/lit/ - Literature

What kind of gf is the most /lit/erary? No gf is an acceptable (though wrong) answer

>>16518253
This guy gets it. Auerbach is mandatory reading here; Biblical and Homeric styles are equally great in their own ways and you pseuds should learn to appreciate that

>The counterdrive to this potential onrush of commoditization is culture. In the sense that commoditization homogenizes value, while the essence of culture is discrimination, excessive commoditization is anti-cultural - as indeed so many have perceived it or sensed it to be. And if, as Durkheim saw it, societies need to set apart a certain portion of their environment, marking it as "sacred," singularization is one means to this end. Culture ensures that some things remain unambiguously singular, it resists the commoditization of others, and it sometimes resingularizes what has been commoditized.

>In a commercialized, heterogenous, and liberal society, the public culture defers most of the time to pluralism and relativism and provides no firm guidance [to valuing non-commodities], while the only lesson the economy can teach is that of the freedom and dynamism that ever-wider commoditization clearly brings with it.

Is Igor Kopytoff right? It seems that the rise of industrial society and especially the Internet in the modern West have commoditized much that ought to remain singular- think sexual and even romantic relationships commoditized through OnlyFans, artistic and cultural output commoditized through Hollywood and Patreon, etc. What's the solution, given that ever-increasing commoditization does seem to increase our standard of living?

>>14162519
Schopenhauer "On Women"

Is cuckoldry the dominant motif in English literature? I am not being ironic.

We may begin with Middle English, where we find two perspectives. In Chaucer, cuckoldry is a source of anxiety and comedy; witness the Miller and Reeve's Tales, where we are made to laugh at the unfortunate cuckold, making japes at his humiliation. The Pearl Poet takes the opposite tack: the Green Knight offers up his young wife to seduce Sir Gawain; besides advancing the poem's plot, this surely reveals a latent desire to see his beloved possessed by another that finds acceptable expression in his scheme to entrap Gawain.

Shakespeare's fascination with cuckoldry needs, I trust, no explanation, and yet I will give a few examples. We find joking references to cuckoldry in almost every play, tossed in as window dressing to set the stage. Whether considered as elements of homosocial bonding through dissipating the perceived threat of being cuckolded or jokes at the expense of the unseen and assumedly adulterous wife, these jokes reveal a strong preoccupation with the notion of female martial infidelity. They reflect not merely Shakespeare's own mind, but the mind of his time. Other plays, such as the Merry Wives of Windsor, are driven entirely by the (real or imagined) cuckoldry of one man or another. We may detect larger reflections of the motif in, for example, the way that Hotspur symbolically cuckolds Hal through his superior martial abilities or how Othello, though he falls victim to the anxiety of cuckoldry himself, nonetheless cuckolds the expectations of the Venetian court with regards to his sudden marriage to the nubile Desdemona.

Turning to more modern literature, we see cuckolding in Hemingway, where the protagonist is unable to consummate his love for the lovely Brett Ashley (female) and must instead watch a seemingly endless parade of lesser man possess her. Something similar occurs in Fitzgerald, as Gatsby must live with the knowledge that Tom Buchanan has physically copulated with what he previously believed to be his innocent bride-to-be. The cuckoldry here is operating on multiple levels however; though Buchanan literally cuckolds only George Wilson, his marriage to Daisy, though not cuckoldry under a strict definition, surely raises its specter by invading and defiling Gatsby's previously sacrosanct memories of her purity. The fact that Buchanan's liaison with the married Myrtle leads to Gatsby's death is, of course, only confirmation that the cuckolded man is the butt of the joke, the object of pity or humor.

>>14014483
All literature is at least a little gay

>In an interview conducted after Pynchon’s first novel was published, Nabokov stated that Pynchon left no particular impression on him, and that he hardly even remembers him attending one of his courses. However, Nabokov’s wife Vera, who sometimes graded her husband’s class papers, said that Pynchon’s papers were memorable because of his unique style of handwriting. She stated that he used a weird mixture of printed and cursive letters; half printing, half script.