• RoundSparrow @ .ee@lemm.eeOPM
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      22 days ago

      “I view James Joyce’s work as the deepest fiction to address reader literacy problems / oral tradition problems of listening to storybook content ever created. What James Joyce has done with his extremely sophisticated fiction is confront the audience with their own inability to distinguish fiction from non-fiction when encounter poetry that is incredibly charming and appealing. Joyce was disgusted with the state of literacy affairs in Dublin and he labored more than any other person to educate society how to move beyond the non-fiction / fiction crisis.” - Stephen Gutknecht, year 2025

    • RoundSparrow @ .ee@lemm.eeOPM
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      22 days ago

      “What Joyce is doing in all his work is… to try to use Dublin as an experience model of how to stitch the Tower of Babel conflicts into the perspective that one reader can understand. As New York’s Joseph Campbell and Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan emphasize, literacy and storytelling changes people, the medium generations change people. The Tower of Babel problem can turn on us in expected ways, and we live with this egoism shallow acceptance of other people from other cultures, other languages, other skin colors, other metaphor systems, other experiences of words, other accents, other styles and fashions, other economic or technological conditions - and we do not see our common humanism. Joyce is great at awakening the content consumer to these concerns, to become self-aware of our own ego conflicts and when we are heading into metaphors of hell and when we should see the metaphors of heaven in persons.” - Stephen Gutknecht, 2025