/lit/ - Literature

>>22542787
What do you mean by structure?

If you mean structure as in metre and rhyme, there's nothing like a classic iambic pentameter couplets. Check out Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock for a great example, or my extremely underrated contribution here >>22535226.

If you just mean a creative restraint, you could try writing an ode to something you're into - a season, an object, a mood - and copy the arc-like structure Keats uses his odes: (1) initial moment of fascination and encounter, (2) ascending with this object into the heights of poetic fancy, (3) coming backing down to your own limited existence, on a note of wistful reflection.

>>22389159
Why call it a religion, then? Why not say that religions are a specific subset of these vague, unsystematic bundles of useful/compelling beliefs?

Also
>a belief in just the world is just that: A cold, material place, full of material people, and nothing more. When one passes away, they are gone, a shell, no more.
A big blue summer's day, a mysterious VHS documentary about an ancient civilization, the unnerving desolation of an empty train station platform, a rare glimpse of a friend's brave compassionate nature -- surely these are all material things, but it seems to me that their power precedes any system of beliefs, and it also seems to me that they don't lack for a human spark. Why do things have to be eternal to escape the cold? Why is eternity the measure of meaning? Surely what's materialist is to care about things as they actually are, as living things, before you and around you: to consider people and places and not the corpses and voids.

Ultimately, I think we shouldn't draw a harsh line that tries to divide (a) the world, cold, material, empty, meaningless and (b) beliefs, transcendent, personal, meaningful. You could equally say: it's all one big life process, and beliefs and ideas could be just as much thought of as organs like bee-wings and snail-feelers, or tools like cameras and chariots. They emerge from the vital, swampy, colourful muck of reality: they are part of its ongoing collective history, not an individual, mind-bound imposition on it.

There's zero utility, I firmly believe, in learning whatever vague associations people have in mind when they say 'structuralism' or 'post-structuralism', unless you want to engage in the endless meaningless arguments in which these terms are abstractly tossed around.

But you can learn what specific writers classed as structuralists have to say, and likewise what writers classed as post-structuralists have to say, and you could learn about specific disagreements between them, according to whatever seems intriguing to you.

If you want recs for structuralist works:
- The Structural Study of Myth, by Claude Levi-Strauss
- The Structuralist Activity, by Roland Barthes
- Spatial Systems in North by Northwest, by Fredric Jameson

And post-structuralist:
- Structure, Sign, and Play, by Jacques Derrida (I have not read this -- too hard -- but it's supposedly seminally post-structuralist)
- One or Several Wolves?, a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guattari
- What Children Say, by Gilles Deleuze

And an essay I like but don't know where to place:
- Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, by Michel Foucault

You guys set up these crazy abstract expectations for literature and philosophy, thinking that it's going to open some kind of literary third-eye that will grant you True Knowledge of the Epoch. Then you inevitably get burnt-out and disillusioned after finding that, no matter how many times you skim Heidegger's page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or read third-hand opinions of Franzen novels, you're not going to transcend to some kind of higher level of pure understanding and aesthetic bliss.

You're supposed get engaged in the specific details of texts that interest you, building your own private projects, finding idiosyncratic threads through the canon that lead to somewhere unique and interesting. Deleuze is right that intensity always happens 'in the middle', in the thick of things. It doesn't happen at some abstract high-level of ultimate value. What kind of psycho feels compelled to come up with a judgement on literary fiction as a whole? Who's asking you to do that, other than the stunted adolescent Wikipedia surfer in you who wants seem as smart as possible as quickly as possible? Just seek out a short story collection that does do something for you, and read the author's influences, and don't be in a rush to find an easy stereotype like 'Franzen etc' that will block your ability to actually discern differences between writers.

Read a book on German woodcarving one week and a book on Buddhist folklore the next, and find the unexpected but productive parallels between them. Read Heidegger but for fun and without big expectations that it will provide the missing piece to your Ultimate Continental Philosophy Cheat Sheet. Then, when you stumble across something like the 'blue beast' in the Trakl lecture it's a a cool meaningful idea that lingers with you, and that relates back to the sad-faced deers in those woodcarvings and the ape-dreams of Japanese peasants.

Or instead you could say to yourself, each time you crack open a book: 'This better offer an irrefutable and transcendent solution to the impasse of modernity or it's a total waste of time.'

You haven't seen through the Matrix, OP, you've just not bothered to cultivate the intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sense that will allow you to perceive and assemble those low-level connections where everything interesting and intense has its vital life.

I refuse to believe that 'It's sincere!' is a useful and meaningful foundation for analysing a stage of culture.

Modernism couldn't be reduced to a slogan, or mood, or attitude -- it was a rupture that set loose countless slogans and moods and attitudes, in conflict and contradiction.

The reason for trying to theorise at this abstract high level about stages of culture is a suspicion that there's some abstract and high-level structure that links together disparate phenomena that are superficially unrelated or opposed. E.g. Fredric Jameson uses the term 'postmodernism' to theorise the connection between action movies and mall architecture and identity-politics movements because he felt that to talk about each on purely its own terms misses the big picture.

But what's the big picture that's being captured by the idea of metamodernism? Is it that some writers seem to like writing in a sincere mode? But which decade of human history would that not apply to?

Postmodernism, as described by Jameson, is a crisis in how we link up our representations of experience with the unrepresentable actuality of the world system that produces and underlies that experience. That crisis is a historical structure, so it doesn't go away by choosing to be sincere. If there is a new sort of value attached to sincerity, I think it should be understood as another necessarily imperfect attempt to respond to the crisis of postmodernism -- another tool in the cultural toolbox alongside irony -- not a dialectical leap into a new stage of culture.

From George Saunders's 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain':

>To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can't do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can't be done. And it can't be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There's intuition involved, and stretching -- trying things that are at the limit of our abilities, that may cause mistakes. Like Yashka [in the stylistically flawed but ultimately powerful story 'The Singers' by Turgenev], the writer has to risk a cracking voice and surrender to his actual power, his doubts notwithstanding.

>Let's say there was a wrist-mounted meter that could measure energy output during dancing and the goal was to give off an energy level of 1,000 units. Or someone would (say) kill you. And you had a notion of how you wanted to dance, but when you danced that way, your energy level was down around 50. And when you finally managed to get your energy level above 1,000, you glanced up at a mirror (there's a mirror in there, wherever you're dancing off death) and -- wow. Is that dancing? Is that me dancing? Good God. But your energy level is at 1,200 and climbing.

>What would you do?

>You'd keep dancing like that.

>If people out in the hall were laughing at you, you'd feel: "Okay, sure, laugh away -- my dancing is not perfect, but at least I'm not dead."

>The writer has to write in whatever way produces the necessary energy. For Turgenev to get his energy level up above 1,000, he had to make those dossiers [i.e. his wordy and unnecessarily detailed character descriptions]. He had to admit that he wasn't good at integrating description and action. He had to plunge ahead, doing things his way, or die. He had to look honestly at himself and conclude, "Yep, Mr. Nabokov is right as usual, even though he hasn't even been born yet: my literary genius does fall short on the score of naturally discovering ways of telling the story which would equal the originality of my descriptive art. But what am I supposed to do?"

>It's hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we've always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.

>I teach "The Singers" to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we'll turn out to be. As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage. A painstaking realist, maybe; a Nabokovian stylist; a deeply spiritual writer like Marilynne Robinson-whatever. But sometimes the world, via its tepid response to prose written in that mode, tells us that we are not, in fact, that kind of writer. So we have to find another approach, one that will get us up above the required 1,000 units. We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy.

>>21489069
Powerful sense for life, and the wit/will/imagination to act on the basis of that sense.

Kind of crushingly depressing, if you dwell on it, that there are some people who experience all of life as you experience it only in your most tuned-in, intense, expansive moments. The only compensation is that there are also people whose basic perception of the world is the same as yours when you're feeling burnt-out and muted and uninspired.

>>21471398
>1) is there a philosophical system that doesn't rely on faith at its most basic foundation?
No, because 'living in the world' requires a basic, irrational leap of faith, and philosophy is only worthwhile if it address living in the world
2) is Emerson worth reading?
Haven't read him, sorry. But surely we all are wasting time that could be better spent on someone like Emerson.
3) favorite book
DH Lawrence's The Rainbow. Or Kafka's Amerika. Or Beckett's Molloy.
4) was goethe racist?
Isn't he like the last guy who had the luxury of not having to think about race?
5) Jesus - should we live as he?
It seems like Jesus lived as 'singular, outcast shaman for the community', so for everyone to live like Jesus seems like a contradiction in terms.
6) opinion on Luther?
Seems like a heroic effort to think through 'how is it possible for everyone to live like Jesus if Jesus is a singular, outcast shaman for the community?'
7) please post a 200 word excerpt of intensly personal writing that examines the things which bother you about life.
I don't write intensely personal writing because the things that are most intense to me are things that are outside and beyond me. But here's 205 words from the unfinished ending of the story I'm most pleased with so far:
>If only I had the foresight to arrange something advantageous here, to have positioned an inconspicuous agent within earshot. I knew the waiters and all their preferred names, and usually they avoided my glance because most owed me serious debts. I could have arranged for one to linger behind the palms and transcribe it all down into one of their pads. Not to transcribe, no specifics (I respect the separate and secret part of a spouse); just the emotional gist, their tones, the aura. Many of the waiters had dropped out of creative writing degrees before arriving at the shore, and from the way they evoked the specials I knew they had the troubadour skill of finding the essential words their patron needed to hear.
>Rising above their paired heads, beyond the hanging plants and strung bulbs, I saw the hill with the zigzag road that takes people far from the coast. I saw Cody’s rose-gold jeep glinting in the setting sun’s rays, ascending with the new girlfriend at high speed. And around me other details: driftwood propped for a coming bonfire, the evening’s moon finding its place, the hiss of sweet-potato fries crisping in the back kitchen of a bar, its door open wide.
8) Is atheism a dream?
The court in which people feel the need to constantly litigate for or against atheism is a dream.
9) does philosophy end with Plato?
Most meaningless of the questions so far.
10) would the world be better off without empiricism?
No world without empiricism. It's the art of living consciously in a world, and we can't live except consciously.