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« Now what? | Main | E-con 101? » Friday, November 10, 2006Portrait of the Artist as an MFA StudentJames Joyce gets his comeuppance today, nine decades or so after the fact: he's subjected to a writers' workshop of "Ulysses." A few young writers miss the point entirely; others make trivial points that suggest a certain hostility to experimentalism ("Typo: last word capitalized." I'm reminded of a classmate who once suggested that Virginia Woolf could have used a run through the grammar check in Microsoft Word.) One interlocutor is an incurable enthusiast: "'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' So true." Another critic -- isn't there always one of these? -- says it's "way too long." (She might be right about that.) In essence it's a typical workshop. Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:12 PM
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