/lit/ - Literature

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>>22480017
Reminder

>>22338246

What was Wittgenstein's problem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEx9a2Q3IBU

>>21933491
that he suffers from autism

>>21892677

>>21882105

>>21772234

>>20481467

>>20204706
Based

>>20104956
Don't reduce Wittgenstein to your shitty anglo interpretation, you freak.

>>19503380
>Can we have a thread for authors being autists/spergs/whatever?

Just the other day I was speaking with a friend, and somehow or another the subject of Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" came up. We both asked for the other's opinion on the novel, and from there it devolved into something of an argument: he, firmly in the camp opposed to it, and myself in the one I had erected in its defense. But after about only five minutes of discussion, I found that I could offer little in the way of substantial praise, whereas he had a whole assortment of criticisms inexhaustibly at his disposal. Indeed, I could give only the most vague, platitudinal responses to his attacks, and he was quick to reveal them as such. By the end of that embarrassingly short exchange, I was forced to concede that what I had so long regarded as Woolf's magnum opus, a novel which holds a very dear and personal place in my heart and that I am convinced even now is of exceptional literary merit, was rubbish, or, at least, that my liking it was merely a matter of opinion with little if any basis in reality.

So, gentlefolk of /lit/, my question to you is this: how does one go about learning verbalize a positive opinion of a literary work? It is simple enough to disparage or criticize a work, to extract even from great texts of the Western canon a small catalogue of imperfections, but what of praise? What of appreciation? We all have felt the touch of beautiful language, analyzed the themes and devices of our favorite stories, and concluded, in that strange and subtle way, that we are better people for doing so. But how do we articulate that conclusion? Do we simply say to those tragic and benighted figures incapable of knowing what sublime joy it is to love Joyce, "you did not understand it; read it again"? Is it a matter of theory? Of combing through litanies of figurative language and thematic indicators and reciting them, as does a clerk accounting for a recent shipment of goods, with a clipboard in hand and every word to the affirmative punctuated by the scritch of pen, declaring, finally, that yes, as this meets all the prerequisites of good literature it is, therefore, a work of literary merit?

Opinions, comments, and suggested reading material are all welcome.

>>19158537

>>19113304
Nothing is needed. Read Wittgenstein first and use him to filter all other philosophers.