/lit/ - Literature

>>12952237
>>12952314
Good taste frens

>When one reads the extremely dense Shadow of the Torturer, one is not reminded of literature but of cinema: specifically, Park Chan-wook’s 2003 neo-noir fantasy film and overrated festival circuit darling Oldboy. Intelligent viewers will understand that the movie’s strength lies cunningly taut editing. Any filler or potential dead space eliminated, scenes blend into each other with strange ease, but the pacing is so relaxed that the abruptness of the scene transitions is never too jarring. To use a phrase dangerously close to a cliché, the movie operate on the logic of dreams. To use a phrase nowhere near to a cliché, the movie operates by the logic of intoxication, which is why the protagonist is introduced as a confused drunk.

>The movie’s narrative provides a constant stream of strange revelations and of developments whose cause and effect is obscured or oblique. But Park does not interrogate the nature of fantasy, and the effect only accentuates pulp sadism. The audience is mesmerized into a state of passive uneasiness and low awareness, like the movie’s hero, holding their breath in anticipation of violence. Consequently, they experience and learn nothing of interest. Oldboy is just an exercise in slick sadism, as is extremely dense Shadow of the Torturer.

>Gene Wolfe’s first in entry in the extremely dense Book of the New Sun quartet/quintet/racket introduces us to another “dying Earth,” a type of pulp fantasy/sci-fi setting where decay and ramshackle tradition rule during an apocalypse so slow that most people have had to get used to it. Severian is an initiate in the torturer’s guild, a satirical device that in Wolfe’s hands always fails to get a laugh. The novel charts his years as an apprentice, journeyman, and as an exile, surrounded by portents, vague factions, and supernatural manipulations. The singular strength of Wolfe’s writing in The Shadow of the Torturer is the hypnotic pacing of his prose, the strange ease with which sentences and scenes meld into each other.

No other readers of a series have been as fooled as those who read BotNS. Severian is one of the shallowest characters ever written and yet is praised as one of the deepest. He always gets the girl, there is never any emotion to deal with, and the prose is always edgy and boring.

For me, it's Cervantes

>>11699159
Thank fuck I went to a community college in the countryside. All we read were medieval pieces and bucolics, and not a single utterance of pop lit. ever surfaced from the profs nor anyone else, really. I'm dreading a transfer to Berkeley, though, boys. Where can I go to finish my English degree where I won't have to experience OP's pic related?

I am having an emotional crisis (?). For some reason I am feeling very fragile and everything seems to be affecting me more strongly than before. I find it so easy to cry and feel empathy these days, especially when I am outside or when I am reading.

I read some parts of the Bible this morning and cried. I read Anna Karenina yesterday and cried. I read The Wreck of the Deutschland the day before that and cried. I read Master and Margarita that day before that one and cried.

What is the name of this affliction? Books for this feel?

Should a poem focus more on structure ore on content?