/lit/ - Literature

Interpretations thread
Offer up an interpretation of your own of something you've read. Argue to whatever extent you want, it doesn't matter so long as it gets people's imaginations going.

Patrick Kavanagh poem 'Epic' is ultimately self defeating for the self-contained value he professes in the poem, that "Gods make their own importance", (which in the context of the poem in one sense amounts to a renewal of nationalist pride and self-definition), because the manner in which he emphasizes the importance of such self-definition is only possible through the affirmation of others, the "Munich bother" causes him to lose faith in the relevance of the affairs of his countrymen but it is just as important an aspect in his ability to set those very affairs apart. He cannot even convey this without drawing on the mythology of another, "Homer's ghost", and in a way this has been one of Ireland's lingering problematics in a postcolonial state - the problem of self-definition. I do not think Kavanagh offers us a solution in his poem. In fact I think he serves merely to affirm such a reliance on the Other.

Hey /lit/ can you do me a favour

I got my hands on a shitload of books over the last couple of weeks that I know very little about but am planning to get stuck into over summer, could you help me out and maybe reorder them? If you reorder them, be sure to explain the rationale behind it please.

Racine - Andromache and other Plays
Ben Okri - The Famished Road
Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
James Lee Burke - The James Lee Burke Collection
Mordecai Richler - Solomon Gursky Was Here
A. E. Ellis - The Rack
William Styron - Darkness Visible
Peter Ackroyd - The Diversions of Purley
Peter Ackroyd - Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem
Roberston Davies - What's Bred in the Bone
John Banville - Dr Copernicus
Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song
Michael Frayn - Headlong
C.S.Forester - The Earthly Paradise
William Styron - Sophie's Choice
André Malraux - Days of Hope
Luther Blissett - Q
Peter Ackroyd - First Light
William Kennedy - Ironweed
Alexander Woollcott - While Rome Burns