Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4816. page

>>7421911
NOT YOUR BLOG

>>7421911
A vial of Nora's Farts.

>>7421911
Does anyone remember the wishlist threads we had, back in 2011?

Amazon apparently saved the wishlists of all the people I bought for as "friends".

I kind of want to buy a book off of some again, but who knows how many people still have the same address.

>>7421881
You also have to say why the host opens that particular door.

yes, swap to get ulysses

>>7421881
one of these things is not like the others. one of these things is utter shit.

>>7421819
your love is my drug ;)

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>>7421819
/lit/ is here to get you interested in books. Not improve your life, though that should come as a result of the aforementioned.

>>7421819
it's because you stopped reading DFW

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I try to look for old Vonnegut wherever I go.

I have a 1969 Bookclub Edition of SH5 I paid $5 for...goes for $60-100

Also have a fairly old copy of Player Piano...1952 printing?

>>7421769
>paying $5 for Slaughterhouse 5

You got ripped the fuck off son

>>7421748
materialism

>>7421674
Can you divulge more about these texts and her ideology?

>>7421674
>Ice & Fire
That's the one with the dragons in it right?

>>7421679
Woman Hating is just about 200 pages and serves as a manifesto of sorts.

Lord of The Flies, 1984, Death of Ivan Ilyich, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Pretty good stuff I guess.

>>7421581
Yeah outside of speak I read animal farm, Oedipus, hamlet, Macbeth, an lots of Poe

>liked:

Shakespeare's works
Of Mice and Men

>meh:
Night. It's not a bad book, I was just tired of reading about the fucking holocaust in school so it was really tiresome to read.

>shit / can't remember:
The rest, mostly godawful young adult fiction.

>>7421497
Faulkner

>>7421525
This and Violent Bear It Away by O'Connor

>>7421497
Literature as a whole sucks here. My entire area is fixated on regional fiction. I read to let me get out of the south, in my head, for a little while.

>>7421424
cont.
>girl stops me, saying that I need to talk to someone, name's unfamiliar
>she leads me down to building office
>laptop's there
>hall director's there
>"have a seat and close the door"
sweating.jpg
>"some of your friends are very concerned about you"
>"..."
>"they've asked me to talk to you"
>"..."
>"we found the phrase 'kill me' written over 70 times on your laptop and they said you dissappeared today"
>"If you ever feel like hurting yourself, it's okay to talk to someone"
what.jpg
>"I understand you haven't been talking lately, but I need you answer some questions"
>spend 15 minutes trying to explain spiritual journeys/mention siddartha
>she doesn't understand, just gives me concerned looks
>end up barely bullshitting my way off the suicide watchlist
>"you look a little sedated"
>"I've been up for over 24 hours"
>"mmmkay, were there any drugs or alcohol ivolved in the last 24 hours"
ohgod.jpg
>she's convinced I'm using
>I don't even drink coffee
>get grilled for another 10 minutes
>get laptop back, shamble back to lounge
>everyone looking at me like I just tried to kill myself
>every S.A. in the building asks if I'm doing okay everytime I see them
>even the ones that I was friends with two weeks ago now treat me like anything will push me over the edge
>friends keep trying to make sure I'm okay
>if anyone reports me again, I'll get put on a watchlist
>tfw I just wanted to find enlightenment
fuck you /lit/, and fuck this book

10/10

>>7421424
my favorite part of siddhartha was when Samwise flopped out Frodo's cock and started blowing him. who knew buddha would be so gay?

>>7421399
(You)

I personally hated the movie adaption of Gatsby

>>7421432
The point is, it's still better than the book.

I am here what ish it

>>7421386
Batsymbol.

>>7421386
> being a literal imbecile who doesn't know how to desu to be honest in google familia

http://german.as.nyu.edu/object/SlavojZizek.html

Fisting Unto Death by Michel Foucault

>>7421350
The sticky, by anonymous.

>>7421350
The Pedigree of Specificity by Walter Bronswut

Stick your finger up a teenage girl's asshole while making out and worrying that she's actually 15 and not 16 like she said and feel a poo and pretend you didn't and lick your finger so she makes a weirded out face and forget about it and then 5 years later remember that you did it and wonder why

The Romans.

>>7421337
>>7421342
Either of these is fine.

if you don't feel comfortable being tracked don't use social media.

also cool literature thread

>>>/g/

I'm just wondering how others feel, I really like goodreads, but I'm hesitate about "questionable books".

>>7421454
Thousands of people have read Mein Kampf on goodreads

The three ways poetry conveys meaning:

>you charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this.

On ulterior motives:

>Partisans of particular ideas may value writers who agree with them more than writers who do not, they may, and often do, value bad writers of their own party or religion more than good writers of another party or church. [...] Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm.

Some general stuff:

>Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.

>The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance.

>The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention.

>France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes.

>Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

>More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.

Finally, the second section of the book is filled with practical examples of readings (though I didn't find them particularly illuminating or helpful), with various "exercises" that are sort of aimed at a classroom setting (such as: write a parody of a bad poem, and have other students guess what it is parodying).

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How to Read Literature, Terry Eagleton - 3.5/5

I liked this one, it does a lot of "teaching by example" by providing the reader with a wide range of literary analysis. Somewhat dry style, filled with annoyingly bad jokes. The focus is on novels, and pays almost no attention to the classics, poetry, anything published after ~1950, etc. Eagleton really likes to juxtapose the "realist" novel against the "modernist" novel and constantly brings it up (realist novels do THIS, but modernist novels do THAT) -- it's not always successful. The advice of this book is to focus on technique and form while de-emphasizing "content", and that's the type of readings he presents us with.

Eagleton loves Dickens and spends a lot of time on him, especially Great Expectations.

The book suffers from a lack of structure. It's divided into 5 chapters: Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, Value. The first two chapters are fairly coherent, but the other three are a clusterfuck. It jumps all over the place, from one example to another, with only the faintest connection to the chapter and between the texts/readings. The book needed a better editor, someone who could impose a stronger structure on it.

>Openings
Starts out analyzing opening sentences/paragraphs. A Passage to India, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, The Canterbury Tales, Moby Dick, Waiting for Godot, The Third Policeman, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

>Character
Provides some general discussion of characters in literature: how they are constructed, various archetypes, etc. Some questions to ask when thinking about characters:

>Is a particular literary figure presented simply as a type or emblem, or is she subtly psychologised?
>Is she grasped from the inside or treated from other characters’ standpoints?
>Is she seen as coherent or self- contradictory, static or evolving, firmly etched or fuzzy at the edges?
>Are characters viewed in the round or stripped to functions of the plot?
>Are they defined through their actions and relationships, or do they loom up as disembodied consciousnesses?
>Do we feel them as vivid physical presences or essentially verbal ones, as readily knowable or as full of elusive depths?

Some of the realist vs modernist stuff:
>The realist novel tends to grasp individual lives in terms of histories, communities, kinship and institutions. Personal history has a coherent evolution.
>The modernist novel quite often presents us with a single, solitary consciousness. Identity is pitched into crisis. They press the complexity of the characters until it overflows (e.g. Woolf)

Then he goes on to some deeper analysis of a couple of characters, particularly Sue from Jude the Obscure.

>Narrative
This is where the structure starts becoming muddled.

Starts off talking about narrators, the various types, how entangled the author is with the narrator, etc.

>If characters them-selves are reluctant to commit murder, the narrative itself may always step in and oblige.

There's a discussion of political/social implications of happy endings, and how they're often ironic. Then some "plot vs narrative" bits.

Realism vs modernism:
>Realism: straightforward plots, beginning-middle-end, there is logic and order to the universe, etc.
>Modernism: all that shit falls apart. WWI? No clear causality, collection of independent mini-narratives, etc. => all narratives must be ironic and keep their limitations in mind. Contra "progress".

>Interpretation
Literary works carry their context within them, which makes interpretation challenging. Fictionality is one reason why literary works tend to be more ambiguous than non-literary ones - good use of the lack of context can be used to generate creative ambiguity!

A realist novel presents (the illusion of) characters and events which seem to exist independently of itself.

Form, genre, etc. mediate content - should interpret in light of them. But ignoring them can make for fun readings.

>One should not make a fetish of personal experience.

>In the ancient Jewish practice of midrash or scriptural interpretation, it was sometimes deemed acceptable to assign new, strikingly improbable meanings to the Bible.

Then there's a long analysis of Great Expectations that spans everything the book has discussed so far. At the end of the chapter he moves into a (thankfully short) fairly bad analysis of Harry Potter...a misguided attempt to appeal to millenials?

>Value
Originality: not necessarily great, and in some ages it was viewed with a lot of suspicion. Then the Romantics came and their individualism, etc. was packaged with a reverence for originality. Pomo sheds originality again, instead going for something like creative recycling.

Are all great works timeless/universal? Opinions differ. Probably.

>A literary classic, some critics consider, is not so much a work whose value is changeless as one that is able to generate new meanings over time.

Is it well executed, judging by standards of excellence?

Complexity: not sufficient for greatness, not always good.

Some more examples, this time of a more general analytical nature + an evaluation of "literary worth".

>If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism.

Easy: NYRB.

>>7421076
Penguin books, friend.
:^)

>>7421080
Fuck off trip.

>>7421076
Depends on the book. Vintage's 'The Foundation Pit' is better than NYRB's.