Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 933. page

or what this board was a few years ago really

r/books xDDD lmao
>le cute otter drinking milk
OWW SO CUTTTEEE
kill yourself faggot

>>9600973
just proving my point really

shut up turd

kill me please i'm so tired

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what is the reason for this intellectual drought

why has the god of conversation abandoned us

>>9600854
And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder.' It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.

>>9600854

Hardy Boys were my jam growing up
Those books definitely do not fall under the umbrella of what Chesterton's talking about there
Pulp SF/Fantasy/Mystery would, and I think it has its merits too. Maybe it's more dessert though as opposed to main course

>>9600869
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,' Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in 'Ivanhoe' will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads 'The Red Revenge,' it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

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>>9600837
Atlas Shrugged actually motivated me to get up my ass, find a job and not be a victim.

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>>9601097
Atlas Shrugged isnt literature

This thread didnt ask you what childrens books or pop music or jigsaw puzzles motivated you to do, it asked about literature

I wouldnt answer OP by saying my neighbors dog motivated me to go out and kill, because thats not part of the thread

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>>9601113
> That's not what this thread is for
> Just complain, doesn't give an answer

Guess you learn nothing then.

>>9600708
finnegans wake is a good example

Nice picture faggot

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>>9600708
The Beginner's Guide handles that theme phenomenally if you aren't afraid of a video game. It's a bit of an onion though. Dig through pay attention to everything.

just read it

>>9600701
Plato's Laws is better.

>>9600752
How so?

>>9600626
>Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant
>Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller
>(Birth of a Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche)

>tfw all the people at my school have fidget spinners and everyone online is constantly talking about fidget spinners, I see it all the time
>I still have no idea what the appeal is and why they are so popular
I must be getting old

>>9600636
Try spinning it. It's fun (though it's mostly just a meme.)

>>9600497
Not very insightful senpai.

>>9600497
even if you tried to write anything else, it'll be trash

>>9600538
not if you don't get how deep it is

>>9600562
you don't know my life

stupid thread

why don't you reason before posting?

It depends entirely how interested in it people become. You can work through an agent who'll help protect your identity but the Internet means things like this are increasingly risky. Any investigative journalist type or hacker who isn't afraid of hard work or breaking a few laws will be able to find out.

>>9600291
You sound like you know a lot about copyrighting and royalties. Care to share?

Read this article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405

the capital

>>9600215

Communists get out!!!

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Holy fucking shit.

We'll, I'll give you one hint. Pilgrims. OK? Jesus...

>>9600087
this post is rootlessness exemplified

>>9600199
same

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>>9599943
>reading plays

You've only read it once, OP... Your age is showing and so is your experience. The structure of Lear is not great, and as a tragedy alone it's eh. But the poetry man.

>>9599943
Just copped King Lear; why did you dislike it? My favorite play of all time is Michael Frayn's Copenhagen

>>9599688
>Carlos
Dropped
>Ruiz
Set fire to it
>Zafon
Piss on it

>>9599688
I would take the opinion of your friend over those of anonymous shitlords on 4chan.

>>9599709
Case in point

>>9599709
OP here. At first, I thought the exact same thing. Yet, I d'like to try.

Born a nigger -> grow up a nigger -> live as a nigger -> die as a nigger

How about that?

Any "template" or "pattern" in writing is inherently worthless

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>hero
>journey
>the
>is
>discuss

>>9599262
Good job OP, you've fulfilled the "is Murakami a hack" thread quota for the week.

He's a decent author.

Its just that /lit/ hates anyone who's famous and contemporary.

>>9599262
If you read Kafka on the Shore and still think he's a hack you are a feeble-minded pleb.