Has anyone stumped him?
Who hasn't stumped him, dude.
The powerful Sam Harris stumped him multiple times.
Then again who hasn't Sam Harris stumped?
>inb4 people misreading the Chomsky interchange who think Chomsky won and didn't completely embarrass himself
>>7883526
“But we are, in many respects, just such a ‘well-intentioned giant.’ And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this.” – Sam Harris
USA = Well-intentioned giant?
Someone doesn’t know how power structures work and operate in social systems, now, do they? There are no good or bad guys in the world, kiddies. It’s about economic stability and power. Sam Harris is a fool to believe in the whole good guy/bad guy spiel.
"one should not be friends with a person of higher station than ones own, unless he is also of higher virtue, which will justify the respect shown to him"
what does this mean?
It means, "I'm a soul-sucking asshole."
Who is "he"
It means that you shouldn't getting involved in sucking up to people just because they're powerful.
What the fuck did I just read?
A Master peeice
Waiting for Godot
good shit.
What would one have to do to unironically and accurately call themselves an ubermensch?
>>7883290
u know how in movies/animu niggas will walk of a dock or sumn and material will just form until their feet? well basically every one of your interactions would need to be best-case scenario
ubermensch ain't even human he ain't calling himself shit
>>7883295
>u know how in movies/animu niggas will walk of a dock or sumn and material will just form until their feet?
no, i don't know that, i'm sorry
What's the verdict on this one?
MZD wears a fucking fedora. Everywhere.
gimmicky trash, but kinda fun / spooky
look through the archive y doncha
So since P&V are shit, who does the most accurate Dostoevsky translations?
McDuff is the best though I don't know about most accurate
Sam Harris says everything Dosto says about human nature/the human condition but better and he's in English already so... pretty obvious what to do
P&V are great, don't fall for the memes. Two jealous contrarian articles don't a reputation ruin.
Infinite Jest is the end of postmodernism. It is the final work in a trilogy of works that encapsulate the rapid changes that confronted literature in the 20th century, the first two being Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. As a modernist work (and in contention only with Eliot's Waste Land for the title of "the" modernist work), Ulysses builds upon realist attempts to derive truth or meaning out of the mundane or everyday lived experience of average people by implementing abstract literary techniques, most famously stream of consciousness, to better represent the "new" or "modern" way of living. However, Ulysses and many modernist works like it abstracted language to the point where meaning and truth often became obscured rather than illuminated; where ambiguity reigned, and entire passages turned into almost impenetrable networks of jargon and sentence fragments. These experimental forms of writing seemed to destroy past mathematical/logical/romantic forms of writing without supplanting new forms that could be relied upon to derive truth.
>>7882924
The experiments of the modernist movement thus led to the disillusionment and embitterment of the postmodernists. Left without a solid literary foundation to build upon and without even a sense of literary community, many postmodernists struggled with creating truth or meaning in their works and applied an apocalyptic veneer to their literature. Pynchon, who studied physics and engineering, used the thermodynamic law of entropy to express these frustrations. His works, Gravity's Rainbow most notably, depict the inevitable breakdown of complex or even simplistic systems. His stories begin with intricate plots comprised of hundreds of characters and end with disjointed, unclear, and unresolved conclusions. Questions are left unanswered, mired in the abstract literary techniques of the modernists. Characters merely disappear rather than reach, or fail to reach, their goals. Postmodernism in general wracks its brains for solutions to the existential quandary of whether truth can exist in a subjective world. Their works describe deconstruction without hope of a new foundation.
>>7882924
>>7882928
Wallace's Infinite Jest becomes the first major work to spurn this downward trajectory. Although cloaked in the abstract elements of his forebears, and constructing a complex, thousand-character plot in a Pynchonesque vein, Wallace manages to strike against these perennial literary pratfalls with moments of extreme lucidity and structural coherence. His story, itself involved with an inescapable echo chamber of meaningless entertainment, links the postmodern entropic catastrophe to consumerist culture: Upon watching "the perfect entertainment" that appears in the novel, characters lose all will to do anything else, even feed themselves; all constructive activities cease until their eventual death. The characters search for an antidote to this condition that is rumored to exist, much as the postmodernists searched (to no avail) for a solution to the death of truth and meaning in both literature and the world around them. However, unlike Gravity's Rainbow, the primary conflict and convoluted plot of Infinite Jest can and is resolved, with clear answers to many of the questions left open at the novel's ending provided through clues sprinkled throughout the novel itself. The point of the novel is not, as in postmodernism, that no point can be found, but rather that a point can be found if the reader exerts the effort to find it, to make the connections, to fill the blanks left unsaid. By no coincidence does much of the rest of the novel deal with the forging of community between those who otherwise would be left isolated and alone: the tennis school for brooding prodigies (emphasized with Hal Incandenza, who struggles to form meaningful relationships) and the Alcoholics Anonymous group for those who have destroyed their lives with drugs. While the overarching plot of the perfect entertainment unifies these elements, much of the story is about how the characters in these spheres manage to escape their own internal realms of meaning and truth and create communal meanings and truths. Rather than increased isolation, as in Pynchon, the novel ends with increased community. In doing so, it reverses the entropic trends expressed in Pynchon's works and the works of many other postmodernists. And its ultimate conclusion, when pieced together by the reader, suggests an end to the hyperconsumerist enslavement of humanity at the hands of entertainment. In doing so, Infinite Jest provides the first critical break with postmodernist themes and trains of thought and paves the way for a literature that can once again perceive meaning in the world.
Please, go wank your post-autism shit somewhere else.
Who would make your American canon? And which of their works?
DFW?
Edgar Allan Poe?
Steinbeck?Stephen King?
>>7882866
I'll skip the easy ones like Melville, Hemginway, Steinbeck, etc.
Controversial/unpopular ones:
Raymond Carver- pretty much everything
Raymond Chandler- at least a couple of his novels
Larry McMurtry- Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove
James Welch- Winter in the Blood
Stephen King- The Stand
Nelson Algren- A Walk on the Wild Side
Samuel Shem- The House of God
my diary desu
Melville, Pynchon, Wolfe, DFW
Things I'm interested in but haven't yet read:
The recognitions
Miss macintosh, my darling
david foster wallace
a novel
good meme, friends
What are lit thoughts on this?
>>7882840
Is that loss?
is this the ultimate argentinian masterpiece?
Bumpin' cause I just bought this and was wondering if it'll be better than expected
How did you feel when he died?
relieved because i gained his spiritual powers
i feelt bad
>>7882714
So we're in a Highlander type situation?
Hello lit! I just finished reading this novel and I absolutely liked it even though is way harder than the preivous two.
Does anyone else see it as a personal experience of Samuel dealing with death and fear of death and/or nothingness? Is true thar Beckett was pretty far away from death when he wrote it but it reads that way. Do you think it is auto biographical?
The other thing I loved was Samuel's genius for visual situations and impossible situations/movements. Like when he images his character as unwinding trough the world and then collapsing in an inward spiral towards itself. Or when he imagines it as having no thickness being pure separation between inwards and outwards. Those images are rrally powerful and Beckett has a genius for expresing despair in metaphores thar mean nothing (much like Kafka's parables).
Watycha think?
>>7882491
>Samuel
>>7882616
>Beckett
He ain't your buddy, Anon. He is Beckett for you.
And I doubt that it is autobiographical as such. Sure, Beckett conveys his thoughts and feelings on the subject through the Unnamable, but he certainly isn't the Unnamable, nor experienced what he did.
Kind of unrelated, but hve you read any of his plays? What was your favorite? Mine is Endgame. I think it is a better, more thought-out and well-rounded play than Godot.
What the fuck? Was Tolstoy retarded? The "debates" between Levin and Sergei Ivanovich, where you're clearly supposed to think Levin's right, are insane.
>Hurr Russia doesn't need medicine because I don't believe in doctors
>Hurr Russians don't need education because serfs who can read are lazy
>Hurr I don't need a fair jury because I won't commit a crime
It's not a very good book, don't worry about it too much.
I'm currently reading it
Levin a cute
'Death'
Why only Shakespeare makes me "feel"?
I nearly cried with Nabokov, and Bartol made me think, but our friend William gives life and value to the words, regardless of whether they are mundane or transcendental.
>>7882000
so tfw no feel?(except in shakespeare)
>>7882000
because you're a Romantic faggot
>>7882008
>faggot
>2016
I honestly don't get why so many authors, philosophers, you name it, are so jubelant about shit like "ego death", or get excited about the fact that subjectivity is an illusion, like some post-structuralists do.
I don't even agree with that, but even if it is so, it is a terrifying prospect and I cannot even perceive it as a release.
Why do people feel such a release from being an "I"? Or even wish to extinguish that idea? If anything being an "I" is a release from the tyranny of the 'greater whole'.
>>7881878
you're spooked
It's a continuation of the eastern/schopenhauer take
the ego though is the newer concept
>>7881878
Hard to do magick without suppressing the ego.