/lit/ - Literature

He's such a cutie.

>>22944506
kek. You are doing better than most of /lit/.
>>22944548
>but now that you've pointed it out it seems so obvious.
He spells it all out and examines it in great detail, read it a few times.
>Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred, one that often causes the haters to feel mean and guilty and to hate themselves for feeling this way about such an accomplished and well-meaning boy, which then tends to make them involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of aspirin when he’s around.

> DFW often switches between using third and first person narration
From the postmodernist on the narrator is a considerably more complex thing than just reliable or unreliable and this whole thing really started with the modernist and stream of consciousness, the narrator became a character even if they are not a literal character in the novel. In TPK Wallace is trying to teach the non lit major this and he explains all this in the Author's Foreward and he does it without dumbing things down so even the lit major can enjoy it. Both IJ and TPK have a single narrator and do not shift between perspectives, which is to say that the narrator is giving you that information and it is not Fogle or Hal taking over the narration, the narrator is relaying you something from another perspective. In TPK it is supposedly epistolary, the narrator is providing you with sources other than himself, in IJ it is an extension of free indirect speech and the narrator is going through the same things which Hal is going through and Gately went through and really every character in the novel experiences, the loss of self to the image/purpose they serve society. In both this is thematic and not just some gimmick, the Author's Foreward explains this, sort of.
>What's with the use of the blank "Q:"
This is something which has been exploited in literature for a good while and comes from how interviews are actually conducted. If you watch the unedited interview that picrel comes from you see the questions are kind vague, the answers rambly and often not even answers to the question asked, and we can not even hear the interviewer very well; this is because the questions are edited in, they edit in new questions which better suit the answers given and edit the answers to be more concise. This has been standard form for ages and avoids interviews being rambly things like the unedited DFW interview. In literature it has been used to various ends but generally it comes down to being a way to force the reader to not accept the character's account so blindly, your having to fill in the questions forces you to question the character. Remember what I said about narrators, perspective has not actually shifted and this is still information which the narrator has decided to give you and it is up to you to decide what to do with it and how reliable it is.

>>22745218
You're awful

>but and so and but so

>>22692626
The camera man said it but the camera man clearly thought it was just a way to say "thinking" and Wallace used it in his standard self deprecating way. It is in the unedited German interview that most of the screen caps are from, picrel. It was part of his way to buy time in answering questions and a way for him to point out that he can not possibly word the answer in a way he would prefer to—as he did in his writing—the limitations of of the format.

>>22674751
the Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table's checkered edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler's cries but still the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still under the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy's side talking sing-song at the child's face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until the first wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel's hem and the parents' eyes met and widened--the diaper, which when they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby's diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water'd fallen and pooled and been burning their baby all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn't, hadn't thought and when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God's first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the size of a grown man's thumb that had clutched the Daddy's thumb in the crib while he'd watched the Daddy's mouth move in song, his head cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy lonesome for in a strange vague way. If you've never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the lady was almost there with him looking down at what they've done, though hours later what the Daddy won't most forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic's ER with the tenant's door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn't stop and they couldn't make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

>>22625390

>room 101a

What a hack

Starting with a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc

>>22439630
>DFW
>prose

>>22405866
Feh.

>>22400724
No there wasn't

wallace was attractive when he cut his hair and ditched that goddamned bandana

Dictionary

>>22324716
>*seethes*

>>22212097

A thread devoted to your favourite quotes whether it be for their aesthetic value or their philosophical contents or their humour or whatever.

Extra points for rare ones.

1/6:
> "I know that there's a paradox in the US of the people who get powerful jobs tend to go to really good schools, and often in school you study the liberal arts, which is this philosophy, classical stuff and languages. And it's all very much about the nobility of the human spirit and broadening the mind. And then from that, you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to write copy of that will make people buy a certain type of SUV."

- David Foster Wallace, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc&list=PLIZqvqbtz9I30kDK7RrKXxtLK9WxA33-T&index=48&ab_channel=ManufacturingIntellect

Why do you still effort post? Why do you try to make good threads, when 90% of /lit/ users want to talk about politics, trannies, and post frogs? You realize no one's here for discussion, right?

>ballsack

Why would a writer bother engaging with the public? What is the benefit of talking to journalists? Why not write about opinions instead of talking about them?

>that post-prandial stroll

>>21014523
>hyphen heavy run-on-sentences
I assume you mean hyphen-heavy run-on sentences.