/lit/ - Literature

Where should I start with Melville?
I have read several reviews of Moby Dick that the book contains a lot of whale bullshit.

>>18174
>I don't even know what my argument is
>but I have a hunch it's correct

nah.

Can someone suggest reading order of Melville works?

>>8583238

Most attractive authors

This guy.

that he never became famous like many European writers...

Did he just really love whales?

(Why are there so many chapters about the anatomy of whales?)

(The shield of Achilles?)

Is he our guy?

Was he enlightened or into eastern mysticism?


>"I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent
dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him
no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an
undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or
near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both
ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from
the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato,
Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always
goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of
thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise
on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before
me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved
worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head."

Obviously him seeing his own aura.

>>7191545
It's perhaps the best annotated edition of Moby-Dick you will find.

For Melville's short stories, however, I suggest the Oxford World's Classics, mainly because of the number of stories (you get those in the Norton edition plus 5-6 more).

>>7053297
>uneducated neckbeard philosophizing
who would have guessed it?
never seen THIS thread before

>>7053312
>>7053308
this is accurate, if you believe descartes in that everything is inherently fallible because of different opinions
so we can't say whether art is one thing or another because there is no true consensus on what determines it
without picking sides on the grand debate, that is.

I'm going to get back to work now, please don't shit up this board further OP

>>7022872
melville died a failure, deeply in debt
practically no great works in the 20th century netted their authors great fame and fortune in their lives

maybe if you take your eyes off yourself and place them on the prize you can accomplish something worthwhile with your life, no? Or do you just want to die after living a comfortable life without ever doing anything worthy of remark?

Maybe you do. Perhaps we should just sit here, wasting our lives away and waiting for the end to come to us. No point in doing anything, right? Just let your life slip past and never do anything because ooga booga the gubberment, the capitalist pigs, the jews. Whatever excuse you want to give yourself for not putting your life and soul into a project and seeing it to fruition.

I don't have room in my life for people like you, op. People without resolve or purpose.
Enjoy making these threads until you die.

>But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have "broken his digester."

What does he mean by this?

>>6809497

Let me post an actually manly man who did manly stuff.

What works do you think show humans in a negative light?

Moby Dick coming at ya:

>Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feasted on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

>>6479353
>>6479528

Yes, Shakey, I'm sure the groundings laughed at your sex jokes. Excuse me while I recreate the world.

>>5839294

>>5155786

>the greatest American book. Ever. Would you agree? If not what would you suggest is?

Moby-Dick is. Everyone knows it.
Clueless newreaders need not apply.

Let us have a Melville thread. Most of the time, I only see Moby Dick being mentionned; which of his other works should I read as well ?