Share your contrarian literary opinions

I like Twain

>>8935087
How on earth is that contrarian?

Tolstoy's a hack. War and Peace is a shitty Vanity Fair and Madame Bovary makes Anna Karenina look like it was written by John Green

>>8935072

it's all for nothing and we all die alone.

i dont like vonnegut and i have no idea what people see in his books

>>8935072
Post modernism is the death of literature and art.

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>>8935116
Yes!
Gogol > Dostoyevsky > Tolstoy

>>8935131
Intellectually it was a short term gain and a long term loss

>>8935125
He's like a 2edgy version of Gary Larson

Dan Schneider is a genius writer and no one feel his impact until decades later

Charles Bukowski is the best poet in human history

>>8935072
Wuthering Heights is trash.

>>8935131
>>8935143
It was absolutely inevitable and now we are faced with: what next?

Philosophy is a vain man's theology.

>>8935598
Bluebird is pretty fooking good

Stirner made the ideal society in Ego and His Own

>>8935164
The Nickelodeon guy?

>>8935657
http://www.cosmoetica.com/Poetrylinks.htm

>>8935598
That's not just contrarian, but extremely dumb too. It also shows how much of a plebeian you are about poetry.

Fiction ended in the 20th century. There's no reason to make it anymore.

>>8935164
I've been reading his humongous Gravity's Rainbow review (where he trashes it). I'm not sure if he's a crappy critic or if all critics analyse lit in this very superficial way but he just arrived at a different conclusion to everyone else.

>>8935710
Y-you're a plebeian, anon! A fugly German Hun with a huge face like a pock-marked asteroid got moar puss than you in the time it took him to write 'Women'. Stop being so livid with jealousy, perma-virgin.

>>8935123
>Saying the truth
>Contrarian

>>8935607
>and now we are faced with: what next?
No we aren't.

There is no "what next?" in some ongoing human tale of literary movements ascending like the angels of history.

Post-modern thought rejected the grand narratives of modernism. For example: "progress".

The idea that we just pick those back up and act like post-modernism was a brief madness on a path proceeding "forward!!!" would be discarding probably one of the best insights of post-modernism: That the promises and hermeneutics of modernism are deceptive and ultimately illusory.

>>8935116
you must be retarded, I'm sorry anon

>>8935607
Original guy here: I think it starts with returning to philosophy that exists outside of the 'useful' sphere. The common need taking over the common good as well has lead us to a point where work and financial security have left no room for someone to ask questions like "what is being?"

Post modernism is a retarded child grunting because it wants to have a voice too.

No opinion ever posted on /lit/ has any value

I have respect for people who pat themselves on the back for reading stacks of fiction books.

>>8935072
>Ayn Rand wrote some compelling prose, and if she bothered to listen to her editors & critics she could have produced a genuine masterpiece.
>Most of Zizek's insights are common knowledge or old folksy wisdom dressed up in academic language. He's not the first to have them, just the first to formalize them.
>The novella is more suited than the novel to most stories; the reason so many bad novels exist is because authors overstay their ideas' welcome. (This doesn't mean there aren't great novels, just that many of the subpar ones would be better if they were shorter and more focused.)
>Prose poetry isn't inherently bad. Rupi just isn't a good prose poet.
>Derrida did nothing wrong.
>The "footnote to Aristotle" meme needs to die. Yes, he discussed almost everything, but not in nearly enough detail or depth to imply that all other philosophy is grounded in his work.
>Sartre and Camus were both respectable philosophers, just relatively one-note and touchy-feely.
>Nationalism isn't inherently bad.
>Metamodernism will actually have a profound impact on our culture.

There is some amazing contemporary literature out there.

>>8935116
read late tolstoy

he all but disowned WP and AK.

>>8935125
only contrarian on r/books desu

>>8935164
go to bed dan

>>8935598
first truly stupid opinion ITT

>>8936354
you havent read enough and you think you're smarter than you are

>>8936357
What are some of your favourites?

>>8935125
I read mother night and couldn't stand it.

Delillo's prose is bad. I've never cringed more reading a novel. It's purple writing at a high-literary level. Often it reads like a hyper-literate jewish grandmother were writing it. Reviews constantly cite his prose as his crowning achievement and I honestly do not see it. I've read Underworld, Cosmopolis, The Body Artist, Mao II, Libra, and White Noise.

This is not to say he's bad. He's an incredibly astute commentator. He's able to synthesize difficult cultural critiques and observations with characters and plot in a way that is both easily graspable and incredibly complex. It's just that he constantly steps on his own toes with his descriptive prose (I have less of a problem with his oft-stylized dialogue).

>>8936367
I just read Laurus, in the last year I read On the Edge, Ishiguro hits it out of the park every time, Red April by Roncagliolo was great, Marlon James is fantastic, The Sellout was funny, Llosa is enjoyable, and I am about to read Zama by di Bennedetto and Eileen by Moshfegh both of which I am very excited for. Basically I feel like I find 2-3 really decent 7/10+ contemporary novels a year. And if you consider "contemporary" from like, 1980, I could go on and on and on.

>>8936392
Zama is actually a translation of a 60s novel though, so that doesnt count, my mistake

>Emily Dickinson is the only female to be worth the paper she's printed on
>Phillip Roth just isn't any good
>Pale Fire is Nabokov's only quality work
>Contemporary literature is dead and will not be revived until the coastal, liberal degenerates who serve as its gatekeepers are purged

>>8936364
>you havent read enough and you think you're smarter than you are
Wanna recommend me some books senpai? Not trying to be snide, just curious what you think I might be missing.

>>8936449

>the "X is dead" meme

Do what every great artist does and work around the constraints of the time to convey your message.

I really like the first 4 Dune books

i really hate catcher in the rye

>>8936463
more high modernism for one

Woolf would be considered equal or superior to Joyce if she was not a woman

>>8936619
It's more likely that she wouldn't be considered at all if she were a man.

>>8935072
Iliad>Odyssey

>>8935116

>War and Peace is a shitty Vanity Fair

You're literally a fucking retard. Those novels have nothing in common besides roughly taking place in the same time period.

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>>8935116
I honestly think people who have can't at least see why a great writer might be regarded as great should be banned from reading.

If you can't see why Tolstoy is a great novelist you literally cannot read and you need to get back to the YouTube comments section

>>8936619

I'd agree with you if Ulysses wasn't so virtuosic and varied in its style

I mean, if Joyce wrote essays, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that they wouldn't be better than Woolf's essays, so that's a plus for her

>>8935072
David Foster Wallace was a pretentious asshole and his books are empty and just trying too hard, with none of the "intelligence" or "disturbing exploration of the human psyche" they purport to have.

>>8936354
>Most of Zizek's insights are common knowledge or old folksy wisdom dressed up in academic language. He's not the first to have them, just the first to formalize them.

Same could be said about a lot of philosophy desu. I remember reading Rawls a lot before and thinking "I've thought about most of this stuff before, independent of reading this".

>>8936800

Try his short stories, I prefer them

Speaking to this -- I'm not sure if it's an edgy opinion -- I think DFW is a much better essayist than a fiction writer

>>8936810
The same guy here.
I read a couple of them ("Incarnations of burned children" and "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again") and they're actually fine, and "This Is Water" is pretty good. What I can't stand are his novels.

I agree that he's better as an essayist, I couldn't get to page 100 of Infinite Jest.

Catch 22 is rubbish, and only a masochist goes beyond the first 50 pages.