/lit/ - Literature

Why do so many women schlick so hard to Mr. Darcy, when Mr. Knightley is clearly the superior Austen man?

>>9275084
I always have a chuckle when I read the letters talking about how much they hated Jane Austen.

Reminder that Jane Austen is the greatest pleb filter in the Western Canon.

Plebs inevitably, consistently get hung up on the fact that she's a woman who writes about relationships. All they can see is a woman writing about love, and so they dismiss her. They consider female authors automatically worthy of dismissal, and consider relationships between people in ordinary settings as an unworthy subject of literature.

Patricians, on the other hand, are willing to take Austen on her own terms, or at least ignore their objections to her, and are rewarded with the brilliance of her story construction and insights into humanity.

Austen herself wrote a pleb filter called "Pride and Prejudice." This is how she catches all the other plebs, most of them female.

Jane Austen is one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, to /lit/'s eternal frustration.

Although honestly Pride and Prejudice is one of her plebbier works. Read Emma or Northanger Abbey instead.

Do you think writers have to be "authentic" persons--that is, honest and true to themselves?

Reminder that Jane Austen is one of the five greatest novelists of all time, and if you disagree you're a pleb.

Also, reminder that fantasy and sci-fi "novels" aren't really novels, they're romances.

>>8558328
Like I said, it's early days. I have really great professors for both classes, and just tonight I had a great Joyce class that salvaged him a bit.

But I can't shake the feeling that Austen is still better. A lot of it is down to bias. I'm a writer myself, and I believe, ultimately, that the text should contain everything the reader needs. The reader definitely brings their own filter, their own frame of reference, to the work, and that colors what they get out of it. This is one of the things Joyce is working on with Ulysses, and it comes off to good effect. But knowing that Joyce sort of had to tell people about this makes me think less of him. People didn't even pick up on the ways it used the Odyssey until he convinced a newspaper friend of his to put out an article "discovering" it. Joyce was a huge fan of scholarly study of his work, and that grates on me a bit.

Meanwhile, Austen's work is every bit as complex, and paints every bit as intimate and interesting a portrait of the human mind. She actually sort of invented stream of consciousness, and it's on display in "Emma." I read a critical essay about the structure of the novel also, and having looked back through it I think everything the essayist said was true, such as the way it uses a triplet motif, or the way Austen uses Emma's perspective to hide things from the reader.

But all this brilliant artistry isn't so hidden and obscure that you miss it. It's all there in the text. Unlike Joyce, Austen didn't get to go out to scholars and point out her book's devices. They probably would have laughed at her if she did because she was a woman. But you can find them anyway if you study. They're not SO obscure, there's a clarity to them.

And that's another thing. I'm a huge believer in clarity. I believe that the reader should understand everything about a work from reading the work itself. I don't think the author should have to write out something later that explains his own book. I think the reader should only need the book itself. In this regard, Austen succeeds and Joyce fails.

Reminder that Jane Austen is one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, but /lit/ won't read her because she's a girl and girls are icky.