/lit/ - Literature

Well? What's your excuse?

>>3512536
>>3512496
Never meant to insinuate that James was better than Proust, merely that it was unfair to judge James with Proust as the standard.

>>3511882
>Even Harold Bloom admits that Henry James' novels are well made but not as great and original as the novels of Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville and Pynchon.

>Citation needed.

>>3511092
>Face it, James is falling out of the canon as regards the general readership.

On the contrary, general readership of the classics is determined by academia and James is not waning in popularity but positively waxing. James never had a popular audience in the first place; his novels sold little in his lifetime and his books were close to out of print immediately after his death. He languished in obscurity for the public and academia--curiously enough he was always popular with poets and novelists and writers in general--until the 1930s and 1940s when the James revival began.

And to be a pleb is to be the worst thing possible in the world of James. To fail to be a patrician, ethically or aesthetically, is to be damned. Real scoundrels and criminals don't exist in the world of James, they are simply beyond the pale. It's only too understandable that so many readers find his world stuffy and incomprehensibly boring. By their standards there was no real conflict at all.

The change in sexual mores contributes much to the misunderstanding and under-appreciation of James. Even among highly acute readers there are those, and they constitute a majority, really, who thought that Strether, at the end of the Ambassadors, rejected Gostrey's overtures to marriage because marriage would interfere with his newfangled freedom and love of life, the "life" he exhorted Little Billham to "live" in the famous book V speech.

A close reading of the diction used by Chad and Gostrey and a slight consideration of the sexual mores of the time easily shows a completely different situation. Strether calls Chad "restless" at the end of section IV of book XII and is returned with the remark that Strether is "exciting". In the very next page, section V, Maria Gostrey says to Strether that he has "excited" her and described herself as "restless".

Gostrey is a courtesan, people. She's a high class whore. She's the same age as Madame de Vionnet, she's single, what's her history? Who is she? Her years of sunshine are running dry. Remember, in section II of book XII Strether calls de Vionnet as looking "old" and compared her crying to the behavior of a "maidservant".

James is calling her pleb, people, a slutty pleb. James is actually very mean sometimes, he's so subtle with his cruelty it's so easy to gloss over. He named a character "Annie Climber" in Portrait of a Lady, which is like Bret Easton Ellis having a character named "Johnny Cokehead". James is very sensitive to names and genealogy and class, he had a notebook full of nothing BUT names.

Today's sexual mores are so unrecognizable from the perspective of the past. The fact that St. Augustine had to justify to the Romans why chastity was a quality of the mind and not the body to excuse the behavior of the raped Christian women of Rome who didn't off themselves after 410 must sound absurd today, and future historians might even question its validity if not for the water tight primary documentation.

>>3504255
What kind of woman browses /tv/ anyways.

>>3504255
Because you are.

>>3503286
>Why do you always barge in and shit on any discussion of contemporary art by women on any board?
Male feminist pls.

>>3490900
>No happier, indeed, but possibly less interesting than a Lizzie Bennet or a Rochester, no? A bit more self-indulgent, irritating, and entitled? And thus a little bit harder for a reader to care about, in the absence of the external obstacles and pressures—class and wealth, cultural convention and social stigma, to say nothing of religious and ethical taboos—that generate most of the conflict, and most of the sympathy, in the novels of an Austen or a Brontë, a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope?

>That seems to be the conclusion a great many contemporary novelists have reached—that the lives of the Western bourgeoisie no longer offer a storyteller the kind of material they once did, and that it’s better to delve into what’s still disparagingly called “genre” fiction (dystopia and fantasy, murder mysteries and historical novels) than attempt to imitate the old masters of the novel. Indeed, one could build a reasonably representative library of turn-of-the-millennium fiction—with shelves for authors as diverse as Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson and Michael Chabon, Susannah Clarke and Thomas Pynchon—without including any contemporary versions of the big, thick stories of intimate life that were once the glory of Western literature.

>But of course the bourgeois family still exists, still matters, still deserves attention, even if the manicured terrain lacks the dramatic possibilities it once presented. Jonathan Franzen isn’t the only author working in these gardens, but he’s one of the most talented. And for applying his gifts to this most old-fashioned novelistic subject, first in 2001’s The Corrections and now in Freedom, he deserves at least some of the praise that’s been showered on his work.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/the-girl-with-the-franzen-tattoo

>>3490900
1. Technology has made the present world smaller and hasn't yet made the present world larger as it has been promised in science fiction. 90% of 19th century novels would have their narrative shortened by 90% if their characters had cellphones and email and instagram and Facebook. The email is simply less dramatic than the handwritten letter, a flight across the Atlantic is simply less interesting than sailing through the same body of water.

2. Fewer moral inhibitions translates into fewer social and personal dilemmas. Ross Douthat wrote an essay on exactly this issue.

>What if Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters had been bright young graduates of Bowdoin or Colgate or Dartmouth, with protective parents, impressive résumés, and no pressure to wed for anything save love? What if Theodore Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths had been an ambitious young investment banker, with no need to marry money (or murder his mistress!) to secure his place in the sun? What if Anna Karenina had simply divorced her husband when she tired of him? What if Mr. Rochester had dumped his deranged wife and married the au pair, consigning the first Mrs. Rochester to the care of a generous welfare state instead of his attic?

>>3491097
>How Should a Person Be? It's one of the greatest things I've ever read,
I'm going to keep greentexting this to remind you how you degraded your soul by posting those words.

>In the story, my desire to be with the photographer in New York started me on a path of chasing one fruitless prospect after the next, always dissatisfied, heading farther and farther away from the good, picking up men and dropping them. While my boyfriend rose in prestige and power, a loving family growing around him, I marched on toward my shriveled, horrible, perversion of an end, my everlasting seeking leaving me ever more loveless and alone. In the final scene I kneeled in a dumpster—a used-up whore, toothless, with a pussy as sour as sour milk—weakly giving a Nazi a blow job, the final bit of love I could squeeze from the world. I asked the Nazi, the last bubble of hope in my heart floating up, Are you mine? to which he replied, Sure, baby, then turned around and, using his hand, cruelly stuck my nose in his hairy ass and shat. The end.

>>3491097
>I saw a video the other day of some fashion models, apparently from a web reality show on them.
You got that from me right? Maybe I'm too narcissistic but I'd like to hear your story as to how you chanced upon RJ's World. That shit is obscure.

>How Should a Person Be? It's one of the greatest things I've ever read

You mean how vain should a woman be?

>How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything. By a simple life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive—but not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for they’d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic. No one has to know what I think, for I don’t really think anything at all, and no one has to know the details of my life, for there are no good details to know. It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.

>Ctrl + F "Fitzgerald"
>0 results

I'm proud of you, /lit/.

>>3500145
>The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

>>3500145
>Still seems like transvestite homo chick lit fantasy.

>It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level.

>>3500145
You finished The Ambassadors and liked it less than The Bostonians?

>>3500091
>I'd put Scarlet Letter above anything Henry James wrote. Really atrocious stuff.
What of James have you read completely through? You sound like one of those bitter folks who drowned in the Jamesian syntax and never recovered.

For an Emerson lover to put the didactic and puritan Scarlet Letter above James can only mean that you are wholly indifferent to him.

>>3499997
>I'd put Faulkner, Pynchon, Melville, Hawthorne above him easily.
The "easily" reveals that you have not read very much of James. Even the vilest of his detractors, having surveyed the bulk of the masterpieces, concede that James is something to be reckoned with.

>And he's not match to Emerson
Unfathomable that people still read Emerson in this day and age.

>>3499997
>James is shit. Talent but not genius.
What does Nabokov's dried shit-crumbs taste like?

And you haven't said who you liked best.

Listening to Wagner is a little like smoking crack.

>>3499333
>>3499284
>>3499283
>>3499263
Have any of you read at least one of the last three completed novels of James? When people say that Hemingway was the best American novelist I get the suspicion that they've read little else. It seems like people just list off what they were taught in school.

>Christopher Ricks was eager to emphasize the importance of universities in determining writers’ reputations—sustaining them, and laying them to rest. “It used to be the case that, if you were wondering why x had enjoyed fame or suffered obloquy or neglect, it was because of the Church,” he told me. We were sitting in a tent in St. Anne’s College, at the end of a day that had started with his keynote lecture. The other speakers and delegates were conducting the reverse ritual of their anticipatory morning coffee: the reflective evening drink. Ricks and I were in a corner, talking about what he called the “conditions of patronage.” “Books are in print because of the most important patrons, and the most important patrons for the last fifty years have been the universities,” he said. “James stands in need of being taught.

http://www.thenation.com/article/170785/masters-servants-henry-james#

>>3499246
Name a better critic of the novel. Oh wait you can't.

>>3499238
So I, Claudius then? That kind of thing?

Do you like Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History?