/lit/ - Literature

are we a hivemind

The initial reasons that caused a great work to be widely studied in the past are fundamentally different than why the same work would be studied now. Literature and by extension literary criticism is a product of its time and place; there are no universal rules for what makes a great book. All of the great books older than a hundred years are considered great largely because of their reputation and the immense body of literary criticism surrounding them. You cannot hope to objectively qualify their artistic merit within that context. They have become necessary prerequisites for even engaging with literary criticism by virtue of the countless derivative works that reference them. Such a tradition cannot be properly evaluated by conventional standards of merit because those standards were developed to explain why the works of the western cannon were great in the first place. Literary criticism retroactively gives a work literary merit, thus it is impossible to predict what contemporary works will be considered valuable and the justifications that will be made for said value.

>>12480588
>>12479395

Fine I'll bite. Was he coward for killing himself?

Yes, but only these three.

I’ve read none of the meme trilogy, despite owning both Ulysses and Infinite Jest because I’ve never found the time. It’s not I like I own them for show it’s just I figured I should have them to eventually get to

This is a thread for anyone dedicated to reading any or all of these works this year. Discuss anything about them, ask anything, you know when to use spoiler tags.

I'm around page 50 of Infinite Jest so still got plenty to go. It's been great though.

>>12428176

Their literary output is mostly quick and easy to read poems written in pop music slang terms or short stories--the two least intellectually demanding genres in literature

Occasionally they'll expand their narcissism and resentment to the length of a short novel, and of course it'll immediately receive affirmative action accolades because a brown person producing ANYTHING is notable in and of itself, but always these novels are trapped in the perspective of a whiny 110er. Often they're filled with magical realism and aimlessly surreal symbolism to make up for the weakness of their narrative and characters, and almost always they have their mouthpiece make an explicitly political screed that directly reflects their ideology

Do brown people and women simply lack the discipline and creativity and skill to produce "sprawl" and 800+ pages? Are they capable of imagining a vast array of characters and competing subplots and then arranging them in a manner that's coherent and subtle and harmonious?

Basically, why is advanced fiction almost exclusively the domain of white men?

What are some good meme books for my shelf? I already own the trilogy.

Ulysses is unreadable. If you threw a dictionary in a wood-chipper it would come up with a very accurate and thematically similar sequel.
Reading Infinite Jest is like feeling around in a dark room full of mouse-traps. Sometimes you manage to find one and figure out how to disarm it, but it's more painful to keep going and in the end isn't worth it.
Gravity's Rainbow is sort of like listening to the radio when you're driving from one town to another and both towns have a station on the same frequency. In this case, one town has a WWII channel and the other is a hippy poetry slam but you can't hear either one clearly and you'd rather just turn the radio off.
I may just be an idiot but I didn't care for any of them.

ITT We rate (books we've read, of) the meme trilogy.

I'll start:
>IJ: 8.0
>GR: 8.8
>Ulys: N/A

>>8714694
are you about to read the meme trilogy lad?

Why are they considered the "Meme trilogy"?

Are they for petulant squibs or are they the founding masterpiece novels that others should be predicated on?

Please elaborate.....

I'm a 10th grader with fairly good grades. I also read often. Am I smart enough to read the Meme trilogy, or will it go over my head?