What is your definition of highbrow literature?

>>9473706
If I raise my brow very high while reading it

Same with low brow, but with lowering instead of raising of course

Adheres to the aesthetic notion of the sublime, it explores the human condition (Proust being the best example, perhaps), it's writerly rather than readerly (Barthes), it has complex characters whose mental activity is not spoon-fed (ToM), and it doesn't stick to existing boundaries: It explores beyond (experimental) and it comments upon the shoulders of literature and society. (highly intertextual)

>>9473790
>Proust

lol

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Books in which no one poops, farts, or fucks.

>>9473706
Shakespeare. I think his play Hamlet would have been highly controversial in his day. Perhaps more than his life. If you understand North European christian culture you'll realize they believed Ham was Hamilcar. To them he's the reason Southern European were of a different race than them. Blood impurity. Than Hamlet would signify a story of them in their pristine white royalty.

>>9473849
W H A T ' S S O F U N N Y , F R I E N D ?

>>9473706
Joseph McElroy, Nabokov

>>9473790
Bravo

>>9473706
I have problems with the concept of "highbrow literature". People should be encouraged to read anything in the vernacular, no matter how difficult. Maybe literature in the original Greek, Hebrew and Latin should be considered highbrow, but not much else besides.

Pretentious garbage devoid of any actual value as art. Literature written for the sake of being literary.
>>9473790
>human condition
Fuck off with your platitudes

>>9475122
What works exemplify literature as literary and nothing besides?

>>9475129
There is no 'nothing besides'.

However, what came to my mind is Ovid, both his writing and the Renaissance revival (obsession) with him.

relational definition
highbrow : middlebrow : lowbrow - rock : paper : scissors

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>>9475144
fucked up the sequence
*paper : rock : scissors