>Jack: On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest
You can't make this shit up, Wilde fucking invented the title drop.
I honestly feel like knowing this is all you need to know about the measure of Wilde as a writer. Charming, funny, clever, but ultimately trash. Chesterton was completely right about him.
"Writing a play is like folding a napkin - One never knows how it should end!"
- Wilde
"A fashionable hat should be seldom seen, and never heard"
- Wilde
/lit/ could you please give me a quick gestalt on this man?
I've only seen the movie about him and am confused on what you people think of him.
>Bloom says, “You know, I don’t want to be offensive. But ‘Infinite Jest’ [regarded by many as Wallace’s masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
>It’s all a clear indication, Bloom notes, of the decline of literary standards. He was upset in 2003 when the National Book Award gave a special award to Stephen King. “But Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. [Wallace] seems to have been a very sincere and troubled person, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure reading him. I even resented the use of the term from Shakespeare, when Hamlet calls the king’s jester Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest.’
>>9326401
Why is he so popular though?
>>9326410
He's popular because he was incredibly intelligent and was an excellent writer, as well as one of the most important postmodern thinkers. His novel Infinite Jest is a best seller and one of the most frequently discussed books on this board, meme or serious.
The quotes in >>9326401 are from a literary critic who is of course pompous and got extremely salty because DFW called his writing shit in Infinite Jest
Post /lit/ charts
Does anyone have charts that aren't posted in every thread?
I'll post what I have
>>9326494
Is there any good fiction based on a realistic hypothetical mass extinction event like 99% of the population being wiped out by some sort of airborne disease
>>9326231
who makes these comics lmao
World Made by Hand by Kunstler
>When, in early 1998, Winfrey picked Toni Morrison’s “Paradise” and heard from more than a few readers who either didn’t finish the book or else “felt a little confused” by it, she decided to make the discussion a class, taught by Morrison herself in her office at Princeton.
>Along with Winfrey and her sidekick, Gayle King, twenty viewers were in attendance.
>“I really wanted to read the book and love it and learn some life lessons,” one of the women said, “and when I got into it, it was so confusing I questioned the value of a book that is that hard to understand.”
>So Winfrey steered the discussion toward estrangement and nonlinear narratives, comparing them to real-life experiences in a way that was both precise and easy to apprehend (for instance: “You are a new person in town and you’re getting to know the people in the town, do you know everything all at once?”).
>The woman finally agreed that submitting to the strangeness of the text “makes sense” and seemed primed to try again.
Holy shit, Oprah was a goddamn patrician. Jonathan Franzen fucked up.
>>9326052
Too bad Morrison exclusively writes garbage that is propped up as culturally significant thanks to the leftist agenda.
>>9326052
Oprah is legit patrician. she curated her own boxed set of Faulkner's works for her book club thing and it included his three most acclaimed and challenging works, minus Absalom. that's why when you look at reviews of Faulkner's stuff there intermittent reviews by confused soccer moms.
>>9326129
>Morrison
>propped up as culturally significant
>leftist agenda
buzzwords and rhetoric area good way of dismissing your own opinion. unless you can explain further, I'm gonna go ahead and lean towards James Baldwin's literary companion the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance/civil rights era writer with everyman's editions of her work as being "culturally significant"
>>9326174
>buzzwords and rhetoric area good way of dismissing your own opinion.
Not half as good as dismissing things as dismissive because you don't like them. Still, I will give you an example of what I mean.
Although really the best thing to do is read her books, if you want to know the 'why'. They're far removed from good.
Of course despite that it didn't stop leftist 'intellectuals' from throwing a giant shit hissy fit when she didn't win the nobel prize, which resulted in her winning next year for Beloved, as you must capitulate to what is basically guilt extortion or else you're a racist. Did she win out of quality or significance? No. But did she win? Absolutely. You can look it up if you don't believe me.
Getting a short story published in the new yorker easy if you follow this recipe:
>Pseudo-Intellectual character
>Maudlin setting
>something sexually deviant
>magical realism
>ambiguous ending
Seriously, just read a few stories and they are all so formulaic.
>>9325943
Just be an ethnic minority that grew up speaking English as a first language in the upper middle class and went to a good college, and write about immigrant experiences or whatever that you never had
>>9326036
Projecting much?
I am meeting the author of this story next week.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/gender-studies-by-curtis-sittenfeld
What should I ask?
Why is Rupi Kaur so disliked by /lit/? Is it because she's a woman?
>>9325808
yeah, basically a brown woman who writes poetry about sex from a woman's perspective. everything /lit/ stands against for the most part
>>9325808
Probably. I am not really into poetry but it seems okay for me. Contemporaneous. That is a nice thing to say about a contemporaneous writer.
Not like most of the people out there, that would crave for living in the fucking XVIII century.
brown women are disgusting
>read this in school.
>Liberals think it's a nightmare
>Tfw it's really Utopia.
Is there a more misunderstood book, /lit?
The 120 Days of Sodom encompasses a sound set of ethics
What is it about? Never read anything by Atwood
>>9325896
It's inspired by the Iranian revolution. Basically portrays brave new world / 1984 in America if women were subgicated like in the Iranian post Revolutionary regime.
How do you become a more productive writer?
Share your own experiences dealing with procrastination, writer's block, time management, etc.
>>9325680
>How do you become a more productive writer?
Step 1: Stop posting on 4chan
Step 2: Write
>>9325680
carry a notebook, take notes on what you want to write, then set aside time to block out what you took notes on. if you'd like to be a writer, you should be writing constantly, and putting the words to paper when you have the time to. if you are incapable of coming up with something to write about, then you are likely not cut out for writing.
It's been a while since I've seen one of these threadsI'm not trying to represent a cohesive pattern of thinking here, just my greatest intellectual influences
>>9325614
woah
>>9325614
why are there two Stirnerfrogs
Just finished this
Where the fuck do I go now? This was way too good to make the next book I read seem like total trash
>>9325595
U die
>>9325595
Read Leaves of Grass
Finnegans Wake
Which one would you wear?
None, because I've read all of those authors and to see them commercialized in that way makes me vaguely nauseous.
>>9325592
>Team Nietzsche
That is the most un-Nietzsche thing anybody could ever do.
No, scratch that. It's the MOST Nietzsche thing anybody could do.
i'll take plain white for white supremacy thanks
Anyone else do this
>go to library/book store
>just browsing
>become increasingly intrigued and excited about the books you're finding
>buy/check out a whole pile of books
>never actually read them
How do I stop doing this? I genuinely want to read the things I check out, but I can't seem to manage it.
Try checking out less books at a time.
You've got a bad case of materialism.
>>9325584
How so? And how do I get over it?
How come people see writers in literature as suddenly "mature" and overestimate them due to circumstances faced during historical times?
Like Anne Frank, she was a stupid little brat who probably would have been like every other stupid little brat in the U.S. if not for the events that took place, leading to cynicism and serious attitudes which normies mistake for maturity.
Why is being a cynical asshole due to life's bitter pill seen as smart and sophisticated?
>>9325458
You should be able to answer this on your own, anon.
>>9325465
I am not a very wise man.
>>9325482
Obviously.
Looking for books that are literary aristocrats jokes. This, Naked Lunch, parts of Gravity's Rainbow, what else?
>>9325425
>aristocrats jokes
what did he mean by that?
>>9325492
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw10xa_xtNg
>>9325425
Hogg
>Hogg is a novel by Samuel R. Delany, often described as pornographic.[1] It was written in San Francisco in 1969 and completed just days before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. A further draft was completed in 1973 in London. At the time it was written, no one would publish it due to its graphic descriptions of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape. Hogg was finally published – with some further, though relatively minor, rewrites – in 1995 by Black Ice Books. The two successive editions have featured some correction, the last of which, published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2004, carries a note at the end stating that it is definitive.[2]