The many faces of Mrs. Dalloway

Posting this week reminded me of the beauty of literature, the main beauty, which has nothing to do with beautiful language or the actual act of writing, but more with the many interpretations that can come from one set of words. I see Mrs. Dalloway as a social commentary of WWI England, but I noticed many of my classmates focussed more on the element of personal decisions made by the characters, and how we might find ourself in many of these situations ourselves, in one way or another. Multifaceted texts are what makes this so fun, and proves that the study of English is no small order.

Mrs. Dalloway...

I didn't expect this novel to be as difficult to read as it was. I got through it, and I think my familiarity with Faulkner and his use of stream-of-consciousness helped me understand it more easily. I had expected Great Expectations to be harder than it was, I should have known this would prove to be more difficult than it looked.

Virginia Woolf is deserving of her reputation. I hadn't read anything that she had written before this class, and now I will probably make the effort to seek more of her work out. Well done. Interesting, challenging, but rewarding.

James Joyce, god among men...

James Joyce is responsible for me being an English major. No joke.

"The Dead" is certainly one of the greatest short stories written in the English language, and Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses are both literary masterpieces, the latter being a specifically monolithic work. How can you argue with this?

You can't. That's why no one does.

The end.

Oh, T.S. Eliot....

Maybe it's because of where I come from creatively, and I might be eating these words in years to come, but there's a lot of what Eliot does that is everything I dislike in poetry. I've always thought of the novel as the more cerebral art, or rather, the form that you'd want to undertake if you were going to write an overly cerebral work. Poetry, on the other hand, shouldn't be stupid, but there's no reason to litter your work with all kinds of obscure references. Perhaps that's just me, but you should write to BE understood, not to keep your audience at bay.

But like I said, that's just me. "The Waste Land" might be a masterwork, I just don't see it.