Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 1673. page

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holy shit if you actively bend the spine of a paperpack to the point that it breaks in the middle the book is so much easier to read

it stays right open

i always thought the line(s) on the spine is something that just occurs naturally while reading a book, all this time i have held paperbacks open without first breaking the spine like a fucking savage, this is so much easier
why hasn't anyone told me?

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Is kartharsis (kάθαρσις) the most important element in fiction?

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anyone has Lattimor's Iliad translation epub with working footnotes?
or go back to Pope?

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How do you define literary merit?

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I'll make up a concept right now called concept-1. Imagine I asked you what concept-1's true meaning was. Imagine I asked you what concept-1 said I should do when herding goats in Rwanda and I have a cold. And similarly for a hundred other situations. Imagine I claimed that the investigation to find the true definition of concept-1 would require many more years. You'd think I was stupid. Maybe you'd point out that I just invented the term, so I should just define concept-1. You'd say that the "solutions" to the scenarios would have to be arbitrarily defined.

Now imagine the same thing but instead of concept-1 we look at "morality". Why is the investigation taken any more seriously?

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wtf I'm straight now

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Gonna start this book today /lit/ what should I expect?

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Post your best "Roses are red" poems!! Here is mine

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm leaving a note
Isn't that what people do?

Your beauty's surreal
Your smile tears the blue
There's a silver lining
When i lay eyes on you

On melancholy hill
I see from afar
Moonlight drowns out all
But the brightest star

I am a moth
Just want to share your light
I'm just an insect
Trying to get out of the night

The train is coming
I must hurry up
But i keep asking
What if i wake up?

Up on melancholy hill
Can't tell things apart
There's never really you
Just me and my paper heart

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Should I read the Bible before going into German Idealism?
I really want to read Hyperion, Faust, also works of Hegel and Kant.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

>I know from clear memory that I would not want to re-experience some of those moments again with my own child; the anxiety, the illnesses, the exhaustion..but what wouldn't I give to be able to go back to some of those moments in more than memory? The pain is only made bearable, the sadness only made blessed by love and by art.

>Reading is a kind of doubled conciousness, existing somewhere between pure memory and lived experience. When we look at our own children, we see not only their current forms but all they have been before. In this kind of doubled perception, love and sadness are intertwined.

>The ruin in the landscape, or the textual ruin created by all of Tolkien's techniques catalyses this change, linking together the imagination, the current experience and recollection, intwining the past and the present with each other so that they are, in Aragorn's dying words, more than memory. More than memory transmutes the pain of exile, of separation and loss through the movement of time, the "Heimweh", into something still sad but now, as Tolkien says of the tears of the hobbits at their parting at the Grey Havens, blessed, without bitterness.

>The past is everywhere and yet at the same time out of reach, overlaid permanently by the present, worn away by time and change and even fallible memory. You don't have to wait a quarter century from the time of some of your most cherished memories to have this feeling, though such a gap certainly accentuates it. The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings, says the song. Pain for the lost home is common to every human as we are separated from our childhoods, from our youths, from our first experiences.

>How do you read Tolkien? By paying attention to the ways that different features of his works combine to produce and transform sadness not into bitterness, but into something richer, greater, something fully human. Reading Tolkien this way you see the true scope of his achievement to touch the heart and you understand now much more fully how Sam's words "Well, I'm home." are both joyous and heartbreaking.

Thoughts?

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Hey /lit/
Been reading a collection of short stories written by Hemingway and kind of doing informal essays in my head. I'm stuck on the point of his story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place". Is it really just about the fact life means nothing? Seems kinda edgy and a bit of a cop-out for Hemingway.

White Elephants had so many layers and this story just seems to be about the fact the younger waiter is ignorant because he's young, and the older waiter is still figuring out what the old man already knows, which I think is something about nihilism. Is the obvious track wrong here?

>pic unrelated

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>he doesn't translate the works he read by himself to gain maximum understanding

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How true is this, /lit/?

>Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one's sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one's actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group's moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.

This is there in Nietzsche, of course (what isn't?). But isn't this what drives irony-politics and so on? Selective outrage and a virtue-signaling arms race? I will readily to admit to having enjoyed, in a totally perverse way, watching Trump vs The Media and being torn up. But I know it's total voyeurism also, because I get to watch all of this on a screen and just be passively manipulated. It's better than a movie. More like WWE, except, you know, But This Time It's Real.

But it isn't. It's just that as a consumer of moral outrage, I get to sit back and have Muh Feels and just re-iterate whatever I hear. It's fun to be outraged, because you get your morality supplied for you as an ideological subject. You get to vicariously participate in struggles without ever really having to change your own behaviour or perceptions. Because who would want to do that?

Outrage is fun. Virtue-signaling is fun. Caring about politics is fun. Being ironic is fun. Blaming is fun. Fantasizing is fun. It's all fun. And fun is good, fun is a big deal. But this kind of fun feels pretty self-destructive, because I don't know how you get off of Mr. Postmodernity's Wild Ride. Outrage just seems to become magically self-propagating after a while, because it is fed by the counter-outrage it inevitably provokes.

But maybe "virtue" can be "fun" too. I don't really know how, but maybe. Maybe by collaborative steelmanning. Anyways. Enjoy the read gents.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/01/moral-outrage-is-self-serving

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Any books for feelings of loneliness in your early 20s? I'm depressed because I thought I was lonely in high school because it was so small so there was no one likeminded but now I'm in uni with 30,000 other young people and I'm alone and sad

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This is the second night this week I haven't slept /lit/.

Are there books that deal with insomnia that aren't thriller or horror fic?

Please no Fight Club