/lit/ - Literature

>>4540889
>I've never once seen anything as a masterpiece literature wise, and believe me I have read enough "masterpieces" to have some experience

>mfw my university 'is a feminist'

http://edinburgh.tab.co.uk/2013/11/22/eusa-is-a-feminist/

"In a conversation with Leonard Price of the Onion A.V. Club, Harold Bloom said, "I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century....it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare."

At least Bloom approves of one of our board's favourites.

>>4013085
I don't know if we're only talking people or not, but Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the defintion of goat romantic poetry.

>>4013323
>

He's so beautiful

cherish him while he's still alive :')

>>3822983
i read infinite jest and consider the lobster.

I'm talking based on those sentences, tao lin is not a serious writer and doesn't deserve the effort. If someone payed me for a book review I would read it all.

As for the argumentation well: his sentences are inelegant and stilted and at the same time he avoids the intellectualism of wallace that makes him slightly intellectual. His topics are mundane and the style reduced to the bare minimum without the elegance of carver or the impactfulness of ellis.

What you are left is the mundane stories of boring normal kids that spend a lot of time on the internet written like bad fanfiction. But that's not the worst part, everything could be saved if tao lin had some idea or some sort of sublimity o even something to say about writing as an art. But he does not because he is stuck in a paradigm of art as an act of free expression.

Hey /lit/. What is, in fact, postmodernism? Can we simplify by saying it's merely all the literary movements that came after modernism?

Why do I reply to my own thoughts with reaction images?

I hope you're all talking about cryptic crosswords.

>reading

Guys, OP just leaked Taipei.

what are some good books on literature and literary criticism? I'm assuming Bloom is entry-level (fuck that word but it gets my point across)

Yeah yeah yeah, classic literature, belowved by millions, blah blah blah. I don't care. I HATED this book. In my opinion, Tolstoy is a raging misogynist - I don't care that it was a different era. Even for his time, it's just nauseating. I swear by the end of the book, I was positively rooting for AK to jump in front of a train, because she's so god damn wishy washy and hysterical. I'm probably the only person in the history of ever who thinks this, but there it is.

>>3548076
>Homer
>Shakespeare
>Cervantes
>Proust
>Joyce
>mfw

James Joyce
Marcel Proust
Samuel Beckett
Franz Kafka

according to Harold Bloom

>>3516894
>I think /lit/ is too harsh on Harry Potter
The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes' book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School Days" and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.

In what follows, I may at times indicate some of the inadequacies of "Harry Potter." But I will keep in mind that a host are reading it who simply will not read superior fare, such as Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" or the "Alice" books of Lewis Carroll. Is it better that they read Rowling than not read at all? Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?

Rowling presents two Englands, mundane and magical, divided not by social classes, but by the distinction between the "perfectly normal" (mean and selfish) and the adherents of sorcery. The sorcerers indeed seem as middle-class as the Muggles, the name the witches and wizards give to the common sort, since those addicted to magic send their sons and daughters off to Hogwarts, a Rugby school where only witchcraft and wizardry are taught. Hogwarts is presided over by Albus Dumbeldore as Headmaster, he being Rowling's version of Tolkein's Gandalf. The young future sorcerers are just like any other budding Britons, only more so, sports and food being primary preoccupations. (Sex barely enters into Rowling's cosmos, at least in the first volume.)

>Yay
>Not yea

Is suicide the result of a lack of willpower or the presence of immense willpower?

>>3138500

>>3065214

Fuck yourself.

>>3049357

>everything about this post

>>3047194

You misappropriated a word as basic as "seldom" whilst trying to seem elitist.

I think you need a time out, sport.