all, given the rather general imagery of the poem. I wonder how one would've guessed that this is geared towards Irish nationalistic imagery if the place "Innisfree" had been marked out (and I did not even know what Innisfree was until I checked it up) and if the poet had remained anonymous. I can see how it is valid to say this of Dubliners, of course, since the "flavor of Dublin" comes out rather strong in the writing, but in this poem ... well, I suppose this is why one is not supposed to read poems entirely free of context. | ||
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OlDan
Austria36 Posts
Cheers | ||
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LightTemplar
Ireland481 Posts
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
On May 02 2013 03:08 babylon wrote: Thanks for the write-up, farv! I would never have guessed this at all, given the rather general imagery of the poem. I wonder how one would've guessed that this is geared towards Irish nationalistic imagery if the place "Innisfree" had been marked out (and I did not even know what Innisfree was until I checked it up) and if the poet had remained anonymous. I can see how it is valid to say this of Dubliners, of course, since the "flavor of Dublin" comes out rather strong in the writing, but in this poem ... well, I suppose this is why one is not supposed to read poems entirely free of context. You are quite right here, and I think it, in part, speaks to the universality of Yeats' particular brand of pastoral imagery. Without much context, "Innisfree" might as well be a lake isle in the US, England, or France, but it is important to keep in mind just how much cultural destruction had been practiced on the part of the English in pursuit of controlling Ireland; to speak on the Emerald Isle at all was relatively unusual as a literary move. Furthermore, "Innisfree" is likely one of the least "Celtic" of Yeats' poems, and it is oftentimes highlighted for that reason, for Yeats served as one of the "gatekeepers" of the tension inherent to the push for an emphasis on the newly rediscovered Gaelic culture/Irish language and the already established and arguably more influential Anglo-Irish tradition. Consider this poem as a contrast with "Innisfree". The Hosting Of The Sidhe (1899) The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving our lips are apart; And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. The host is rushing 'twixt night and day, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away. It is interesting to note that, as the turn of the 20th century commenced, English more or less won out as the lingua franca of mainstream Irish literature. Consider, for a moment, why Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett's most popular and canonical works are in English. All three published material in Irish, and yet, much of it remains relatively unknown to this day. Now whether or not this speaks to some sort of insular celebration of Irish culture or a continuing discrimination against all things inexhorably Irish is a difficult question. | ||
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