/lit/ - Literature

>>22680571
Italianon here: no one does besides the most obvious names (Dante) mostly because of our "intellectual" class. More than in any other country in Europe (I have lived in four different European countries), Italy pushes only the most trites idiots as its foregound author, and publisher abroads know this and don't translate. The literary world of our country, much like its politics, is again one big giant incest system, with friends publishing friends, political factions pretending to fight each other and then going to dinner together, and so on. We get people like Rosella Postorino or Vincenzo Latronico getting nominated and winning awards, getting translations that are forgotten after one year abroad, and meanwhile our big names (Moresco, Siti, Busi, to mention some: all living authors) are living poor lives, ignored by most except a handful of critics and writers, rarely or ever mentioned in the media, while their counterparts in other European countries (Krasznahorkai, Cartarescu, Houellebecq - more or less same generation and alive, and two of them coming from minor literary traditions and yet capable of writing masterpieces and having their voice heard abroad) are widely translated, acknolwedged and talk about in the rest of the world.
But Italy has been doing this for more than 200 years. Leopardi is the chief example of how Italy, a retrograde, conservative, ideologically stale country, steps into modern literature: a hunchback working in total isolation, rereading the classics to find some meaning and escape the toxic intellectual environments made of priests, lousy politicians and salaried penmen at the service of whatever power is now at the top of the hierarchy. He was the greatest genius we had since Dante, yet in school we read Manzoni because his impious nun and redeemed criminal are more morally "edifying" than Leopardi, who is speaking to us from such an intellectual height that it feels as if he books were written in the fucking future.
All great authors of our country in the last 200 years are and will be martyrs - they will be hunchbacks of an art no one values, in the most desertic wasteland of western culture. If they survive (like Moresco and Leopardi did) they don't bloom, they explode, like those weird, frienzied desert plants that can resist anything.

Pic extremely related. Emanuel Carnevali is an absolute animal (technically speaking) when it's about writing poetry and prose, in English especially, but he's very much incarnating what we could have been as modernist literature, and what we failed to be. Another martyr, with a lot to say, who said it very badly, in his case (differently from Leopardi), and who paid with his own body for having this absurd dream that is literature.

>>19596598
No, reading books, especially fiction, is the only way you can actually get close to multiplying the quantity of life you live at the expense of a few hours of your time every day. It is possibly one of the few things that grants you access to reality rather than distracting you from it. Other media, especially visual media which are mass produced in the lowest possible qualities, get you out of touch with reality be constantly feeding you a corporate version of reality made to appeal to fantasies and desires so that you can be mildly happy and keep buying things you don't actually want or need. The feeling of being out of touch with reality while everybody else is in touch with it actually testifies to its exact opposite, namely, that you are the only persone who managed to get in touch with reality by daily self-inducing allucinations of multiple lives from different times and dimensions into his brain, while others spend most of their times masturbating over the same tv or anime tropes repeated over and over again for decades.

>>19043777
Emanuel Carnevali, the First God and his poems. He techincally writes in English but he was an Italian immigrant in New York in the first half of the 1900s. His life was terrible: ridden with poverty, perversion, physical and mentall illness, all while thinking that he was a poet and his voice was the voice of god. I think this board should adopt him.

>>18532072
also, to expand on the general idea of criticizing the "modern world", I think that people do not realize how enhanced our capacity to communicate our own distress about the world is compared to previous ages. People can now share stories about how they feel for millions of other people to read and see with basically no mediation time, when, until 20 years ago, this just wasn't possible. So, of course, we are now living in an age where everyone is (finally) able to voice their distress at the same time: what is coming out of that is a rather dismal picture of life as a series of painful events, shattered dreams, deluded expectations etc. Public discourse before 20 years ago was simply not able to register distress on the same level, but I am pretty confident that if you could have tweets and videos from people living in any age before this one the picture you'd get of general human pain would be way, way worse. Our problems at the moment are very hot summers and a global pandemic - which are big problems, of course, but I do not think they compare with ciclical global famine, general exposure to all kind of untreatable illnessess, material poverty, unrecorded violence of all kinds and forms most humanity experienced until basically 100 years ago. People who wrote and shared stories before the internet era have been, mostly, people who could afford an education and lived comfortable lives. The more you go back in time, the more expensive education was, the richer were the people writing. It is extremely difficult to reconstruct, for instance, how poor people lived in classical Greece. The very few cases of people who were horribly poor and capable of writing, such as pic related, usually depict a way sadder, way more violent, way more horrible world than ours: that was the world most people lived in. Only, nobody was talking about it. Today, at least we are. So, if anything, the modern world is better than the previous eras, in that we can at least be vocal about how bad life can get. Before 20 years ago, if your life was bad, you mostly just died and nobody cared.

Carnevali would be very popular on this board given his combination of poverty, inceldom, mental illness and being an italian immigrant in the US - also possibly one of the saddest authors you will read in your life

leave this board and never return if
>you embrace any kind of perennialist worldview
>you appeal to nature
>you do not fully understand the difference between philosophy, anthropology, history, history of philosophy and philosophy of history
>you acknowledge similarities among different religions/cultures without being aware of the differences
>you believe these similarities contribute to any philosophical statement
>you use cultural/historical evidence as proof for any given metaphysics or normative moral order
>you define a given metaphysical order as "tradition" on the base of historical and/or cultural analysis
>you do not question the accuracy of any kind of historical or religious analysis which is more than 50 years old
>you are not aware of the current methods of research in the fields of philosophy, history of religion, comparative religion, and history
>you believe previous civilizations had a deeper connection with any of the following: nature, god, the divine, the truth
>you believe you can use one and the same system of symbols to interpret cultures that are centuries apart and rarely came into contact with each other
>you believe time is cyclical
>you believe time is ordered hierarchically in ages of different degrees of goodness
>you believe this is a "dark age"
>you are not aware of ancient and modern philosophical and scientific discussion on the nature of time
>you use the words "degenerate", "degeneracy", "degeneration" in any given context
>you are unable to offer detailed and well-arguend explanation on what precisely is degenerating, from what, and why