Any classic books which openly critique storytelling or literate

Plato's views on poetry and mimesis in The Republic

Aristotle's Poetics

The Romantics (English + German) on the function of poetry and the poet seeing the truer or better reality, or creating it

Auerbach's Mimesis

Northrop Frye on mimesis

Ricoeur on narrative

>>9596849
An excellent reply, thanks a lot anon

>>9597113
No worries, also check out
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/blueguitar.html

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

>>9596822
Pretty much the main point of The Quixote.

>In the novel you once again brilliantly mix reality (or perhaps the strong illusion of reality) with “true” fiction. As an author, what do you make of these terms, reality and fiction?

>>Oh, you have used the expression “author” several times. I cannot let this slide. In my case, there is no difference between a statement I make as an author and a statement I make not as an author. There is simply no difference. I do not have two separate lives or two faces. I am an author in my personal life. And the other way around too, I am a person in my life as an author. This is not simply a play with words. I hear your questions, I try to answer them, but in the meantime in my head there is . . . a sentence. I wait for an airplane, a train, a bus, someone else, or I happen to be waiting for them to bring me the glass of brandy that I have ordered at long last, and they don’t, damn them, and in the meantime this whole…is a single whole. I don’t know if what I am saying is clear. I do not divide myself up into parts. I do not divide myself into parts depending on what is happening around me at a given moment or depending on which part of me the things happening around me happen to want. I am always aware that I am part of a whole.

>>And so now the question, reality or fiction. It will be about charlatanism. As a child, I was constantly chided for colouring, exaggerating, overstating, and distorting the “truth.” This has not changed. For some unusual reason, the essence of which I do not entirely understand, reality as such was always inadequate and remained inadequate to me, so I always told tales, fictionalized, changed the proportions, and I always made changes in places where I sensed a lack of proportion in the “real” process of events. Disproportionateness. As if reality had a more proportionate, more “real” version, so I thought for a time.

But then I had to accept that I was not on the right track. Reality is like God: “we are convinced that He exists,” but He has never appeared in . . . certainty. He does not present Himself. Nor does reality present itself. We surmise that “this” is reality and not something else. The more honest among us try again and again to get closer to it. But that is like trying to see your own eyes. This drove me to despair in my youth. And then, following the guidance given by Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, I resolved to be a “scoundrel.” Or to use a different word, a charlatan. Writing is quackery. But so is proclaiming anything about reality. We are charlatans. Simple little charlatans. So why not be a charlatan by profession, I thought. And I started to write Satantango. That’s how it began.

>>9597785
Which book?

>>9597789
Krasznahorkai's Báró Wenckheim hazatér, English translation forthcoming in 2018.

So not classic literature, I suppose.

Still, check out Satantango by Krasznahorkai. And if you're up for it, try Wittgenstein's Nephew or The Loser by Thomas Bernhard.