>be English major >professor asks me what my favorite classics

>>9689982
Tell him you prefer the lesser works of Frenchmen.

I've slowly grown to realise this myself, English language authors outside of poetry and non-fiction tend to be tedious

read the meme trilogy you twit

>>9689986
authors outside of poetry and non-fiction tend to be tedious in general.

>>9689994

I disagree. I can breeze through a novel by a frenchman or a south american and have a blast, then come to the stilted jarring manner of english language writers, who seem to be preoccupied with ideas rather than elegance. The literati have this obsession with "wit" which really dries out our literate tradition and gives us awful modernist shit like pynchon.

>>9689982
>Shakespeare

Where have you been, son? C'mon, man.

>>9690000

Case in point, Mark Danielewski. But I can appreciate a writer like him for his concepts and say, Murakami, for elegance and economy of language equally, just for different reasons.

Just say Conan Doyal and get past your professors tedious questions.

>>9690014

danielewski is a literal meme though, nobody outside of the internet takes him seriously. id be embarassed to admit ive read him in public.

>>9690014
>tfw your only literary points of reference are contemporary meme authors
must be hard

>>9689982
I become immediately suspicious of the term "classics." It's a marketing term, nobody in literary spheres refer to "the classics" unless they're the type to disregard anything older than 50 years and not published in America, in which case their opinions are worthless anyway.

>>9690039
Eh, House of Leaves was interesting I thought. I read Familiar 3 and I'm currently on Only Revolutions- structurally it intrigues me, and being a poet the style seems rather vivid and imaginative. It's a good balance of style and substance.

>>9690000
>implying ideas aren't more important than elegance
Saying something meaningful is way more important than making something SOUND meaningful.

>>9690074

theyre not mutually exclusive, numbnuts

>>9690062
I've been reading a lot of poetry recently- W.S Merwin, Philip Larkin, T.S Eliot, Dylan Thomas and some others. Am I just a walking meme?

>>9690069
Yeah, it's never used at all. Most professors refer to the "canon" of a period rather than if something is a classic. It's more flexible than creating an absolute list of "classics" as books frequently enter and leave the canon of a period.

>>9690081

Eliot is great, but Larkin just pisses me off. Thomas I can barely understand. Have you figured out his drunk ramblings, anon?

>>9690077
Never said they were. The post just implied that the elegance of the writing is more important than the ideas contained in the writing. Obviously you won't be able to convey anything without a certain level of elegance (though the threshold is very low for just getting a message across) but the ideas in a work of literature should always be the most important facet.

>>9690090
>Not thinking Pound is the true genius between him and Eliot

>>9690092

no i get it you were being typical 4chan kneejerk reactionary

>>9690096

Pound was not a particularly good poet by any stretch of the imagination. His whole life is marked by this haunting him.

>>9690106
The apparition of these anons in the crowd.

>>9689982
What Chinese books? Or just what are some of your favorites?

Gene Wolfe, Alastair Reynolds, DFW, Pynchon, John Scalzi, the list goes on.

>>9690074
You can say something meaningful in nonfiction. If you're going to sacrifice form for substance, don't half-ass it. Great literature is great because it contains both. It is the pinnacle of human achievement, and it's better not to touch it than to bastardize it.

>>9690000
>who seem to be preoccupied with ideas rather than elegance
Dickens, Austen, Melville, etc. are all very elegant writers who seem to me to have thought about their words and sentences very carefully. They are maybe not florid, but definitely elegant. I'm just assuming you're talking about the Victorians and such. Surely you don't think Shakespeare to be lacking in elegance?