/lit/ - Literature

Tolkien

>>17451503
The field died decades ago.

Does anyone else hate the current widespread beliefs that critics/elitism/gatekeeping are bad and outdated, everyone's aesthetic opinions are of equal worth, and there's no such thing as objectively good/bad, better/worse, higher/lower, there's only subjectivity? I feel like there's been a major change in the public's thinking over the past 10-15 years. Has the Web 2.0/social media/Yelp killed criticism and expertise by ennobling the plebs?
>in b4 have sex

>>16445018

>>16370608
And yet the board dedicated to it is filled to the brim with LARPing philosofags.

>>16181527
>does it anyway

what is more /lit/, to reject or accept modernity?

I miss him bros, currently reading Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

>For Shinji is not, like the Sweet Danish Prince, a master ironist who steals the quill from his author's hands and writes his own play; rather the boy resigns his will to the sadistic never ending flow of the penstrokes, where, like the Kabbalistic texts that I recited as a boy, meaning wanders like the wandering tribe. Here Evangelion is most disctintly haunted by Kafka, that Writer-Trickster herald of Anxiety, surely the most original of all major twentieth century writers, leaving aside Stevens at his most Apocalyptic.

>And it is with Apocalypse that this Great Work is primarily occupied. Not the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, which so influenced the inimitable Dante, but the Apocalypse of Freud. Freud, more gnostic prophet than physician, invented the metaphor of the libido, (which, like all metaphors, is partly a deception), the particular energy that fuels sexual desire and our Will to Live. Its antithesis, Thanatos, the death drive, is a concept that Freud entertained but feared too much to explore.

>The aformentioned Will to Live can be witnessed within Evangelion by the radiant image of fiery-headed Asuka, a forceful figure of feminity; the adolescent poetic heir to Shakespeare's fearsome Cleopatra. Like her Egyptian foremother, Asuka's rage is a channel for her delight in the world's splendour and ugliness. She is one who rises to meet life and gleefully returns its scorn when the time calls. She steals the narrative from under the nose of her opposing force, Shinji, squire of Thanatos, and fashions her own place within it, becoming the self proclaimed protagonist of a story never told. The same cannot be said for Rei who, in her sub-Beckettian blankness can only be described in the words of the great hero-critic Samuel Johnson as "undoubtedly worst girl." I neither have the heart nor the wit to argue the contrary.

>Alas, Asuka's creator is no Shakespeare: Sad Anno cannot contain a universe within himself and so cannot conceal himself from our gaze. He, like my dear Hart Crane, has sounded his Whitmanesque yawp out into the void and found its echo slight and wanting. His failure is his clay, from which he has fashioned his Monument to the New Century.

can you actually make up for a shitty or non-existent education on your own and later in life?
literature to help me do it?
t. product of failed public schools and apathetic parents.

>>15088626
He knew what would happen once he was dead

Books to take my mind of how much I love Evangelion. It's got pretty bad recently, it's all I can think about.

Why is Evangelion better than most literature?

>A-anon, you must protect the canon...

>>14988674
Professor Bloom, you're still alive!

>>14991840
He's always here faggot. He always will be.

>>14852930
Never forget

Make your own book covers

>>14657021
>spent his entire career protecting the Canon and dabbing on the school of resentment
uh, yeah... I'm thinking he was based.

From a bong's perspective, anime is still a very much fringe interest, still an occupation of the weird and the autistic. There was a Manga exhibit at the British Museum that I went to last year that was very popular but it's popularity seemed more academic than anything properly devotional.
During my time working in a school, I noticed no resurgence of anime's popularity amongst the zoomer population. Their cultural obsessions were not entirely different from that of my own peers' 10 years prior: football, music (then dubstep, now drill), YouTube, blockbuster films etc. In fact, anime seemed more popular with my generation as we had grown up with it on Toonami and other children's television stations. The only students that displayed a vocal interest in anime were autists and, strangely enough, Asian girls (as in girls from the subcontinent for you burgers out there).

My own interest in anime is rather slight - slightly more than my own age group but not by much. I have a certain affection for the anime my entire generation grew up with (Dragonball Z, Pokémon, Yugi-Oh etc) and I've recently got into the highly regarded stuff (Ghibli, Kon, Bebop and so on). Evangelion is unironically one of my favourite works of art ever. I have yet to get into the /a/ level white but, seeing what it does to those to the minds of those who take the plunge, I hope to avoid it anytime soon.

This is all anecdotal blogpost crap but I use it as a basis in which to say this: if one were looking for a cultural source that the artists and writers of the day will almost universally tap into, anime ain't it. You would do better to look at the effect of image/video sharing social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok on visual art and the effect of rap lyrics on contemporary poetry.

Comparing anime to Christianity is a bit of a non-starter too. One is an artistic medium with certain stylistic similarities featuring a range of different artistic works and products. The other is a religion, an ideology, an ecosystem of thoughts, ideas, imagery and beliefs that seeks to be coherent and cogent within itself. A more apt modern day comparison with Christianity is the strain of 'compassionate neoliberal wokeness' which has infected absolutely everything in the last decade and has become, in the eyes of the cultural establishment, the lens through which all art is to be viewed.

TLDR: the premise of your question is unfounded

>d-don't let the canon fade, anon...

>>14539273
Good night, sweet prince.

It's all falling apart bros...