Jaundiced Literary Quote of the Week

Somehow, your protagonist has to be able to do something heroic, or you might as well be James Joyce.

There are people who read James Joyce. Most of them are graduate students. You can’t do that to undergraduates. They’re not ready for it. They don’t have the discipline to put up with that amount of garbage.

Orson Scott Card, in his interview with Ben Shapiro, May 23, 2020

4 thoughts on “Jaundiced Literary Quote of the Week

    1. Jennifer Mugrage's avatar Jennifer Mugrage

      Yeah, me neither. I guess neither one of us is a graduate student in literature. 😀
      Apparently, Ulysses follows an ordinary man through an ordinary day, describing his experiences and thoughts in excruciating detail. According to one summary I read, all this ordinariness at some point coalesces into the sublime and we are supposed to see that all of our own ordinary lives are also, in fact, epic. Which is true, and that is what literature is supposed to do. But not having read the book, I’m not actually sure whether Card is right or whether Joyce does it.

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