/lit/ - Literature

>>20626129
People need to come to terms with this more. Fiction and poetry are ART. They're written art, like painting and sculpture are visual art, like music is auditory art. For some reason people are reluctant to classify literature as art. I geuss because they tend to not think of the written word as being artistic, and use "art" purely to mean the visual and auditory arts.

Borges has an interesting perspective on this matter. He says that every author, no matter how self-hating and miserable, believes he is good enough to be read. Believes he is good enough to take the world by storm. Or else he wouldn't write anything at all.

So Borges argues that deep down, despite being completely obscure and dying in poverty, Kafka nurtured the faint hope, even on his deathbed, that his name might go down as a great writer. This is why he did not move to stop Brod from not burning the manuscripts.

Borges argues that, if Kafka had REALLY wanted to ensure that they didn't get read, he would have burned them himself. But he didn't.

>tfw finished "The Intruder"

Why do people sometimes try to paint Borges as this bloodless, distant academic? I often find stark emotion in his stories, all the more potent because it usually comes by surprise. The sudden violence at the end of this story is very striking and I've been dwelling on it.

>>20105748
Very interesting. I'll check it out.

I'm actually the OP, and I'm currently at work on some major academic writing involving Ulysses. I'm a huge Borges fan, and I know he had such interesting opinions about literature, so when I heard he'd talked about Joyce and Ulysses I knew I had to track his opinion down.

I've used Borges' commentary on Nathaniel Hawthorne before, in another piece of academic writing. Borges is a fun critic to play around with.

>>19569320
He basically wrote nothing but short stories, poems, and literary criticism. It's all really good. Just get a bunch of his collections. Start with Ficciones.

For me, it's "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

34-year-old Millennial here, I actually love this thread because it paradoxically goes against the general thesis. The general idea is that Zoomers don't read, but this thread proves to me that there are in fact some Zoomers that read, and read great literature, too. Maybe not a ton, but some. Maybe /lit/ is actually working.

By the way, guys, don't give up if you're in your teens or early twenties and feel like you don't get anything. I didn't get anything either for most of my life. The first big mind-expanding moment I had while reading was when I read The Lord Of The Rings as a freshman in high school. That's when my mind was first expanded as a result of literature. Then I went to college and read a ton of great literature. I still remember how mind-blowing it was to read the Republic for the first time. If you're still pretty young you don't suddenly have to possess all this learning, all this erudition, all this knowledge. Just keep grinding and keep reading, keep working and keep pushing, and it will come.

I used to come here to /lit/ when I was younger and I got so many book recommendations. Now that I'm older, I come here in no small part to give recommendations to others. I have a lot love for /lit/ and I want to give back to it, insofar as I can.

Is Borges the most talented right-wing writer or poet? It's gotta be either him or Pound, right?

There's so much I wouldn't know about literature if it weren't for /lit/.

I think some posters on /lit/, especially ones from Europe or Asia, don't appreciate just how much people in North America aren't taught, when it comes to great literature. I went to public school in the United States and /lit/ has been responsible for introducing me to a whole range of writers that I would probably never have known about otherwise. I'm not talking about meme authors like Evola or Guenon, either. I'm talking about real writers or real poets.

I wouldn't have known about Gene Wolfe if it weren't for /lit/.

I wouldn't have known about Borges if it weren't for /lit/.

I wouldn't have known about Pessoa if it weren't for /lit/.

I wouldn't have known about Bolano if it weren't for /lit/.

I probably wouldn't have known about writers like Nabokov, or poets like Schiller, if it weren't for /lit/.

So thanks, /lit/. Thanks for making up for my lack of education. I unironically appreciate you.

>>18501357

[labyrinth]
[1001]
[Muslims]

Have you ever fully revealed your /lit/ power level in public?

What happened as a result?

Who are your favourite short story writers?

I am in complete awe of this man's works. Before reading him I would have never thought that such dense and profound ideas could be contained in a few pages of fiction. Instantly one of my favourites.

Is this man in a league of his own or are there authors you could recommend that are comparable?

>Plenitude and indigence coexist in Joyce. Lacking the capacity to construct (which his gods did not bestow on him, and which he was forced to make up for with arduous symmetries and labyrinths), he enjoyed a gift for words, a felicitous verbal omnipotence that can without exaggeration or imprecision be likened to Hamlet or the Urn Burial…Ulysses (as everyone knows) is the story of a single day, within the perimeter of a single city. In this voluntary limitation, it is legitimate to perceive something more than an Aristotelian elegance: it can legitimately be inferred that for Joyce every day was in some secret way the irreparable Day of Judgment; every place, Hell or Purgatory.

What did Borges mean by this? Talking about Joyce's Ulysses

SHORT STORIES! POST YOUR SHORT STORIES