>tfw you take a break from reading realists, realist-modernists, modernists and postmodernists and read Shakespeare and KJV for a few months
>attempt to go back to what I was reading before, and it all just seems like a heap of dogshit now
Seriously, nothing can compete with Shakespeare and KJV.
>tfw smart enough to understand DFW but still to stupid to understand "ye olde English"
These are the thing that literature does
It makes our hopes come alive, our imagination.
Savouring all the emotions contained within.
All the other stuff is bleak and talks about the way it is and how it will never change constantly changing.
True. Shakespeare will always be the greatest.
This thread is a feeler to see if anyone has interest in participating in a /lit/ based reading group for a long text by the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, which is called "The Theory of Communicative Action". It is a two-volume work which blends philosophy and sociology, and advances a particular picture of human life which is contrasted with earlier thinkers like Karl Marx and Max Weber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action
Volume 1 of the text is reproduced below. Although clumsy in spots, the pdf is nethertheless an extremely faithful reproduction of Volume 1, even preserving pagination, which would be useful to the above.
http://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_2795_0.pdf
Volume 2 is reproduced more literally here:
http://bibotu.com/books/Philosophy/Habermas,%20Jurgen%20-%20The%20theory%20of%20communicative%20action%20-%20Vol.2.pdf
I have a personal concept for an approach to the text. The first bit is to digest a good 4-5 texts, or selections thereof, to get up to speed (readings from Weber and Marx say, and for myself, another book by Habermas and reviewing Austin's How To Do Things With Words). One thing which is very clear on skimming TCA itself is that Habermas is extremely thorough about citation and context, so that reading him cold isn't such a chore of-itself.
This won't be the last time I float this idea, but I'm slowly getting more serious about it.
is he as much of a pessimistic twat like Marcuse or Adorno?
>>9474302
habermass, (from the Middle High German halber Marx; cf. ganzer Marx) n. A religious ceremony designed to engender an illusion of understanding through chants describing socio-economic conditions. Hence also, habermass, v. "He habermassed Einstein; he attempted to deduce the special theory of relativity from the social structure of the Bern patent office." "Nothing but a gadam habermass" - H. S. Truman.Also, you're an idiot
I see Habermas mentioned in passing by French philosophers sometimes, but I don't think I've ever seen a post here dive into his theories.
What would you say to make people interested in his work? What are his most compelling ideas and viewpoints?
so why do I need to start with the Greeks?
>>9474277
Just skip it all and read Jordan Peterson
They set the stage on which the Western world marched along
>>9474291
okay, but why is it important to read philosophy chronologically, rather than selecting different thinkers from different time periods?
Why don't you own any of these books, /lit/?
You're not a resentful woman hating virgin, are you?
>>9474191
No
Discernible
Talent
Why don't you own any of these books, /lit/?
You're not a resentful catholic hating liberal, are you?
>>9474191
A thread died for this.
My poetry is about God :-)
Why Yoshua and not Yeshua or Jesus? Curious.
>>9475655
Jesus is a corruption of the real name.
>>9475655
>do not find nothing
so you find something?
Just started reading Heart of Darkness, what does everyone think of it?
>>9474070
I didn't even finish it. Pretty boring.
Slog, probably ruined by english teacher, will reread eventually.
Movie is better.
>>9474086
I love Apocalypse Now so much. I don't care if I get shat on for it, but I really think it's a stronger work of art.
Books about living under Communism in Soviet Russia? Preferably something that takes place during the 60s. Not necessarily something overly-political, just covering day-to-day life and shit
Moscow-Petushki is a masterpiece imo.
Also, Plakha.
Dr. Zhivago
The Master and Margarita
What the fuck is his problem?
America.
But really, what the fuck are you talking about
>>9474020
you mean why doesn't he smile? It's because he's from the Bronx and possibly because of bad teeth.
>>9474020
modernity
I feel like we're so desensitized to horror these days between the wide range of crazy things you can find on the internet and movies that rely on jump scares and cheap gore.
*you've
Sorry
>>9473994
Most of the Stephen King books I've read have given me a good spook, altho most of those were more suspense rather than fear. I definitely thought his scariest book was Pet Sematary, although Misery has the most suspense.
>>9473994
I don't know why it's never mentioned that Philip K. Dick's works are spooky sometimes, maybe it's just that I read them when young but sometimes they become cosmically horrifying.
I am Argentinian. I read a book/story once that basically was about a secret underground place that connected Argentina with Uruguay. The point of that tunnel is that it was magic/had some weird physics because it only took a few minutes to cross.
The main character dies in the end and thus the location of the tunnel is forever undisclosed.
I've been googling for 2 hours and I can't find anything about it. Has anyone ever read something like it?
And yes, before anyone asks, I am white.
Maybe I mixed El Aleph and El Muerto from Borges
please help /lit/ you are my only hope
>>9473870
Maybe you are referring to your tunnel of shared guilt that connects you regarding the infamies done to the people of Paraguay?
Are you wise, /lit/?
>>9473812
im not
Beyond my years
No, I'm an idiot..
Also, baby with a beard
why do people (including Pynchon) say this is a bad book, /lit/?
>>9473754
nobody says this
>>9473756
yes they do, including Pynchon
>>9473754
maybe bad for pynchon standards
still better than anything I will ever write
Alright, I have to write a paper on Heidegger, and I have no idea how to begin it without saying "fuck it, Heidegger needs to go back to the drawing board" or "fuck it, what the hell have I been doing all semester".
I realized that during his chapter on death and the ontological relation to it, death doesn't mean what I thought it meant (or the way SEP viewed it). In fact, it means something mind-blowingly profound with how it relates to care (the being of Dasein), but it also makes the entire chapter a bait-and-switch from the way I understand it, because we're no longer talking about death and the problems of understanding our relationship to it as framed in the beginning of the chapter.
Heidegger starts talking about how we have to look to the timespan of Dasein, and not just its momentary Being, to understand the whole of it and what it really means to "be". This means looking to the "end" and Dasein's relationship to this inevitable, but unpredictable, event, which he flirts with to mean death, which becomes a problem because nobody can really experience their own death. Pretty soon, however, he starts making random distinctions like perishing, demise, and death, so now we're describing a relation to something other than the death we thought we were talking about, which isn't really "the final end" like losing your life, but rather "the end" of meaning in a particular world. Having an authentic relationship to death means recognizing the groundless grounding of all meaning and coming to own the possibility of having no possibilities.
It fucking blew my mind because I have no idea if I ever understood Division Two of Heidegger because I don't understand if there's some sort of superstructure Dasein that is born, killed, and rebirthed throughout life, or the fact that now we have a "death" that can be... experienced... to some extent... meaning that we never really had a problem in the first place of determining an ontological relation to death because the possibility of no more possibilities can be experienced.
Honestly, I'm bummed out that there's all of these contradictions and depth to Heidegger that I've missed out on, and I have no way to reconcile it without barfing a terrible paper because there's no way I'm going to reread all of B&T in a weekend. What the hell am I missing here, Heideggeranons?
>>9473725
existential death is the end of all possibilities for Dasein
this can either be within a particular "world" that Dasein itself survives the end of (albeit it will lose one of its identities and a mode of intelligibility with that world)
or it can be the total collapse of all possibility for Dasein, which is coincident with actual perishing but only in the case of Dasein
in the latter case the total world and not just a particular world collapses (for that particular Dasein, though)
you are fleeing so far from perishing as death that you are taking the local conception of existential death as the entirety of existential death, but there must be a global conception of existential death as well
>>9473779
>existential death is the end of all possibilities for Dasein
This makes sense. It's just that I don't understand the point of the framing at the beginning of the relevant chapter on Death, which is focused on understanding what it means to have a relation to "the end" even though that end cannot be experienced. I feel that something is lacking from my understanding of making distinctions from the ontical and the ontological, or that maybe I've missed the point of the first 5-10 pages introducing the chapter of death, or maybe that's a genuine fault in the exposition of death.
Like I said before, it feels like a bait-and-switch since the entire chapter was prefaced by a need to explore the "whole" of Dasein. Exploring ontological death as the end of all possibilities (collapse of a particular world) is a very meaningful phenomena that I think Dasein should have an authentic relations toward... the relation that Heidegger defines as Being-Towards-Death.
But by redefining "the end" of Dasein from a non-Dasein-incorporated event (like demise) to a very much incorporated experience (end of possibilities but a continuation of Dasein) in order to define the relation towards death, it seems that Heidegger sidestepped that problem that framed the problem of understanding "the end" in the first place. In its time span, Dasein experiences multiple collapses (thus experiencing this new "end" often), so this new Being-Towards-Death isn't a relation to the end of the "whole" of Dasein, but rather just a chapter of its existential identity.
The bait-and-switch sucks the existential gravity out of having a relationship towards death, which is a theme that I think Heidegger wanted to capitalize by playing with the colloquial conception of it as simply "the end". "You perish/demise, and you're gone, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to "own" up to your own death? You can't experience death by simply observing the death of others because you're only "Being-With" others in their death from Dasein to a Being present-at-hand."
...
...
...
Of course, now that death is no longer what we normally understand as demise, but another abstraction that further defines how we act authentically towards possibilities in the world, a lot of the gravity in the beginning of the chapter is sucked away (and replaced with something else). What the hell is the point of talking about others dying? What the hell is the "cult of the graves"? What's going on here, exactly? BAIT AND SWITCH! Or maybe there's something else going on.
>>9473779
>you are fleeing so far from perishing as death that you are taking the local conception of existential death as the entirety of existential death, but there must be a global conception of existential death as well
So does the ontological death associated with Dasein's demise carry any special weight for Heidegger? Or is it just an "unfortunate ontical fact" of demise and not necessarily the most important feature of understanding Dasein's Being-Towards-Death? Is trying to understand any special meaning from a relationship to demise a form of fleeing itself?
-- -- -- -- --
Thank you for the clear exposition of your understanding of perishing, demise, and death. It's helped to clarify my ideas and I'm probably just typing out the bulk of my essay right now. I was "anxious" to pieces until I had a nice, solid interpretation to confirm that I was heading somewhere intelligible.
What is your definition of highbrow literature?
>>9473706
If I raise my brow very high while reading it
Same with low brow, but with lowering instead of raising of course
Adheres to the aesthetic notion of the sublime, it explores the human condition (Proust being the best example, perhaps), it's writerly rather than readerly (Barthes), it has complex characters whose mental activity is not spoon-fed (ToM), and it doesn't stick to existing boundaries: It explores beyond (experimental) and it comments upon the shoulders of literature and society. (highly intertextual)
>>9473790
>Proust
lol
I've read V, and although I enjoyed it, I did not enjoy it enough to explore Pynchon's oeuvre any further.
However, I had a change of heart. So, which Pynchon novel (excluding V) should I start with?
>>9473705
tcol49
Ineherent Vice.
>>9473710
His worst book, and the only one ever pushed on reddit for a reason. Jump into GR and stop being a pussy OP. If you want something a little more linear, read Mason and Dixon. Inherent Vice is objectively his best pleb-accessible book, though, so if you can't read dense lit go for that one over Lot49