/lit/ - Literature

I don't like ideologies, isms and grand literary theories, not that I don't think they're valuable but I repeatedly tried to understand it and all I got was dry academic prose and rehashed ideas.

I also don't like that fetishism of great literature, though the great writers and classics are my favorite part of the library.I love literature as a whole. I still cherish and reread the books of my childhood (Diana Wynne Jones, Rowling, Verne, Melville, Tolkien, St Exupéry) but also the Canon and more recent postmodern works.

I like Shakespeare, Voltaire as much as I enjoy Pynchon, Heller and I certainly like DFW just as much. I'm not totally uneducated, I read Spinoza, Descartes, Platon, Leibniz, Sartre, Pascal, Heidegger a bit of Kant and plenty others but I don't pretend like I know what I'm talking about.

I read comic books, manga, I even watch a bit of anime sometimes, oh indeed but I don't really tell anyone, I'm 21 years old after all. I have a massive amount of mathematical textbooks I cherish since I study the damn thing. I love getting lost in my uni library randomly flipping books about cellular biology, physics or ecology (the scientific subject not the political crap). I read self help books because some of them are infinitely fascinating, I read women's stories, I don't like erotica much, I jerked off to hardcore porn way to much to enjoy it at this point.. I sometimes read non fiction too.
I don't like other arts too much, save for music, but I try to understand. So when I read something about DFW's "horrible prose", "awkward display of intelligence" or "convoluted plot", I just laugh. None of those plaints stand out. Plenty of masters have used convoluted plot, absurd levels of technical trivia, weird sentences and plenty of other sins. DFW can be anything you want but he isn't a visionary, sorry. On the other hand he touches me because he's a great testimony to what plenty of people "feel". DFW's style illustrate his point, it adds to it. You don't like it? fine, we get it, but to say he's a hack, a bad writer is simply not true. It's about the feels goddamn it. Plenty of people recognize themselves in what he writes. You can shit on him all you want and call those people idiots and insult the author using the fan-base but you don't see Classical musician say Wagner was shit-tier because the nazis liked him? Yes he was a massive racist jerk but he made good music. That's why I hate politics and art being thrown into the same basket.
So DFW is liked by idiots? I don't see the problem. I am an idiot then, so be it. I'll go back to liking my DFW, Pynchon, Shakespeare, Le clezio, Voltaire, Melville, Tolkien, Rowling &al like the proper moron that I am.

Don't think for a moment that I can't make the difference between people liking the idea of enjoying great literature and people actually enjoying literature. Who the fuck are you to think only great literature is worth reading?