Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3125. page

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wtf i hate england now

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Any advice on writing good poetry, /lit/?

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How do you find critical analysis of literature that focuses on the style of the writer rather than the meaning? Something that analyzes the syntactical rhythm, vocabulary, grammar etc. of the text in a detailed way? I feel like this sort of analysis would really help me as a writer, but I have a hard time finding it.

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Are there any books where the male main character is literally fucked in the ass by the main villain?

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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.

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>mfw I realize free will isn't a thing

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What sort of writing can we expect out of this new publication?

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would it be bad to explore 4chan and meme culture in a novel of the contemporary world? it feels somehow dirty or trivial to write about, but it is no insignificant force in our world

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is it worth it? is it actually all about prostitutes? will it make me come more often than lolita did?

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Critique my poetry bruhs


You are you, You were born as you, You can't be anyone else but you, If you try to be something your not than you are not you, You are the only one who should be you, Nobody else can make you feel like you, Your destiny is controlled by you, Be you and only you, You are the only one you have in this world in the end, Be the one thing that makes everyone beautiful, Younique

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In Defense of Purple Prose, by Paul West

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html?pagewanted=all

(…)the almost lost art of phrasemaking attracts the scorn only of those who have never made up a stylish phrase in their lives, as if style had become taboo, a menace to people, gods and cars.

Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.

(…)

Certain producers of plain prose have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum or flat can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy - the human bond with ordinariness. I doubt if much unmitigated ordinariness can exist. As Harold Nicolson, the critic and biographer, once observed, only one man in a thousand is boring, and he's interesting because he's a man in a thousand. Surely the passion for the plain, the homespun, the banal, is itself a form of betrayal, a refusal to look honestly at a complex universe, a get-poor-quick attitude that wraps up everything in simplistic formulas never to be inspected for veracity or substance. Got up as a cry from the heart, it is really an excuse for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the democratic myth that says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone else.

How many prose writers can you identify from their style? Not many have that singular emanation from the temperament or those combinations of words all of them characteristic for a certain gait, a certain tone, a certain idiosyncratic consecutiveness of thought and image. Stone the crows by all means, but let the birds of paradise get on with the business of being gorgeous.

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thoughts on this individual?

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Does everyone have a higher self that is same for all beings?

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Let's get a thread started on The Wake. Our thoughts on this masterpiece and all it entails. Which is broad, considering it is the final culmination of culture, the hegelian end of history, and thus contains the totality of experience in one literary artifact. Let's unravel this beast.

Is it just me who love Joyce's style in this one? The Stream of consciousness style invokes a dreamy feel, and the cyclical nature of the work takes you deeper into the mind of Finnegan by mimicking his dream cycles. I feel the theme is really the cyclical nature of time and the endless return of history in the particular. A truth first grasped in the awakening; in the opague rememberance of the dream.

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I'm looking to pick up some light reading and one genre I haven't really explored is period pulp noir. Unfortunately due to the nature of the genre, there's a ton of rubbish. Any decent authors that stand out in this genre?