So we all agree he's the best writer of the 20th century, right?

The question should be : is Joyce the only worthwhile contestant to that title ?

Answer: maybe.

Thomas Pnychon

>>7661347
Joyce is gay

>>7661240
Hi /lit/ who is he? I only read harry potter and comics xd xd oh and also memes xd

Yes.

Gene Wolfe is second, followed by Faulkner. Joyce is fourth.

>>7661240
>>7661408
You two obviously haven't read enough literature to say "yes".

ITT: Retardation, plebness, and meta ironic shitposting.

>>7661425
>>7661427
Hellooooooooo Reddit

>>7661458
you're only proving him right.

Literature is not a contest.

>>7661503
No one claimed it was. It still doesn't mean all literature is equally good

>>7661240
I think he's tied with Joyce and Beckett. Gass' more flowery writing makes him a contestant too. And you can't forget about Schmidt, Rios, and Orlovitz.

>>7661625
>Gass' more flowery writing makes him a contestant too.
god fucking dammit stop this meme NOW

Someone please reply to my post?

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>>7661405
what is your motivation for making this post? We all know worthless posts exist, do you feel any need to exemplify a garbage post for us, just in case we forgot what it looked like? The thread wasn't off to an amazing start but it was salvageable, not an outright shitpostfest, so why make an ironic shitpost? We could have just went on, knowing the thread could easily be derailed but hoping it wouldn't

>>7661820
i'm level 4 should I be worried?

>>7661841
yes, now you have to keep going and reach post irony or you'll be a shitter the rest of your life

>>7661629
I'm sorry you haven't read Gass, but it's true: his prose is beautiful and extremely musical.

bitch that ain't davey fostah wally

>>7661865
how does one become post-ironic

That isn't Jim Jam

There is a fundamental difference between acts of greatness and actual greatness itself. Proust defines this difference as well as any other artist. While certainly Remembrance Of Things Past contains much great writing- in fact a hefty-sized novel’s worth of about three hundred pages, the whole work of thirty-three hundred pages cannot realistically be termed great. To willfully ignore the three thousand pages of often puerile, repetitive, obsessive, gossipy writing is to actually demean the three hundred pages of unequivocally great writing, by smearing the totality into a gray fog of undifferentiable verbal sludge. Yes, he has needlessly digressive, and clause-filled, sentences that can occupy a page, but if many meander and die of their own ennui and/or heft, is that a thing worth celebrating? It reminds me of the seemingly pointless world’s records that are charted by the Guinness Book Of Word’s Records. So what if someone made a kielbasa three hundred yards long, or the like? Did it taste any good?

There is also a question over what sort of writer Proust is. He is most often claimed as a precursor to the Modernists, or an early Modernist of the stream of consciousness variety, but even in his obscenely Byzantine sentences there is a clarity and lack of obfuscation that is not present in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, nor even William Faulkner. In fact, Proust is the absurdly baroque and filigreed end of the Romantic movement, with ornate frills and all- more of an Impressionist, though, than full on Romantic. He is a literary Monet on steroids, rather than a Picasso with a new vision. If he were a dinosaur he would be one of those lumbering hundred plus foot sauropods of the Jurassic Period, not a sleek Velociraptor of the Cretaceous. There is a child-like preciousness to Proust’s writing, at its worst, that most Modernists reviled, and while it may look, from the outside, to be Modernist in design, its soul is purely Romantic, and technique Impressionist.

Ultimately, the overall work fails to sustain itself. Its entertainment and readability simply cannot weather the repeated barren stretches of hundreds of pages between a half dozen or so pages of brilliance, and the Romanticism of the whole work negates the very notion of it being an act of memory.

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>>7662406
He used to pay prostitutes to stab rats with pins for sexual gratification.

>>7662406
>>7662412
kek

>>7661871
>using an incorrect colon to seem artsy like his hero Gass
kill me

>>7663260
>not understanding how colons work.
That colon is fine where it, and you should feel bad you didn't know that.

>>7663271
*it is

>>7662412
wow that's pretty hot. I completely understand.
these women have sex with people for money. they dont feel when they do it. he just wants to watch them feel. I would jerk off to those kinds of feels.

Not at all. There is nothing in his writing, its just a passing memory of things without substance. He writes well, maybe the best, but his unwillingness or inability to make works of both substance and quality like Joyce or Faulkner is obvious. Proust should've left his comfort zone every once in a while and expand his mind.

Reading Proust requires the sensibility of years of reading literature. Any high schooler who claims he enjoyed it lies. I don't know why we had to read it in high school honestly, it's just not entry or even mid level of /lit/.

>>7663294
>There is nothing in his writing, its just a passing memory of things without substance.
Haha, yea, ok.

>>7661625
>And you can't forget about Schmidt, Rios, and Orlovitz.

Have you actually read anything these authors published?

>>7663260
you'll have to kill yourself mah boy

>>7662392
if you have to ask....

>>7661240
Yes.

>>7663349
I've long since evolved beyond a superficial interest in the emotional entertainment of reading and now exist inside a realm of pure intellectual abstraction. So no, I haven't read anything published by those authors, but through my thoughtful readings of others who have, I understand their literature better than most who waste their time with primary sources.

>>7663499
True patrician.

>>7663499
Any man who uses the word superficial is, ultimately, superficial. Enjoy your formal metamusings.

>>7663517
Now guess what you've gone and done

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>>7661351

>>7663523
Egads!

>>7663526
Zizek doesn't know God, that immidiately disqualifies him in my opinion

>>7663566

not anon, but he posted that because Proust was gay.

>>7661240
Tell us why, OP

>>7663305
lol wut