Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 206. page

>>9950476
Neither

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Is this correct /lit/?

>>9950482
>those pictures at the bottom

cringed hard

>>9950462
/lit/ has never heard of it because it's not Moby Dick or Infinite Jest. But Babbitt, like Main Street, is truly insightful. Lewis is the first novelist where the America of today appears fully recognizable.

That said, Lewis is a better sociologist than a novelist. Neither of Babbitt nor Main Street really shine artistically. Among his contemporaries, I go to John Dos Passos for that.

Anyone read Arrowsmith?

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Babbitt is lovely, though I still prefer Main Street. Like anon above me I truly believe Lewis is criminally underread, both here and elsewhere. But I do also believe he has a great talent for prose. Take a look at the first part of Main Street, for instance:

ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

>>9951277
He certainly can manage passages of quality prose, he's adroit with tone, and he sets a scene well (having grown up in one of those towns described in Main Street [and my grandmother is from his home town], I can testify to their portrait-perfect accuracy even to this day.) But both Main Street and Babbitt seemed to lack any cohesive structure. The of string-of-pearls structure has a clear purpose in the Quixote, but feels meandering in Lewis. Plus he can lay it on awfully thick. The passage you've cited is one where he nails the balance - genuine affection for the American Midwest dramatic-ironically aware that the affection is a product of a dangerous seduction - but not all of them are so good. I don't have a copy handy, unfortunately.

I've already recommended Dos Passos as an example where I think the contrast is clear. Dos Passos never browbeats and his novels are so beautifully architected that he makes Babbitt look like a shanty-town.

The same contrast illustrated negatively: watch Dreiser. Lewis is definitely a more adroit writer, but both of them overwork their subjects in a way that Dos Passos (or Fitzgerald) doesn't.*

*for the record, it works pretty well in American Tragedy. The sheer volume of banal journalistic detail ends up giving the thing a real heft that I didn't see coming.

>>9950419
Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy

was he woke?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=100wLAP6URc&t=24m45s

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>>9950374
/lit/ is a Christian board. Atheists GTFO or convert.

>>9950398
This is not 2012 anymore, grow up

can anyone here explain how retarded this video is?

plx

Lets say someone was being as pretentious as possible, how do you respond to vid related?

Neuromancer. I always found cyberpunk to be a bit of a drag because of the telegraphic language, but maybe you'll like it.

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>>9950412
>I always found cyberpunk to be a bit of a drag because of the telegraphic language


> hasn't read Burroughs

Can't say I've read a lot of cyberpunk. But I listened to bookworm the other week and Zachary Mason was on there. Never read any of him but his new book is called Void Star and it got me curious enough to order a copy. Not here yet. Have to say that during the interview he kind of rejected the cyberpunk tag, but apparently that's what it has generally been classed as.

Post your feet right now

>>9950313
Are you talking literature or pulpy exciting/sci fi/ fantasy shit? He could always read game of thrones or Clive cussler or Steven king

>>9950506
Literature, he's not interested in King or anything sci-fi that I've offered him

no one here read beyond that opening scentence

>>9950903
no one here reads beyond that opening scentence

>>9950177
you wrote it, you tell us.

>magic priest dooms the world with gay sex, misquoted bible verses, and ill-advised paganism

>Russians get memed on by a talking cat

>>9950107
Reading your greentext one-liner gave me 10 times more enjoyment than the entire garbage book you're describing, OP.

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seriously stop role playing as /pol, even if you do it ironically.

I....I can't...

>>9950039
Stop baitredditposting, even if you do it ironically.

>>9949999
>but there is pretty much nothing left to write about
Entirely wrong. The people who believe this nonsense have been memed into thinking that thought is 'done'. They've essentially been memeing this since the 'enlightenment'

>>9950008
Well, you have to look at it from a pragmatic standpoint I suppose.

Every time when I try to find a field of interest for me, that would be worth to analyze without running out of substance or vigor, I discover that dozens of people from universities all over the world have already written on it. Every time.

Don't know about you, but I'm close to giving up at this point.

>>9950071
>pragmatic
Fuck off. Stop being a pseud.

>>9949989
A philosophy degree

>>9949989
anthropology is the study of humans.

cultural semiotics is the study of bullshit.

>>9949910
You know full well what she meant

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If you'd read this masterpiece you wouldn't have to ask

>>9949799
Unfunny pleb is more like it.

>>9949811
sorry, I didn't mean for this thread to be about you.

Interesting info in general, especially the parts on texting nonos. But he kept trying to shoehorn the data into comedy which for me never worked and was even groan inducingly bad at times. It's like he was in the way. Would have been a better book if he played it straight.

Seriously worth reading for the texting section alone, though. Solid info in general, but boring comedy.

it was a disgusting tea to drink though

>>9949776
Good for (you), anon. It gets better and better.

I recently found a set of all volumes in French at my grandmother's house, very nice.