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May 2025

	goethe's faust (goethe) ★★★ it's so painful to read poetry and be entirely aware that it's only a translation. but I liked the end of part one, I like when women in old books go insane and they're suddenly granted an interiority (and I like the performance in this production).
	a portrait of the artist as a young man (joyce) ★★★★ I really loved the stream of consciousness in the first chapter. it reminded me of the story "encounters" from dubliners when the old man was described as thinking in circles (lacanians when circles:). and, though I understand why the prose became denser, and I thought it was interesting when it culminated to poetics at the end of chapter four, nothing lived up to the first chapter for me. also, a portrait of the artist confirmed my theory that modernism did everything romanticism wanted to do but better; the contrast of the casual language of the dialogue and the narration overfilled with imagery was like if wordsworth wasn't lying about his admiration for the common person.
	dubliners (joyce) ★★★ ½ tried reading finnegans wake and after spending hours on the first five pages I ended up here. but my weakness as an english major are short stories, and I started to feel impatient to get to later Joyce; even if I struggled with fw I was hoping for a little more of its playfulness in dubliners. but my favourite story was "encounters." I liked how the prose didn't compensate for a child's first-person perspective, and I liked how Joyce only wrote in first-person for the childrens' stories, allowing more introspection to the children as opposed to the performative-ness of the adults. I also liked "a painful case." it appealed to me when mr. Sinico said "love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual relationship and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse." I also liked the immature father of "a little cloud," and I liked "a mother" as well.
	the sublime object of ideology (žižek) ★★★ ½ while it is becoming more and more embarassing to like zizek I have to call this one a guilty pleasure. I needed a refresher on hegel and lacan so it served that purpose … though I was looking forward to the critique of post-structuralism only to find out that I haven't read enough Derrida. it was also definitely brave of The Village Voice to compare this to anti-oedipus in the praises on the back of the book. but I have become less partial to D&G's rejection of unconscious "belief"; I liked zizek's "subject presumed to" know/believe/enjoy/desire. I also thought he demonstrated psychoanalytic repetition through hegel pretty well, and the difference between hegel's and kant's sublimity will be useful to me. but I have to admit that I skimmed the last 10 pages because I didn't understand the choice to start using the most hegelanese at the point where I was getting exhausted of the book, though I did like the choice to start with comparing the logic of freud's interpretation of dreams and marx's commodity fetishism, that was a good hook for me. zizek wrote a decent book and I enjoyed it.