/lit/ - Literature

>28
>Medical doctor
>Write a critically-acclaimed novel someday

>>8163972
Bend Sinister, by Nabokov

Subtle insult to Stalin, too.

>>8161626
What the fuck just happened?

I've been posting and joining discussions here for over a few months, and I have not once seen a Faulkner hate thread until now. He may not be to your liking (and there are definitely many who dislike him), but one can't disagree with his contributions to American literature.

He's great.

>>8160991
I prefer older textbooks because they go more in-depth and aren't really afraid to spend time explicating upon their subject matter. The recent textbooks I've read are often shorter, and more to the point, but miss a lot of nuance that the older textbooks possess.

It's an anecdotal observation, however, but that's what I noticed.

>>8160948
That is so beautiful.

>>8160150
George Meredith. He was well-known in Victorian England for his Egoist and Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but most modern readers have tired of his circumlocutious prose.

>>8160228
In effect, his allusion to the storyteller as God possesses elements of spirituality.

>>8160218
I'd like to correct this, however. I haven't read Lolita yet, but in Bend Sinister Nabokov actually saves the protagonist from despair by making him insane and acts as the omniscient character and storyteller at the end of the novel.

>>8160206
You have to admit, 'Symbols and Signs' was fucking brilliant, though. You made a nice point regarding his obsession with 'how something was said than what was being said,' but he trolled us very well with that short story. The point was that there was really no point.

>>8160181
It has an article on Wiki. Poshlost. It came from a Russian term I couldn't read.

>>8160083
I disagree with his opinion of Faulkner, but he got Finnegans Wake right.

>Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

Finnegans Wake

>>8150432
The Judge probably performed sodomy on him.

>>8145909
No, I have no background in philosophy, especially because aside from my basic Philo subjects, I graduated as a Biology major, and then Doctor of Medicine. I just admired Kant's organization with regard to his ethics (Groundwork was great), but I'm thinking CoPR will be far too challenging and unenjoyable for me.

(I read to learn, but mostly for enjoyment.)

Maybe you could ask other /lit/izens. I read more fiction, really.

These are purely anecdotal observations, but I think the reason that there is an apparent decline in people reading is that there are more avenues for entertainment. In the 1980s, there was only television and a nascent video game industry. In a third-world country such as ours, there were no cable channels then. As a result, people either had the choice of television, or reading. I was lucky that my parents chose reading.

Contrast the time then to now, where there are just too many options with the Internet, a well-developed video game industry, and many avenues for entertainment. Reading takes effort and much thought, and lesser human beings tend toward laziness: as a result, less people read as extensively as people did then. Consequently, there are fewer intelligent people.

One pediatric journal published a report, however, that because of parents' reliance on technology, there is an increase of children developing ADHD and a decrease in the general IQ of a lot of these children. Their reason is simple: the abuse of technology during the child's earliest years stultifies their ability for imagination, and this affects their mental development. I do think there is credence in this belief, seeing that millennials, among them my brother, are less intelligent than the generation prior to them.

I've read two of Kant's shorter works, and would decide on reading Critique of Pure Reason depending on how intrigued I was with the work after reading Korner's introduction on him.

It turns out that Kant's really among the most difficult writers I've ever read: I had a hard time reading Prolegomena and Groundwork, and even with Korner's lucid prose, Kant is still difficult to penetrate.

What are your thoughts on Kant?

>>8144903
You could read complex philosophy books, but if you want some guidelines to become better, you can try to get Dale Carnegie or Normal Vincent Peale books.

I have four, I guess. Two of them were my literature professors, and two just like reading.

>>8130724
I made my own list for Faulkner.

>>8130729
is right, start with his short stories, then ease into As I Lay Dying.

>>8126064
I barely see him mentioned around here, though.

Jose Rizal - El Filibusterismo
Jose Rivera - The Vortex
Frans Eemil Sillanpaa - Meek Heritage

>>8125727
Tadeusz Borowski - 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen'

Hermann Broch - 'The Sleepwalkers'

>>8109300
I've read the first book. It was also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, and had bitter humor. Bras had a small treasure because he didn't bring a child into this forsaken Earth.

That's not Hamlet.

>>8107848
>>8107855
Nice. Good jokes!