/lit/ - Literature

>>15004378
I like Infinite Jest alot but fuck David Foster Wallace for teaching a generation that irony and sincerity are opposed poles. pure Idiocy.

>>15005154
to be sure, his big novels are absolutely worth it. He has a few books that are god tier for sure, namely GR, M&D, Against. THeyre great reading experiences, this is undeniable. but theyre not, uh, timeless in the way that the real heavy hitters like Joyce are. Pynchon is easily placeable in a Cold War American context, responding to and invoking european high modernist forms with a satirical, irreverent mood. None of this is meant to discourage reading him. But the cross I bear on /lit/ is qualifying a bit of the lionizing of him that happens. It's half devils advocacy on my part. I feel like we need someone here who has wrestled with Pynchon who doesn't think he's that great. I happen to think he's great but still take this pon meself. I don't think he's goat, however, and I especially don't think he's in contest for american goat. Among his contemporary Americans, he's about as good as Toni Morrison (v controversial take on this board, I know) but doesn't write as beautifully as she does. In terms of world lit, he's very on par with Salman RUshdie (another who will never win the nobel "For politics) (and was a huge influence on Rushdies 2 best novels, Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses).
All of my recent comments on Pynchon are made amidst my quarantine reading of Mason and Dixon. I'm trying out various notions on him. I need to hear more of why people like him. He or GR tops all the list of best authors/books here but few can really get into about him, because, I suspect, few have actually read him (let alone read him seriously, widely, and/or deeply).
Red is the only Pamuk I enjoyed. It's like Umberto Eco + Rushdie. But fuck Pamuk. Lived off a railroad fortune. Who has less character than those who inherit a trust fund?

>>15002891
this is a joke right? The mandate for the nobel in literature clearly states that it is awarded to an author's who work provides the greatest benefit to mankind writing in an ideal direction. Pynchon's work 1) doesnt really break any ground for the medium 2) is primarily, almost solely, concerned with the history of the United States and this from a mainly cultural perspective -- compared to metaphysical or ethical perspectives inhered in the work of other american winners like Faulkner and Morrison 3) his style undermines the high art aesthetics with extreme prejudice upon which the prize's taste is based. so no I don't think he will ever get it. I don't think he cares. I don't care. Orhan Pamuk won the nobel prize and James Joyce did not so really why bother.

To be clear, however, I am a big fan of Pynchon. I've read most his works except Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice. The adoration he gets on this board is some real bs. He's good but he aint that good. I think he's mostly just a meme at this point besides. I'm tempted to say 90% of people who post about him on here haven't read him. Of course 90% of posters on here in general don't really read at all.

>>12590446
sure sure sure brohan but consider for one milisecond that number ten (10) on the reddit list is the Harry Potter series. This is literall (LITERALLY) written for CHILDREN to have it read TO them, not to even read themselves

>>12586042
First, it's worth interrogating your definitions of APollonian. Many in this thread seem to have overlooked Nietzsche's insistence THAT THE APOLLONIAN IS CONTAINED WITHIN THE DIONYSIAC AND THE DYONISIAC WITHIN THE APOLLONIAN

>>12505938
Get the 1961 corrected text, published by Vintage these days. Don't get the Gabler

Read Burgesses' thoughts on it in ReJoyce. This should be a required companion for people reading it outside of a classroom setting

Good precursors:
Required: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tristram Shandy, TS Eliot's The Waste Land, A couple Ibsen plays probably like The Master Builder and The Wild Duck

Supplemental: Hamlet, The Odyssey, The Bible, Sartor Resartus, Some sort of contexts for modernism such as the 5 Faces of Modernism by Mattei Calinescu; A Play or 2 by Wilde, Some Nietzsche like at least Zarathustra and Birth of Tragedy; Hella Aristotle (all of it) and Aquinas if u really wanna do it justice

Scholarly supplements worth checking out: Aesthetics of Chaosmos by Umberto Eco, something by Derek Attridge on Joyce,

Summary: Read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses in that order. Pair it with ReJoyce. Do this and still have questions? See my other suggestions.

Joyce's birthday is Saturday so we really do be in Joyce season

Cheers

>>12506999
It's the literary equivalent of blackface

>>12507797
I say start with The American Scholar because it will teach you how to read Emerson. That is, in it he opens up the notion of "reading creatively." Cavell has great readings of this concept.
Also important to note that Emerson works at the level of the sentence, not the paragraph. Points come at u much faster this way. Put another way, Emerson is extremely dense and u have to be careful not to miss the meat of what he's saying (it's in every sentence); I pity those in this thread who have called reading him relaxing. It's a pleasant experience but also fun in how demanding it is; read Thoreau if u want to relax. Emerson is heavy lifting.

>>12503054
Deeply misguided post, unfortunately. Nietzsche was hugely influenced by Emerson. Stanley Cavell traces the lineage in multiple different books. Many people in this thread have just clearly never approached Emerson in an academic setting. Nature is a cool essay but there's so much more to him. Would that everyone would start with The American Scholar instead of Nature... in another reality this is true

ANyway
Emerson is probably the best and one of the only examples of an American philosopher as such (not talking about profs post 1970). Emerson was highly influenced by Plato first and foremost, followed by Puritan Christianity (Exodus and Luke being some of the most important Bible books for E), and much of his writing (eg Higher Laws for example, but really anything) reflects this once u have Plato's name in your mind.
I think Emerson is instrumental for understanding the culture today, in America, particularly re shame (and shamelessness, moreso). It would be very interesting to see an essay on American pop culture today as a bastardization of Emerson's writing

Some have mentioned Montaigne, yes a fine place to go before Emerson. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is worth checking out. Emerson loved it so much he got it published in the US after it was poorly received in Britain and wrote the first introduction to it.

Where to start?
The American Scholar, then something like Self-Reliance, Circles, and end with Experience.Know that his son died between the composition of Circles and Experience and that it devastated him. Besides that, Stanley Cavell has excellent secondary literature situating him in relation to Nietzsche and Plato (some would say Emerson is the link between the two, and I know saying as much here will get many peoples' panties in a bunch lol)

>>12504813
Freud's essay on the oedipus complex

>>12501562
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Doblin

>>12501844
The Confessions of Zeno by Svevo

>>12501815
Your question begins to unearth some of the quite questionable soil upon which lit is built. Rarely is there a mention of Fielding or Defoe, and when there are they are lacking all depth of thought. Unfortunately, these aren't the only great authors that this board disrespects. A shame really. It's why I can only ever come here when I'm terminally bored

>>12484838
obviously General Psychological Theory by Freud. Has all his bangers in it.

>>12489537
(2/2)
What else can I say?

Deleuze's essay, "Plato and the Simulacrum" (first appendix from The Logic of Sense) has been instrumental to my own readings of the book and I highly recommend this if you're looking for a nuclear supplement to go with this reader-nuking book (Martin Amis' metaphor, not mine)

Someone above noted that chapter 1 feels like it lays out the themes of the novel's approach to representation. I would specify this a bit and say every page, almost every sentence, functions as a microcosmic statement of poetics for the book at large. This is to say, the forms present on each page (serial representation/connection to every other image in the novel, the fractal references that bloom out of each pun) continually make overt the novel's representational investments in 1)language as such 2) partiality, partial forms of representation. We can get into this more if u so desire.

I would say a good way to read is to pick a page u like and do a close reading of it. This is to say, more than decoding the references, figure out the arguments that are put forth by the formal play...

>>12486388
Aight as someone who has personally studied the fuck outta this book, lemme give yall some suggestions.

1) The only secondary lit that OP posted work getting is McHugh's annotations. This is a required companion. One literally cannot read the book without them *to start.* Once u get the hang of it, however, it can be fun to tread water for a bit without the notes, going back to them when u feel u really need to get something (wtf are law of 12 tables, etc)

1a) Secondary literature I recommend
-Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary by John Gordon, Syracuse UP 1986 (believe he writes the introduction to the most recent Penguin edition, correct me if I'm wrong?). Admittedly dated. Admittedly a conservative approach to the novel (Gordon says as much on p1) BUT highly HIGHLY helpful for answering the question: What the actual fuck is going on? See, reading McHugh, like reading Gifford along with Ulysses, will let u know what each word means, but it isn't going to help at really with what the fuck is going on and that's at least part of what we're interest in, right? Joyce is an ideas man, a wordsmith above all, but he also tells a good story and FW is no exception. It takes place on a particular day. In a particular place. Actual things occur. Gordon's Herculean effort helps elucidate all this stuff. It's very effective, I've found to go from Gordon->FW->McHugh->Gordon on a first read. Really, to do it all justice, and because of how fun it is, I recommend u spend most of your time with the primary text, but Gordon is going to be a much more effective spotter than McHugh, in my opinion. Depends on how u read tho.
-The Aesthetics of Chaosmos by Umberto Eco. This is on the more scholarly side, but not at all as scholarly as some of the other stuff I could recommend for FW. Essentially, Eco traces the influence of Aquinas, Bruno, and da Cusa on Joyce. Obviously the chapter on FW is the relevant one, but the points made in the Ulysses chapter can also be illuminative of issues at play in the Wake. If you're on your way towards theoretical interpretations of the novel, this Eco essay is instrumental in laying out the transition in theory from linguistic models of rational order to that of chaos and crisis. You may note bubbling beneath the surface of that comment a nod towards poststructural theory. FW was a premier inspiration to the likes of Derrida and Lacan (who credited the mirror scene in FW to inspiring his own writings on the mirror stage) and is a great foil to poststructural theory.
Anyway
Finally I recommend ReJoyce by Anthony Burgess for the chapters of his readings of the Wake. Excellent for a layperson with enough precision and wit/genuine insight to seriously buttress anybody's private readings. Seriously, if you get only one of these three books, buy ReJoyce
What else can I say? see next post (1/2)

>>12488316
cool

>>12484284
>Humanity is ultimately only a temporary vector for technology's progress and will be discarded once it no longer requires us to facilitate its reproduction and evolution. The beginnings of this are clearly seen at the onset of industrialization wherever it takes place; technological advancement reaches a stage wherein a positive feedback process starts to take place that has an immediate and substantial impact on the population, shown clearly in the drastic decline in fertility rate. As this feedback progresses the need for human labor in all of its forms steadily decreases and thus the need for humans consequentially decreases also, leading eventually to our complete extinction (and perhaps the extinction of all carbon based lifeforms). Humans are more or less the boot strapper of a glorious and humanity-free techno-future.
almost based but supremely lacking an understanding of the machinations of capital in this whole here dang sitizuation

>>11771008
sure but he never had access to the fortune that is discussed around him. For a long time the US speculated that his (osama's) fortune numbered around 300mil USD as inherited from his father's fortune. However the truth is that from the 1980s till around 1992 he could only receive around 1mil/year because of levies placed against him by the US via Saudi gov't. Yes, alot of money but hardly the 300mil fortune that was thought. Then when he was in Sudan the Saudi govt divested him of his holdings in his father's company. In Sudan he controlled some small businesses but lost the money from this when he left the country in 1996, being generally broke since then. I'm basically quoting the 9/11 commission report here which anyone remotely interested in the subject would behoove themselves to read and it seems just about ne person in this thread has actually read, unfortunately.

>>10884028
jesus everyone in this thread is half past retarded. Blake's cosmogony is one of the most important antecedents to British/Irish literary modernist aesthetics.

Songs of Innocence and Experience -- fire bars
Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion -- fire bars
All Religions are One -- fire bars
Milton -- fire bars

Continental prophecies - bars
the first book of urizen - bars
There is no natural religion - bars

Definitely one of the top 3 Romantics along with Keats and Byron, honorable mention to Shelley.
Bet you all are still reading turdsworth tho. His criticism is important, in the same way Mathew Arnold's is, but his poetry is wild rubbish

>>10881396
>https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/21/2018-whiting-awards-tommy-pico-poetry/

In this thread, there seems to be a conscious anxiety about the corruption of the canon / degradation of taste coming to the fore lately (past 24 months) in the literary world. I think this is a very valid anxiety and something I wish were addressed more tacitly in the actual literary world, rather than ghettoized into 4chan and made to appear as some crypto-fascist project. Harold Bloom is right to lament the decentering of aesthetics from judgments of the canon, and it doesn't make one a racist to say as much. However, where this thread goes wrong is to erase the difference between Tommy Pico's work and the likes of Rupi Kapur or whatever tf her name is. Kapur and what she represents is trash. All I've read from Pico is what's quoted in the paris review article. I must say it's very well-wrought work and I was impressed from what I saw. Formally speaking, a few things jump out at me, namely the shortening of language as a product of the demands of capital/normalizing efforts of state power & how he deftly (and with a very dark, angry humor!) comes down on the demands of genre and form generally (mostly re: Nature Poem). Theoretically speaking, I think we could definitely categorize his work as existing "In the wake" that Christina Sharpe writes about in her book of the same name, I think the framework she puts forth in that book would be a very effective lens through which to approach Pico's work here. In terms of his content, he's picking up a contemporary strain of conscious exploration of unconscious trauma and does this very well (see especially: yr dad's bad dad) + importantly touching on the medicalization of this very trend.

Iono that's a start for some exegesis on his work which I noticed was lacking in this thread. I'm not being a devil's advocate, I genuinely appreciated what I read from him and think his work is very appreciable in itself. I think on this board we shouldn't be so quick to denounce new up and coming writers. We should hold them to the same standard we hold everyone else in the canon, and this unfortunately has not seemed to be the case in this thread. I understand that it's jarring to see his abbreviations that *call to mind* the likes of a tumblr aesthetic &c, but a little probing of how those formal qualities are mobilized, I believe, shows them to have much more substance to them than anything one would find on tumblr.

Let's have a little more rigor on this board, guys. Twould be nice for a change.

>>10863303
The first German translations of Shakespeare appeared in the mid to late 1700s which, including the affinity between the English and German languages themselves, gave great excitement to Goethe et al.
N.b in the 18th century German culture was essentially French culture and you could find many Germans (Goethe et al.) looking for a distinctly "German" (a slippery concept in itself as there wouldn't be a unified "Germany" for another 100 years or so) culture, in literature especially, which they frankly had none. Already inundated with French cultural output, they looked to the English for inspiration.

>>10843738
>Reading it right now. Are the themes actually kinda opaque or am I illiterate?
Get Anthony Burgess' (of A Clockwork Orange fame) book ReJoyce, will help with Dubliners as well as anything else by Joyce.

>>10848365
>It's like pic related applied to social interaction
Feel like this diagram is not coherent with Freud's understanding of the uncanny. Doesn't the uncanny (unheimlich) trade on a particularly high level of familiarity, but a familiarity that can't be placed (I suppose that's why it's familiarity rather than straight up knowledge)?
If I were to remake this graph I would reflect the uncanny valley along y=x, making it the uncanny mountain

>>10848211
I read Mendelbaum's translation recently. Pretty fire bars throughout. Honestly some of it was very disturbing or just straight up heart breaking but I guess thats how some great literature be.