Need a hot feminist take need a hot feminist take. Oh I know
“A woman could never write Finnegans Wake or Ulysses”
Was thinking might try it someday, just because I’ve heard so much about it over the years. Is there a particular annotated edition you think is good?
It’d be a separate volume, but Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated. Or you could go another route and read Anthony Burgess’s Re-Joyce, which attempts to make the case that annotations are unnecessary.
I think I’d rather go with the annotated, just because like if I get to the end of the book about why we don’t need annotations then I could have just read Ulysses without annotations in that time, and if I disagree at the end then I have to read the annotations anyway. :galaxy-brain:
Damn, the annotations book is 700 pages long? And that doesn’t include Ulysses? That’s intimidating damn.
It’s basically footnotes. Useful as a reference but not necessary to read cover-to-cover. Like, there’s a part in the “Cyclops” episode that’s a few pages of ridiculous names, and Gifford tells you what they’re referring to. But you don’t need to know that Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler means “penis in bath, inhabitant of the valley of testicles” to know that it’s a funny name.
I have Don Gifford’s ‘Ulysses Annotated’ which is comprehensive but almost as long as Ulysses itself.
Another option you might want to try is the Ulysses lecture series that the Great Courses produced, its cheap/free to listen to on Audible. The professor give a 1 to 2 hour lecture on each chapter, going through the events, giving background and some light commentary.
Is it better do you think to read the notes beforehand so I know what I’m getting into, or afterwards to contextualize what I read? Or maybe both? Probably both is best for me lol.
I’d read a section of Ulysses, the relevant annotations, and then I’d reread the section of Ulysses. Other strategies may vary, and of course I already knew that if I wanted to read the book I wouldn’t mind reading it twice. The first two sections of Ulysses are perfectly comprehensible - it’s when you get to “Ineluctable modality of the visible” that a lot of people give up. (Stephen Dedalus walking down the beach thinking about Aristotle.) So maybe you can do the first fifty pages or so and see how far you want to take it.
