Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 735. page

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and why were so many European intellectuals at this time racist?

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>age
>5 favorite writers
>other anons r8

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www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/25/why-shakespeare-is-italian

www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespeareitalian.html

etinkerbell.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/was-shakespeare-italian-and-born-in-italy/

GG britbongs, your main author is actually a spaghetti

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Turn your depression into art and poetry.

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If I want to read but I don't know what to read, what should I read?

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>start reading pic related
>expect a story about immigration or a clash of cultures or period politics, with a surreal twist
>get story about a downtrodden stoker, a dark maze, a femdom scene, and autism
What the fuck am I reading?

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Heyyy, this book's pretty good. Just finished book four, looking forward to Diomedes being dope af.

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I've been working my way through Plato's dialogues and have been thoroughly enjoying them, despite some weak arguments, and logical flaws. But this book is on a whole new level of stupidity. How much of this was intended to be taken seriously? Was it an exercise for students to pick apart? I can't imagine someone being stupid enough to support the ideas conveyed here.

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Thoughts?

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Acclaimed writer Zadie Smith writer:

Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not willfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about. For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise. Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results. It's certainly not a call to arms for the autobiographer, although some writers will always mistake the readerly desire for personal truth as their cue to write a treatise or a speech or a thinly disguised memoir in which they themselves are the hero. Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can't help tell if you write well; it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.
..

Why does /lit/, through preferences, critiques, and samples of writing, contradict this?

And, thoughts on her opinion?

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>I'm dead.
>You're remarkably animated for a corpse
>No, inside.
>And why is that? Has a woman taken your spirit?
>Ha, not a chance!
>Why, are you a virgin? Perhaps the comma wasn't necessary, and even then the question isn't exactly a riddle.
>I'm no virgin, but I have only slept with one woman legally.
>What were the rest, prostitutes?
>No, I raped them.
>A fine wit you have.
>And they say wit is a sign of intelligence.
>Well, you've proved them wrong.
>I'll have you eat your words.
>I could only eat them if they were minced, and I'm no butcher.
>Continue like this and you'll make a butcher of me.

That's it so far.

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Is there a word for the literary device of stating something directly in very plain terms that yet the words carry an immense weight. It's a quality I notice in Biblical language and I think Neil Young lyrics but somehow not that common.

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Can we all finally just admit that prose is just poetry for brainlets? Do you not find it strange how the greatest works in literature are poems?

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Is it best to read older literary works (Paradise Lost, Dubliners, Moby Dick) with or without footnotes?