/lit/ - Literature

Was Spengler right?

With the rise of sensible political beliefs perhaps you all can actually help me.

How exactly do you take something valuable from capital-L Literature?

I'm an English major, getting my MA right now. It's all useless. The way I've been told to read literature is utter bullshit. It's all (((critical theory))) and psychoanalytic nonsense. How did people read literature before all this? Did they appreciate it aesthetically? Is there some conversation happening in it I'm not aware of?

To be honest with you when I read literature I get next to nothing from it. I've taken two Chaucer classes at this point and it just doesn't leave me fascinated. I mean I understand all the mechanics of what is going on, cultural context, I understand what Chaucer is doing poetically, but I'm not prepared to sit here right now and tell you that it's great and awesome.

How do I come to find literature awesome? I don't want to extract from Shakespeare about how whites are oppressive or any of that BS. I want to read literature and find it to be great. How do I do that?

>>8599927
The fact that it is even possible for you to find Dante boring, assuming you are well-educated and individually capable of appreciating good literature, only illustrates my point: that our Cultural mode has provided us with limitations and a certain tunnel vision that restricts everything we do to the level of the popular.

We read old works with a certain reverence, treating them as perfect and almost mysterious. We approach them with several different critical theories and are at an utter lack for answers all the time. In short, the doings of ascendant Culture are unknown to us. The scholars in universities devote their lives to unpacking and unlocking a Cultural relic that to its contemporary audience had an obvious and easy meaning that reflected their experience. Shakespeare surely spoke to an early modern in a way that we will never truly understand, just as Dante spoke to his Renaissance contemporaries in a way that will forever remain a mystery to us, but which his contemporaries could appreciate as if it were gold.

And by contemporary I don't even have to mean immediate contemporary, but the audience within a century will do.