/lit/ - Literature

Last year I finished Ulysses, and I'm about to start reading Finnegans Wake. The TTC course on Ulysses helped me get through that motherfucker; any suggestions how to tackle Finnegans Wake?

This sums it up

>>1047090

As for literature? A French, sensitive lad called Marcel Proust sets out to write his entire life down in hopes of understanding himself, life, love and many other fundamental things such as war and memory; a pale, funny-looking girl called Virginia Woolf tries to remove the dichotomies of sex by asking herself what would happen if she were to wake up one day as a man and if it would be the same; an Irish guy called James Joyce first tries to put the very process of thought onto paper before attempting to penetrate the very fabric of language by spending 17 years writing an unreadable book [see pic].

The result?

Well, Marcel seemed to think he had won. But then he got sick and died. So. I don't know about that, mate. As for Virginia, she filled the pockets of her coat full of rocks and jumped into a river, and James? James was condemned by most of the literary community for his last output and died the same years as Virginia.

Oh, well. We've learned some lessons; time to move on and try again, right? Wait. What year are we in? 1942, people. 1942. We're in the middle of the Second World War, we've soon got the nukes, holocaust and the world, simply, seems to be taking a turn to the worse. Do we despair? Fuck no. We laugh hysterically. Cue POSTMODERNISM. Cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdDbktVKUI..

If the story about Diderot was the core of modernism, then the Warhol vid is the core of postmodernism. In other words, the world makes no fucking sense, so let's just fuck around. How does this play into literature? Well, first of all, there are no longer any rules. Italo Calvino has written a book where you, the reader, is a main character, and everyone has seen House of Leaves, right?

As for literature? A French, sensitive lad called Marcel Proust sets out to write his entire life down in hopes of understanding himself, life, love and many other fundamental things such as war and memory; a pale, funny-looking girl called Virginia Woolf tries to remove the dichotomies of sex by asking herself what would happen if she were to wake up one day as a man and if it would be the same; an Irish guy called James Joyce first tries to put the very process of thought onto paper before attempting to penetrate the very fabric of language by spending 17 years writing an unreadable book [see pic].

The result?

Well, Marcel seemed to think he had won. But then he got sick and died. So. I don't know about that, mate. As for Virginia, she filled the pockets of her coat full of rocks and jumped into a river, and James? James was condemned by most of the literary community for his last output and died the same years as Virginia.

Oh, well. We've learned some lessons; time to move on and try again, right? Wait. What year are we in? 1942, people. 1942. We're in the middle of the Second World War, we've soon got the nukes, holocaust and the world, simply, seems to be taking a turn to the worse. Do we despair? Fuck no. We laugh hysterically. Cue POSTMODERNISM. Cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdDbktVKUI..

If the story about Diderot was the core of modernism, then the Warhol vid is the core of postmodernism. In other words, the world makes no fucking sense, so let's just fuck around. How does this play into literature? Well, first of all, there are no longer any rules. Italo Calvino has written a book where you, the reader, is a main character, and everyone has seen House of Leaves, right?