RE: https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_new/116177713014688778

Features essays on #humanism by many folks, including #tseliot.

Another 'production' of mine. Did you read it? Inquiring minds want to know, even if you come across this years later.

Haul from the "local" used book shop…

(top to bottom)

• "Gregg Shorthand Dictionary"
• "Merry Wives of Windsor" by Shakespeare (that's the opera, by Nicolai Otto, I saw last Friday)
• "The Wordsworth Dictionary of Shakespeare" by Charles Boyce
• Tennessee Williams "Plays 1957-1980"
• T. S. Eliot "Collected Poems"
• "Clown" by Jon Davison (Readings in Theatre Practice)
• "A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music" by Sonneck / Upton
• "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics" by Preminger / Warnke / Hardison

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Kalifornia, echt amerikanisch.

#TSEliot #TheWasteLand #literature

"I do not wish to wish these things". Doesn't this basically mean: I wish I was someone other than I am? Eliot seems to wish to efface his own soul so as not to go against what is expected of him

#tseliot #poetry #literature

The stairs the poet climbs in the 3rd Ash-Wednesday poem are a Purgatory: below he sees a devil in the fetid air, and above a window and a pastoral scene; "I am not worthy" he says, "but speak the word only."

I think we have more "dissembling" here. The poet feels bold enough to speak and yet feels unworthy. He is not telling us, or is not yet able to express, how he really feels about himself and his own creative powers.

#poetry #literature #tseliot