/lit/ - Literature

I wish he had finished his last novel. The excerpts make it seem really good.

After that he could go right ahead though.

I'm glad he stopped writing and giving high-school faux-literati new trash to read.

>>822922

Seconded.

>>822925
>>822922
I think you are both faggots

>>822902
Yeah. In retrospect, that would have been awesome....

>>823041

Well now that really hurts. It really does.

>>822922
Oh, come on now... DFW was a good guy who took his craft seriously. He said he hoped his books helped his readers feel less alone. Cut him some slack.

>>823110
Why cut him slack because he found an exploitable demographic and wrote tasteless drivel to appeal to that lonely segment of teenagers?

Doesn't /lit/ hate on That Author Writer who found a way to exploit lonely female teenagers with bad writing?

>>823123
You think he solely wrote with the intention of selling truckloads to lonely teenagers? Hardly.

>>823126
No, but I do think saying, "I wrote it for lonely people." does not automatically make something great writing.

Yes, because it's completely DFW's fault that his good writing got a reputation for being God tier that made arrogant HS kids want to read him.

Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books, haters gonna hate.

>>823132
Well... no, it doesn't. But calling it high school trash is selling it a bit short. You think he writes Perks/Wallflower shit? At least he wrote with serious intent.

>>823163
I like you, we should hook up

>>823162
Certainly not that level but his writing really isn't high-quality. If someone dropped a chunk of his writing on /lit/ without attribution and said, "What do you guys think?! Critique please." we would rip it to shreds.

>>823174
/lit/ rips everything to shreds.
I've yet to see someone post their work and /lit/ say "Oh wow great stuff, keep writing."

>>823184


The Penis Was. Your argument is invalid.

>>823186
/lit/ wrote that collectively.
Disregard your post you're a faggot.

>>823184
That's because everything posted on /lit/ is really, really bad. The only writing that gets praise are well-done troll poems.

>>823186
>>823189
No, a bunch of virgin /b/-tards who still giggle at dirty words wrote that, then somehow stuck around in /lit/ to post it in every thread.

>>823194
uhm...No.
You couldn't be moar wrong.

>>823189
>>823194

Not the point.

I mean that there's OC /lit/ has liked in the past. The Penis Was may be a controversial example, but seriously, you can't just come to conclusions like saying that /lit/ bashes everything OC.

>>823199

Except The Penis Was is retarded and all the compliments were tongue in cheek.

>>823184
I posted a poem on here once that people actually said was pretty good. Apparently I needed to lose less adjectives, but that was it.

>>823186
Really man? Really?

He's right, people on /lit/, like the rest of 4chan, aren't as interested in content as they are in what they want/have to say about it, usually in an attempt to be funny, which involves being cruel more often than not. You could post any modern writer's stuff as "OC" and whether they're accepted authors or not people here would be dicks. It's been done many, many times on this board and almost always turns out that way.

>>823194

Dude, wtf are you even going with this

>>823199
Bro, you cannot fucking deny that anon has never once given a real response to posted writing.

>>823204
>lose less adjectives
I'm 100% sure you were told to use less adjectives.

>>823199
OK

>>823213
also *fewer
It's only 2am so I only cut you 1 piece of slack.

>>823204

I was about to mention that, but then this guy came along and slammed us with a block of text implying why we don't like anything, sooooo...yeah.

>>823204
*use
It's 2am, cut me some slack.

>>823199
>The Penis Was

what did i miss these past 4 months?

>>823211
Just the greatest story ever told.

>>823211
no, you missed pure shit on a stick

>>823217
It's /lit/, not /kindergarten/. You are assumed to be able to handle respnoses longer than four sentences.

>>823209
I edited the structure of that sentence and forgot to change that part to use. :/ It's not like it was incomprehensible so...

>>823220
>>823211
A bunch of children making a mad-lib with dirty words.

>>823218
FFFFFUUUUU.
You win though.

So yeah I like David Foster Wallace I guess

I like where this derail is going

>>823229
Douhavalink.jpg

>>823217
Alright brah.
Why don't you test out this theory sometime?
Post an excerpt from a respected writers work(claiming that it's OC) and see what /lit/ has to say about it.

>>823223

>It's /lit/, not /kindergarten/.
>respnoses


Also:

Brevity is wit.

>>823238
No because it was a piece of shit and if you go looking for it or post again asking for you it you are a piece of shit too.

>>823236
do it faggot

>>823238

http://www.mediafire.com/?tujmhmzmudy

>To justify: Behold my penis, my intestines, my cherry pie.


Fucking masterpiece.

>>823240
seconded. The real only value was that it showed /lit/ to be 100% bullshit

>>823237
"A typo" and "Arcueid is incapable of reading a few sentences" are different beasts, friend.

>another conversation about the penis was

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words
This is the only thing I ever read by DFW.

From this, he seems like a Buddhist to me, convinced that mental discipline and looking at reality from an objective standpoint while lauding the virtue of experience.

I personally think that this is something that everyone goes through, and that DFW's main strength in his writing was pulling on his experiences and creating a web that other people can relate with.
So he doesn't actually say anything here that you wouldn't learn or understand with experience, like when your mom told you about talking care of the turtle and then it died and you were sad. Hemingway 2.0, but instead of sitting on his high horse and sort of requiring you to be more experienced to truly understand him DFW gives you a nice hand.

He was reaching out all along. This is why high schoolers found him true to their hearts, they wanted someone to tell them that they aren't alone, everyone suffers like this.

>>823252
and then what happened?
What was the general response?

Here's a question relating to DFW:

If a work is culturally relevant, and is widely considered representative of a particular culture or time and place, does it then have literary value based solely on its importance as a cultural item? Even if the prose/technique is lackluster?

>come to lit
>read early morning typos
>see man hung by grammer police

>>823246
I suspected you were one of The Penis loving idiots on this board. Now you've confirmed it.

>>823236
It's been done many times. I saw someone do this with Hunter S. Thompson just the other night.

>>823252
That thread didn't have more than five responses, most of them not very critical, before OP spilled the beans.

It really didn't prove the "/lit/ shits on everything" point.

>>823259
shut the fuck up and get out or add something you little tard

>>823257
You can ask the same question of Kerouac and Hemmingway

>>823257
It depends on whether you think that literature CAN be valuable based on its relevance to its time period or that it should be read without thinking of its context.

I don't see how this relates to DFW though, because he is not lackluster

>>823260
>Hemingway 2.0
No, just no.

>>823258
Someone outed him a lot earlier than those threads usually last, but it was a few people critiquing it, some were nasty about it, and then somebody explained it was Thompson and lots of butthurt arguments ensued.

>>823257
Prose has to be good for it to be truly culturally relevant, at least on a level where it will truly be considered a hallmark.
There are works that were weak in the prose area but did well because of interesting plot elements/construction which represented ideas that were greater than the work itself(e.g guiliver's travels,100 years of solitude).

wtf you guize are going back on topic?

ITT: Nobody has actually read more than 50 pages of anything by David Foster Wallace.

>But we can pretend.

>>823263
>he thinks "little tard" is an effective insult

>>823278
mhmm.
I'll have to try this.
But with a lesser known work.
One that hopefully anon wouldn't recognize..

>>823276
Brilliant rebuttal good sir, I will now go lament how wrong I was and worship you opinion.

>>823257
The prose is not very good: he uses many "literary" words imprecisely. It reads like he went through with a thesarus and substituted at random, with no accounting for the nuances of synonyms.

>>823282
I just finished his collection Oblivion. It was alright. He tried some interesting stylistic work, but didn't do much that was very interesting with it.

>>823281
but you replied, didn't you?
>coolface.jpg

>>823282
YOU LIE

>>823279
100 Years of Solitude weak on prose? Ehhhh? Please explain.

>>823301
sorry what

>>823301
lol he deleted his response.
what a faggot.

>>823304
come at me bro

>>823253

>I suspected you were one of The Penis loving idiots on this board

What you did there, I see it.

>>823279
>100 Years of Solitude
lolwut.jpg

>>823310

>>823302
I felt it was a bad example, but that work came about at a time where the history really made it popular and relevant instead of the prose itself.
I'm not going to argue it was truly weak, merely that it was superseded by plot elements and presentation that made it relevant and not its prose. Too good I guess.

>>823279
You seem to contradict yourself. You say the prose HAS to be good, but then concede that Gulliver's Travels represents great ideas regardless.

>>823294
Yeah, I said in my question that the prose isn't perfect. I'm ambivalent to Wallace. But I still think he deserves more respect than 'high school trash'.

>>823313
sheeet

>>823320
You said cultural significance, a work needs both of these to stand the test of time and get into history books. Look at The Stranger by Camus, it's very plain language but you can't exactly call that bad prose.
I'm arguing that because the idea presented were great and at a critical time, that along with them being presented well or at least well enough was what it took for impact and future reference.

>>823260
>>823293
What you describe is not Hemingway-esque at all. He was never "on his high horse" expecting his readers to have experienced life in Europe, in war, in a bull-fight, in a boxing ring, at a race track, or anything else like that.

His writing was based off of "The Iceberg Theory" (I don't think he coined the term). He tried to write while describing in just enough detail that you could tell the author had been there, experienced it, and knew it through and through. He wanted people reading Old Man and the Sea to be able to tell the author had lived in that village, knew all the gossip, heard the stories and legends and people, had fished in that sea. He didn't describe any of that gossip, any of those stories, because he didn't need to. Hem gave you a taste that was just enough to let you fill in the background for yourself.

Wallace, not so much. That's why he was no Hemingway 2.0. Your analysis of Hemingway is completely wrong.

>>823334
My experience is lacking here as I admitted in my first post, I was basing that off of that speech DFW gave and several short stories I read from Hemingway in contrast.
I'm being unfair to Hemingway though, so I'll concede on that.

>>823329
>I'm arguing that because the idea presented were great and at a critical time, that along with them being presented well or at least well enough was what it took for impact and future reference.

This is what I think about Wallace's work. His books are worth reading because his ideas, which dealt with contemporary society, were executed well enough. His prose needs taming, but his books are still valuable because of the relevance.

/lit/ rule of thumb:

accessible = bad