Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 1510. page

We should abolish letters too. Letters are like talking to yourself.

>>9275147
Punctuation as a delimiter for clauses is alright in reading is alright.

The proper use of a comma is to do a slight rest.

>>9275147
down with capitalization too. or make everything capitalized. what the fuck purpose does that shit serve?

>>9274981
katherine dunn

there's like 12 of them

McCarthy, but quite specifically Suttree

>>9274927
>HURRR WAHWAHWHA WHY ISN'T NIETZCHE PERFECTLY REASONABLE ;_;
>What was his fucking problem?
He was one of us

>he fell for the 'will to truth' meme

Of course people far above your level of sophistication all seem pretty cool, nobody is saying that plato or kant are garden variety retards, but ultimately their philosophies and psychologies are not what neetsz is looking for

>>9274821
Best book you've read this year

My favorite book by a woman

>>9274821
Septimus....

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>>9274785
Ryan Adams and Bryan Adams were both born on the 5th of November

I sexually identify as walrus teeth AND YOU SHOULD TOO

>>9274785
"Britney Spears" is an anagram for "Presbyterians"

thats if you want to be good

>Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29

Oh it shows!

writing isn't actually that hard, the hard part is having something interesting to say

Irony is just fear + detachment

>>9274669
You're saying people are ironic when they feel apathy?

The gentle cure will be in analysis, where irony is recognized for what it often is: failure to engage. It still attracts hits on worthless review videos for now.

The harsh fix will be when the robots arrive and make a generation of ironists completely useless.

My diary in poetry. Not even ironically.

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>>9274620

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>>9274620
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

We told you the whole bible except Chronicles and the tanakh other than Genesis was dank.

Isn't one of the big Bible memes "skip everything but Ecclesiates and Proverbs"? I feel that I've seen that posted a fair bit.

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>>9274617
>adhering to meme advice

Pistis Sophia

>>9274586
added to list

>>9274579
Sigrid Undset
di Benedetto
JM Synge
Bartol
Tournier

I see all of these underrepresented on /lit/

>>9274343
You gotta keep 'em overrated!
It was baaaaad

I suppose the easiest way for me to read Stoner is as a study of human dysfunctionality--of how people are shaped by their circumstances, distorted and distended and disfigured (both physically and mentally), until the most monstrous acts seem to follow almost naturally from what they have become, and how at no point in that process could anything different really have happened; the villains are themselves victims, hurt by the world and by others. Edith grew up in a loveless household; Lomax was cruelly mocked by his peers; Stoner's marriage was doomed by his naivete about love, which stems from his upbringing in a poor farming household during which he attained very little worldly knowledge.

I think there is more than just that; part of the beauty seems to be that any person ought to be able to empathize with each (or at least most) of the characters. For me, I empathize with the wistful inevitability with which Stoner draws away from his parents; I empathize with Lomax's desperate urge to see virtue in a student who shares his own flaws, even if there is none to be found; I empathize with Grace's and Edith's emotional disassociation, caused by a childhood spent around people with little love or care for one another; I even empathize with Walker in some sense, or at least the part of him who knows he's in too deep but struggles to overcome his ego and do the right thing (quit). That isn't to say that Edith's behavior wasn't psychologically destructive for both Stoner and Grace, or to say that Lomax didn't act maliciously--none of this is saying that their environment redeems their sins--but it helps me appreciate that others act as they do often not because they don't understand the consequences or morality of their actions but rather because having experienced what they have there is no other way to act! I suppose even after years of being aware of it I find it difficult to fully rid my thinking of the fundamental attribution error. Just as we (or at least I) ourselves conceive of our past failures as inevitable results of the life which preceded them, so should we realize that the faults of others are not so easy to fix (as some commenters on Stoner seem to believe...) as just beating the right course of action into their heads. By drawing us into these "villains" of the novel, Williams helps to dispel our self-absorption, to see others as we see ourselves.

>>9274358

People also seem to say that the characters in Stoner seem like caricatures. I think this is true to some extent, and that it forms a major weakness of the novel, but I also believe people overstate the case for this. Part of the beauty of Stoner is how it illustrates, so frankly and sincerely, the prejudices and failures and brokenness of normal people. If we looked around us and objectively evaluated what we saw, we would likely see Stoners and Ediths among our parents and relatives, Graces among our childhood friends, Walkers among our classmates and colleagues, Lomaxes among our superiors; and we do already to some extent, to be sure, but there is a certain natural tendency, I think, to optimistically believe one's own life and relations to be better than they are. Were our own lives to be made into novels, I am sure that readers would believe at least some of the characters within to be so absurd, so extravagantly (self-)destructive or cruel or nasty or broken, that they could not really be real people! Williams sees the world as it is; he presents Stoner's life to us so cleanly and honestly that we can walk in his footsteps and see through his eyes, but he presents the external reality of Stoner's world unclouded by the mist of (irrational?) optimism through which we interpret our own existence. To some extent, we aren't horrified by what Stoner experiences; instead we're really horrified by the similarities we intuit between Stoner's world and our own, and what they mean about our lives and the people in them.

Useful.

>>9274303

Patterns so broad they can fit anything.

That meme picture follows the Heros journey formula

Except he rejected and apologized for his ideas in his most recent work, trading them in for a much more fluid system of strengthening and weakening bureaucracies that are either helped or hindered by tribalism or variations on spoils systems.

>>9274725
Is this true?
Because back when i was in college he was kind of taught a lot in both (senior level) political philosophy classes,international relations classes, and business with a foreign clientel focus classes

>>9274294
Fukuyama is a Hack who wrote a literal meme

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>>9274185

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>>9274185
You know it
But let's make it hard mode
One per country

>>9274224
us: melville
brit: shekspear
span: cervant
frans: flaubert (or le temperdu??)
ruse: tolstoy
itali: dent

?

>>9274180
Nope. He doesn't even register on the list. Lattimore > Pope > Fagles
Those are the only ones that matter.

>>9274197
...The /lit/ meme trio for Homer translations is Lattimore, Fagles and Fitzgerald anon.

>>9274212
It may be the meme triumvirate but it's wrong.