eliot on ulysses

the porous city

eliot on ulysses
I can't figure out if this is called "The Mythical Method" or "Ulysses, Order and Myth".

I didn't dive into the Homeric parallel that much when I read Ulysses. Perhaps I'll read the Odyssey before I read Ulysses again. (Or, maybe Eliot is full of shit.)

sidebar: Eliot wrote this at a time when aesthetic arguments were also arguments about morality.

If the novelist is less important culturally today, is it because the novel is exhausted as an artistic form, or because the economic substructure of society has changed in a way that - somehow - makes novels less compelling?
(DeLillo thinks authors are independent of these forces - "If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us--we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow." Readers are a different matter: "if serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end." [cite])
(Wow, Mary's right, I am a Marxist. I blame Jared Diamond.)

last modified: 14:35:25 20-Feb-2003
in categories:Arts/Literature

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