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/lit/ - Literature

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16007768 No.16007768 [Reply] [Original]

Is this accurate? Why Hamlet, Dante, and Aquinas?

>> No.16007858
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16007858

I want to know too

>> No.16008597

For Hamlet, there's a chapter where Stephen goes to a library and talks about how he thinks Shakespeare wrote the play for his dead son, largely because the son's name was Hamnet and it's believed that in most of the productions in the Globe Theatre the ghost of Hamlet's dad was played by Shakespeare himself. I think he goes on to speculate that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic too (at a time when that carried a death sentence, being considered treason, Christopher Marlowe nearly got executed for it), and that the play contained hidden clues to prove it. I can't recall what specific Dante references he makes off the top of my head, I haven't read it in years.
Joyce references absolutely everything, the more widely read you are the more neat little in-jokes and parallels you'll see. Really almost all writing since Dante and Shakespeare carries some trace of them, or of a chain of influence going back to them. They've both completely saturated western culture. It's a good idea to read them before reading much of anything else, honestly.
Aquinas is very influential in philosophy, less so in fiction. You can probably pick up on a lot of the ecclesiastic puns and irrelevant theological quibbles in Ulysses without reading any Aquinas if you're Catholic, but I don't think it's worth combing through the Summa just for that, as he mostly uses it for humor.
The earlier Joyce pieces are good introductions to his style in easier-to-digest form, and if you read Portrait you'll understand Stephen ahead of time. Chamber Music is an odd choice, though. I've literally never heard anyone discuss it before. I'd like to hear about it if any anons have read it.

>> No.16010173

IMO:

Portrait is essential to understanding Stephen's backstory. A lot of minor characters from Dubliners come back in Ulysses, I read Dubliners after Ulysses and didn't feel like I had missed much.

S&C will completely go over your head if you don't at least read Hamlet. you should probably also read at least a short Shakespeare bio online. Even then it's gonna be a slog, i'm still not entirely convinced Joyce wasn't just jerking himself off for this chapter.

The whole book is modeled after the Odyssey but, hot take, you really only need a good idea of what happens in the Odyssey to pick up the parallels.

A good companion book or set of endnotes will tell you all you need to know about Aquinas to decipher Stephen's ramblings. Totally not worth reading just for a background.

I agree with the other anon, nobody needs to read Chamber Music to read Ulysses

>> No.16010857

Trying to find a good epub edition for La Divina Commedia.
All the ones I've found have explanations on separate pages, so reading amounts to a lot of going back and forth. I've lost my school version which used to be quite good, the only one I've found around the house is a tiny pocket sized book which contains very minimal annotations.

tl;dr: good epub edition of La Divina Commedia (in Italian) with notes on the same page as the text?

>> No.16012115

>>16008597
>>16010173
Wow, thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

>> No.16012181

Aquinnas is just a meme.