/lit/ - Literature

>>11332941
>Noon: wake up, check e-mail/facebook/chat logs for a half hour
>shit, shower, and shave
>1:00 walk down to local supermarket to pick up breakfast (banana, strawberries, and jianbing)
>1:15 eat breakfast and read, brew green tea for the day
>2:15 walk to work
>2:30 - 8:30, teaching little kids to speak English, cigarettes and green tea between classes
>8:30 - 9:10 walk to noodle place, eat dinner and read
>9:15 get home, open bottle of cheap red wine, read
>10:15 getting too drunk to read, jerk off and browse /lit/
>11:00 cry because the world doesn't care that I can read Deleuze, reading Deleuze won't get me any money or social prestige, why the fuck am I reading Deleuze?
>11:15 more wine and cigarettes, look in the mirror and realize how fat I'm getting
>11:30 tell myself tomorrow is the day I'll finally join a gym and start eating healthy
>midnight - 3am drunkenly browse /lit/ and listen to music
>3am sleep

Rinse and repeat

We had one of these threads a few months back and I thought it was a really cool way to learn about new books, so let's try it again.

You've been tasked with writing a syllabus for a one-semester literature-related course on your specific area of expertise. The department dean would like you to present this syllabus with all of the following information:

-The course title (and number, if you like)
-A brief synopsis of the course (one to three paragraphs)
-A list of the five to eight books or any other relevant material you will use throughout the semester
-Prerequisites needed, if any

>>9312353

Tentatively entitled "A Motion Not My Own" but I'm probably going to change it.

>The man who's read 10 books is just as likely to be a good writer as the man who's read a 1000.

Ahh, you were doing so well. 4/10 bud, try harder next time.

>>7926622
Kant asserts we can't know anything about noumenal reality. How can he securely say we can know that we can't know anything about it?

If there is literally zero evidence to prove that noumenal reality isn't isomorphic with our own (albeit limited by our own sensory finitude) then how can he so confidently say that we have zero access to it?

This is probably just a re-phrasing of the neglected alternative, but I'm still curious to hear a refutation of it.

>>7281389
>>7281429
>>7281482
>love for Bartimaeus

Arguably the trilogy that made me fall in love with books

Along with Timothy Zahn's Dragonback trilogy, Hilari Bell's Farsala trilogy and the Emperor/Conqueror series by Conn Iggulden it blew my 11-14 year old mind

>tfw you will never be a wide eyed pre-pubescent boy satisfied with slightly above average Fantasy/Sci-Fi ever again
>tfw now only close readings of post-modern lit gets my literary rocks off anymore
>tfw I don't even know what it means to sincerely enjoy something anymore

>>7230270
I think we have a misunderstanding, I'm not championing Christianity over other religions. Sure, the Abrahamic religions are what are currently the norm but that doesn't discredit other religions. The religious mindset (Christian, pagan or otherwise) is what is important and what has brought us so far.

>>7230279
Dynamic enough to birth all of modern academia

How does one arrive at a fully developed sense of self? I can't shake the feeling that I'm nothing more than the culmination of various social, cultural, economic, and political forces and that I'll never truly understand who "I" am.

How do people become passionate in something? At what point does active interest become passion?

I worry I've never been passionate about something, but only actively interested. I just don't know the distinction between the two.

>>5688069
Love Giles Corey and that pdf was a great read, did you ever do the meditation recommended to this album?

I'd recommend:

Camus - Sisyphus & Other Essays (for suicide)

Nietzche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra (easy to dive into without any prior knowledge of philosophy, essentially a philosophical novel told in axioms, just read it + deals with transcendence)

Dostoyevsky - Notes from Underground (diary of a nihilist piece of shit + deals with human perception

Which is worse, the unexamined life or the obsessively examined life?

Which is worse, the unexamined life or the excessively examined life?

I suppose I'm an Absurdist, but only because I can't escape the realization that we're all just flecks of meat on a speck of dust orbiting a single spark in the infinite vastness of space and our actions are therefore both futile and humorous in their futility.

It doesn't make me happy so much as it motivates me to do shit outside my comfort zone so that I won't wake up one day realizing I grew old without any stories.

How does one find their own identity? I'm 24 years old and I don't think I'm any closer to a state of self-realization than I was 10 years ago. I'm just a pastiche of influences from various cultural references, but I'm at a loss when it comes to finding out what I personally believe in. Are there books that address something similar to this?

To make it clear, I'm not talking about states of arrested development or stunted youth, I'm talking about not having any palpable sense of personal identity to begin with and how they experience self-discovery.