/lit/ - Literature

>>18415213
What do you mean by 'good book'? If you mean commercially successful and reasonably entertaining, then it's actually very objective, with clear, tried-and-tested story arcs that score easy points with the reader.

If you're asking how to write a good piece of literature, on the other hand, then you're missing the point a bit. Literature is a form of art, and you don't create a great piece of art by asking someone else how. Melville wrote Moby Dick. Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom. Nabokov wrote a beautiful novel about a paedophile, Proust spent his life writing thousands of pages on memory, Joyce produced Ulysses. The point is, you either have originality or you don't. If you don't have originality, then you won't ever be a truly great artist, but you can become a merely good artist as long as you possess a sense of the aesthetic (see - prose style). If you possess neither originality nor a sense of the aesthetic, then you won't really be able to produce a good literary work, but you could still be a successful writer.

The best works of literature either say something true or are beautiful, which is really the same thing.

>25
>Buckinghamshire, England
>Under the Sun of Satan

>>17874846
For me, I've absolutely found it to be a worthwhile major. I went to uni late (age 21) and am now 25 doing my Master's. I wouldn't have spent all this time if I didn't think it was worthwhile. It depends what you want to get out of it, though.

Many jobs today require degrees that really shouldn't - to some employers, it just shows you're willing to apply yourself to something for at least 3 years, meet deadlines, and work hard. So a lot of graduate schemes accept people with any degree background.

I chose English because I love English, and always have. That makes it easier. Its also a very versatile degree, as I mentioned - you could go into journalism, publishing, advertising, teaching just as easily as business, government work, charity work, and the like. You specialise increasingly as time goes on, so in your third year you can study and write about any particular period.

>>17874810
Not sure friend.

>>17874666
Why would you want to? The synthesis of English with history, philosophy, culture, art and politics is what makes it so versatile and unique. My MA dissertation touches on Greek drama and philosophy, Augustine's theology, and Shakespeare's plays. You can study literally anything in the realm of 'literary studies' when you include history and the like.

>>17840303
That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.