Is modernism pretentious?

I am forming a terrible habit of ignoring the prompt for these thingies. oh well.

This is more or less about our discussion of how the English language is highly allusive. One of the suggestions put forth in class is that our modern education system is inadequate for studying Joyce because it doesn't force us to memorize Tenyson and Byron. While it is true the focus and intensity of the study of English has shifted (for good or for ill), the language of modernism seems so intense and so convoluted that it would take an incredible amount of knowledge to decipher it. Mr. Shingavi suggested that it is impossible to get through Joyce's Ulysses without someone to hold your hand through it. I understand that art has a target audience with a certain set of skills and experiences that allow them to assign value to an art form. However, modernism is so interested in the form of words and with the author's own mind that it becomes harder and harder to understand. The modernist mantra seems to be that the most we can do is understand our own mind. So why write a book about it? If we can barely understand our own thoughts and experiences, then how can we begin to decipher a collection of someone else's writings? Of course, one could argue that Joyce's books are less about narrative and more about words themselves- the subjugation of the subject matter and the exultation of the form.

Now, I personally like this book. I think it's a great read, and just the right mix of wordplay for the sake of wordplay and interesting characters (or character- Stephen is really the only character we see developing). But I think it's easy to see where modernism can get out of hand, making books harder and harder to decipher and the target audience smaller and smaller. At what point does it become pretentious- when is it just writing weird stuff for the sake of writing weird stuff?

I hope this post doesn't get singled out as blasphemous in class on Monday.