/lit/ - Literature

>Anyone familiar with Kant’s antinomies—again, certainly not a certified Redpiller—will know that, almost like the skeptics he accuses of giving up, Kant admits that certain things are indeed unknowable: whether time and space are infinite or limited; whether every composite thing is made of simple substances or not; whether we are free or not; whether there is a higher being or not… of which the third one I disagree. Certainly, though, the point of my ramble is to say that no one is going to dare claim they know what Love, of all things, is, it being, above all things, mysterious. As will become our constant theme and necessary chant towards these Redpillers: it seems so silly to have to reiterate such an obvious point as that, that no one knows what love is.1 To sum this short rambling up, though, take an antinomy that even I have struggled with: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” A woman in my life showed me this once, and everything inside me thought the opposite. To her, though, it’s true (“Unless she’s lying!” screams the Redpiller). As to me, the flipside of it is true. Switch the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in the sentence, and use whichever one to tell the according opposite sex it’s true, and watch the hidden wrath.

https://kidcatallus.com/2018/06/01/on-the-red-pill-and-the-general-uncertainty-of-things/

>>10457512
>>10457409
>>10456853
would definitely chill with, but I hate tea

Shakespeare Complete
Ovid's Art of Love
Moby Dick
Anna Karenina
Ulysses

Martial
DeLillo
Montaigne
Schopenhauer
Plato

Name five books that you loved and anons recommend you three more.

Ovid - Art of Love
Montaigne - Essays
Schopenhauer - Essays
DeLillo - White Noise
Kierkegaard - Either/Or

pic unrelated, i think.

What the FUCK is irony? I've been trying to figure this out for two years now and I feel like Borges searching a hexagonal library for however many books, only I just want to know what the FUCK irony is. Is Borges ironical? Is DFW ironical? Oh! I get it! Irony is the opposite of sincerity. Wait, no, that's insincerity. Wait, was I being ironic at the beginning of this sentence when I said "I got it?" Or is that sarcasm? Holy shit put my dick in the dirt because I figured out why Wallace killed himself. It wasn't for the fame or because he suffered from depression or because fate willed it so that I might be prone to write him in as my Virgil for my 21st century Divine Irony. It was because he didn't know what it (irony [are these brackets or parentheses ironic?])

WHAT IS IT? Seriously guys. I'm not safe from it wherever I go. DFW, Joyce, Borges, Tolstoy, Proust, Shakespeare, the Romans, the Greeks, fucking PLATO. Fat fuck erudite Harold Bloom (God bless his soul) can't go twenty pages in any of his works without mentioning irony.

>I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says.

We've all heard this definition. I'm down with it. I can get behind it. (am i being ironic right now because although I'm down with the definition I don't know what it means? [because but]...) how the hell does that apply to the actual text? (Oh and btw I'm not talking about dramatic irony you fags). Is Hamlet ironic when he's contemplating suicide? "Oh God I could be bounded in a nutshell blah blah my personal favorite quote" Is that irony? Is him fucking with Ophelia at the play irony? Is him fucking with R AND G irony? G and R?

H.C. (GOD)dard: "I Henry VI opens, with a note of high irony, on the funeral of Henry V." God how. It's ironic that they're fighting after succeeding? THAT's ironic?

>"I don't know how to 'espress' myself," I would gloat over her admission with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr Percepied. - Swann's Way

>Why, then, try to make ourselves think that Shakespeare liked [Two Gentlemen of Verona], except in an ironical sense, any better than we do?

Please God help me. When Chandler from Friends cracks a joke: is it irony? When Pynchon says sez: is it irony? When the fuck is Joyce being ironic? Are socratic dialogues ironic? Is 4chan ironic? Is saying "nigger" ironic? Am I gay?

Pic unrelated. I think.

How much of my knowledge on literature should come from critical theory and outside essays? For example, I reread Hamlet for the fourth time, and now I feel like delving into Bloom's Poem Unlimited and Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory.

I've read some portions of Bloom's Invention of the Human but my real question is: How much of what I glean from a book is going to be my own thought? Should I just do close-reading exercises in my own time? When class comes around, that's another thing...

Pic unrelated, I think.

What the FUCK is irony. I've been struggling to understand this for years now.

Dramatic irony is about the only definition of irony I understand. What I really want to put a definition to is the irony that DFW talks about. Take a sitcom, like Friends. Are the majority of the punchlines ironic? If I'm being the opposite of sincere, am I ironic? If I say "Get-r-done," in front of friends from the city, is it ironic?

Pic unrelated, I think.