Why is elitism so pervasive in the literary world?

>>8664740
because when you put a lot of effort into understanding something, you'll get frustrated when someone else gets the same things out of something for less effort

>>8664740
Because some things are better than others.

>implying a subculture that produces abortions like Emily Gould has any claim to elitism

>>8664855
Emily Gould and most womyn authors are affirmative action cases

>>8664862
If you aren't a time traveler, the literary world is plagued by these, or worse, people that promote them.

>>8664982
publishing being a pink ghetto is why
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/us-study-finds-publishing-is-overwhelmingly-white-and-female

it's not prevalent elsewhere?

>>8665008
the polylego community is very welcoming at least

I wish it was prevalent. I hang out on /lit/ because people actually have standards here.

What I really wonder is, grossly generalizing, how the largest sum of lit(or at least the loudest) "understands" so much about philosophy and are so deeply engrossed in works that demonstrate all kinds of viewpoints and ideas can still (or choose to) act as the specific kind of people who authors write negatively about, mainly being close minded anger filled elitist snobs who regard other's opinions, if different, as being objectively inferior and thus to be brushed aside without second thought, all of this,while mocking other groups of people of being simple-minded circlejerkers.

It's actually the other way around: elitism has been the rule for most of history in all human endeavours. It's just that the market has managed to overcome this in all other artforms by making them easily consumable (see music) or the relevant artforms have mostly been replaced (see painting, sculpture). Literature is in a weird place because it was getting more accessible when the novel dominated in the 19th century, through ease of of distribution, but then it got replaced by film/tv as the main form of narration; but because writing is overall a lot less expensive (less people, less materials, less physical skill than instruments or drawing) than filming, and because literature has the largest canon of any (hint: history starts with writing), it's managed to fill its own niche; at the same time, the reasons it was displaced (its lack of immediacy) continue to make it relatively more isolated.

>>8665415
There's a difference between knowing the way and actually walking it. But really, they're mostly unselfaware; which isn't helped by people overall being incapable of producing constructive criticism.

File: ackshully.jpg (7KB, 250x226px) Image search: [Google]

7KB, 250x226px

>>8664740

First you must understand the elitist.

Imagine you've accomplished nothing in your life. The most likely reason for this is that you have no talents, skills or redeeming qualities of any kind. In other words, you suck at everything you do.

Yet, despite this, you don't want to be treated like a loser. Indeed, people figuring out how useless you are is a source of great anxiety for you. It fills you with great dread to imagine being derided or insulted to any degree in a social situation, for what could you possibly say in your defense? Surely you would need to say SOMETHING.

Now, think about how easy it is to simply read a book and tell everyone that you liked it. Think how easy it is to say that smart people read the books you like, and stupid people read the books you don't. Is it difficult to say "his prose evoked the poetic meter of Faulkner?" Is it difficult to say "that book wasn't hard to read at all, I understood it perfectly!"

It never works on people who know literature, though. They'll see you coming from a mile away.

Pic related. Did you know he wrote the narrative elements of his thousand-page-long novel Infinite Jest (which is a Shakespeare reference, btw) to fit together like Sierpinski triangles? If that makes any sense at all to you.

>>8666345
is this bait

>>8666442
Nah I get what he's saying I just think he might be one of who he's bashing.