/lit/ - Literature

>When I was a Cornell freshman, I walked out of Vladimir Nabokov’s initial lecture in a course on the European novel. At that time, I had read only “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” (1941) and “Bend Sinister” (1947), which had just come out in English. My adviser M. H. Abrams, a permanent influence on my life and work, was a friend of Nabokov and urged me to take the course. I recall that Nabokov began by unfavorably comparing Gogol and Jane Austen. He added that women just could not write. At seventeen, I was brash enough to walk out. This was observed by Nabokov and by his wife, Véra. That evening, I received a phone call from Mrs. Nabokov, inviting me to tea at their house at 957 East State Street, Ithaca, the next afternoon and gently telling me that her husband was displeased and intended to destroy me in a chess match after tea. I was only an amateur chess player and knew Nabokov’s reputation as a composer of chess problems. In some terror, I went over to the Cornell library and took out José Capablanca’s “Chess Fundamentals.” Relying on memory, I ingested five or six sample games. After tea the next afternoon, which was outdoors on a balmy September day, during which Nabokov did not speak at all, Mrs. Nabokov cleared everything away and the novelist led me over to a very ornate and large chessboard, placed in the shade of a tree. I had never seen such beautiful chessmen, and I was awed. Silently, Nabokov graciously indicated I had the first move, and I commenced one of Capablanca’s favorite games. I held my host off for about eight moves, during which he looked perplexed. Suddenly his face cleared and he cried out, ‘You young rascal, you have memorized Capablanca!’ With great relish he said, ‘Now I will destroy you in just four moves.’ He did exactly that. Without a word, he walked back into his house. I walked home.

>>19528370

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxFvKdObTmg

>21st Century "adults"

The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time an writer was introduced, the author wrote instead that 'Shakespeare influenced them’. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Bloom’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead playwrights that he has no other style of writing.

>>18756646
because nobody reads books ;)

>>18748278
Reminds me of the /lit/ classic (see pic attached):
OH NO THE SCHOOL OF RESENTMENT HAS GLUED MY HAND TO MY FOREHEAD!

But what is Wordsworth saying?
OH NO THE SCHOOL OF RESENTMENT HAS MADE ME POET LAUREATE!

Does anyone have other pictures of this nature? I think it's an important topic.

>>18740272

Are literary critics intellectual cuckolds?

>>18119326
Hamlet
As You Like It
Henry IV

I miss him :(

>>17804447
Imagine having enough money to own or fly on a private jet and still fucking around with chicks who have random graffiti doodle tattoos in random spots on their bodies.

Why did he hate Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath?

>Reading is in the end, even though one doesn't want to discourage reading groups, which do good work, but reading is in the end a solitary activity, you know. You're not really learning, I believe, how to speak to other people when you are deeply engaged in reading Shakespeare or deeply engaged in reading Dante or deeply engaged even in reading Cervantes. You're fundamentally learning how to speak to yourself. You're learning how to listen to yourself. You're learning the discipline of yourself. You are, indeed, in the act of discovering yourself.

>Some kind of preparation needs to be made before you have a young individual with the incredible, the endless range of the Internet coming at them all at once. I mean, they cannot just, as it were, surf endlessly.

>We none of us live forever. There's only so much time in the end to read. I mean, I remember that when I was getting into canonical arguments some years ago, I remember saying frequently, making this point almost obsessively, that if we all basically lived, let us say, not 80 years -- not that I'm 70, I will say at least 80 -- but 160, if in fact we could look forward to lifetimes twice our current length, I don't think I would ever have wanted to argue with anybody about canonical matters. I would have said there would be world enough and time in which people will find what is most worth finding. But our time is limited. We read against the clock. We read ultimately in the shadow of mortality. And I think it does matter immensely what you read and how you read it.

It's all so tiresome.

>>17266652
>TFW you will never have a thicc gymnastics girlfriend who locks you between her powerful thighs during coitus, hooking her feet behind your back so you can't pull out when you orgasm.

Why even live bros

>If you do an activity for 10,000 hours you'll be pretty good at it.

Who would have known?

>83 unique posters

>he plays video games
>he thinks he's allowed to hold opinions on the literature board

>>16979184
>Using a forward slash unironically.

Ngmi

>>16932260
wha t the fuck this is the most egregious hilarious bullshit i have ever had. our culture just lets flagrant narcissist liars like this stand at the forefront and that in itself is hilarious, the respectful way this NPR writer passes on his obvious lie but what's even fucking funnier is that in this man's lies in his fantasy in his ideal dream version of himself that he presents to the world the best he can come up with is an image of a man sitting at a table speed reading at a rate of 16 pages a minute or 3.75 seconds a page and this is what he thinks is believable and cool

look into this man's eyes and realize he realizes the cosmic joke of his existence

love you bloomy

How do we solve the femcel epidemic?

>download a shitload of books on literary theory
>get excited because finally I'm going to understand written word beyond the normie plebeian perspective
>think I'm going to be introduced to theory of poetic rhythm, use of metaphor etc.
>open the pdf
>it's mostly Freudian sexual reductionism, feminist/postcolonialist readings of Shakespeare and Marxist materialist "analysis"
Bloom was right, please don't make my mistake and don't let yourself be memed into literary theory

>The silliest way to defend the Western Canon is to insist that it incarnates all of the seven deadly moral virtues that make up our supposed range of normative values and democratic principles. This is palpably untrue. The Iliad teaches the surpassing glory of armed victory, while Dante rejoices in the eternal torments he visits upon his very personal enemies. Tolstoy’s private version of Christianity throws aside nearly everything that anyone among us retains, and Dostoevsky preaches anti-Semitism, obscurantism, and the necessity of human bondage. Shakespeare’s politics, insofar as we can pin them down, do not appear to be very different from those of Coriolanus, and Milton’s ideas of free speech and free press do not preclude the imposition of all manner of societal restraints. Spenser rejoices in the massacre of Irish rebels, while the egomania of Wordsworth exalts his own poetic mind over any other source of splendour.
>The West’s greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

>no one has said shakespeare yet