Joyce and Stephen's greatness

Overall, the book is enjoyable but the con is having to go back and forth to understand some things for me anyway. I like his language in the book and as I said in class it is sort of conceited but in a good way. I chose to focus on the the scene when Heron and Boland are bothering/questioning him about the greatest of poets. It is funny because Stephen is amazed at the conversation between the dunce and class idler. Stephen is like how can these two have an amazing deep intellectual conversation. Stephen does give his opinion and states Byron but somehow that is not the answer they were looking for. In the end, we read that they beat Stephen up (alludes to the stoning of Stephen in the bible). Before Ulysses was written, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was conceived to be Joyce's greatest work and others have written about his work such as in the book Exile's return by Malcolm Cowley. The whole conversation makes you either feel like Joyce knew his writings will be great and argumentative like the conversation between Heron and Boland. I believe Joyce alludes to the fact that literature is always critiqued and if it is critiqued, you would like it to be in the great category.