/lit/ - Literature

>>10906293
>>10906260
sup ladies

should we address the room in the elephant first?

>>10720818
but that requires talent

>>8448550
Interesting analysis. I quite like that.

I'll throw on my DFW analysis hat and say that plenty of IJ thus qualifies as a nightbook, at least until the narrative becomes clearer a third of the way into the book.

And, but so.

Do you unironically think DFW was the best writer of the last forty some years? Because I do. A legitimate warrior-poet among the people.

Do you unironically think DFW was the best writer of the last forty some years? Because I do. A legitimate warrior-poet among the people.

>not having his own perfectly curated post-ironic text syntax with just enough errors to be authentic and just enough structure to be intelligent and just enough weirdness to call attention to the absurdity of having put so much effort into a text syntax

Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.