/lit/ - Literature

>>17085904
Johnson

As far as general literary theory, Samuel Johnson is the most trustworthy man in the English language. Yvor Winters called him the only truly great literary critic in the English language.

Harold Bloom, of course, is another name that comes to mind.

As far as anyone who's alive today? I have no idea. You tell me. I'd love to know the name of a trustworthy critic who's currently alive, it would make it easier to keep up with contemporary fiction and poetry.

/lit/, have you ever hated a genre of literature as much as Samuel Johnson hated pastoral poetry?

>>16800693
Johnson was ENTIRELY RIGHT AND JUST in his hatred of the Scots. The Scots have never produced anything worthwhile. Their greatest philosopher is Hume, for God's sake.

Johnson's own stuff is actually very good, in addition to the way Boswell depicts him in his biography.

Johnson has been called the greatest literary critic in the entire English language, and he has some legitimate claim to being exactly that. His observations about originality, about the quality of good art versus bad, and about what makes a poet a poet, are all excellent.

Start with the Rambler essays, you'll find a lot of Johnson's criticism in them, and also quite a bit of his moral thought. Actually, everyone should read the Rambler.

Just read Samuel Johnson instead. Start with the Rambler essays, then move on to the Idler and the Adventurer essays. After that, you can read Rasselas, and the Lives of the Poets.

Read Samuel Johnson.

Start with the Rambler, then you can read Rasselas.

Boswell's biography is also very good, but keep in mind it is not an actual work by Johnson himself.

What you want is the English Enlightenment. The absolute high water mark of prose for Modern English. Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, all those guys, they're beautiful writers, fiction and nonfiction. Reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall will blow you away just by how pretty it is.

>>15913482
If you think it's going to last that means you're acknowledging its literary quality, since only the great works of literature, the works that remain in the depths of the human condition, actually last.

Samuel Johnson writes in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays that, in the year 1765 when the edition came out, Shakespeare had been dead for more than 150 years. Everyone who had ever known him was dead, and also dead was everyone who could have gotten some monetary value, some personal benefit, to having his plays performed. Yet his plays were still being performed. Johnson says that, therefore, there must be something of value to Shakespeare, something of genuine power in Shakespeare, that has transcended his own time and makes him relevant in ages beyond his own, and the way we judge this is the fact that he is still beloved, and still popular, long after his own time has passed.

According to Johnson, popular judgment over time is the only way to truly tell whether a work is great or not. Why have the great writers of the 20th Century survived? Why have Joyce and Faulkner and Proust survived? Because people have judged, over time, that they deserve to survive--and not just academics, but common, everyday readers, or at least those readers who are genuinely literate.

So if The Lord Of The Rings is more than 65 years old at this point, and it is still being widely read and discussed, wouldn't that indicate that it will probably wind up in the Canon? And therefore that it IS a work of literary value?

>>15855897
This. Consider: the greatest critic in the English language is generally regarded to be Samuel Johnson, and he was a pretty fair writer and poet himself. Check out "Rasselas" by him, sometime.

It absolutely IS fanfiction. It does multiple things that people shit all over fanfics for doing, INCLUDING ripping off scenes from the original stuff. Samuel Johnson has an entire issue of the Rambler where he talks about how Virgil rips off a scene from the Odyssey in a way that makes it not work at all.

Is there a single greater period in English letters than the English Enlightenment? Look at all these amazing writers and poets who lived in this period:

>Alexander Pope
>Jonathan Swift
>Samuel Johnson
>David Hume
>Edward Gibbon
>Edmund Burke
>William Blake
>Robert Burns

Obviously not all these writers and poets wrote in the same way or belonged to the same school. Many of them are quite different from each other. But they were all great, and they all lived around the same time.

Read Samuel Johnson.

>>15377256
>>15378194
Johnson is so fucking cool. Whether you're reading about him or reading what he actually wrote, he is the best.

>>14705548
This. That entire era was basically the golden age of English writing. Gibbon, Johnson, Burke, Swift, they're all amazing.

Do you like Samuel Johnson, /lit/?

British/English literature thread? Sounds like fun, I'm in.

You lads like Samuel Johnson?

Fun fact: Samuel Johnson fucking hated the American Revolution. He even wrote a pamphlet denouncing it, which you can read here:

https://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html

Samuel Johnson

>Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel
Was he right?

Can we have another Samuel Johnson thread? The one from a few days ago was nice. I really like the Lives of the Poets.

Also I guess we could talk about Burke, Goldsmith, etc. in here, too.

All of /lit/ should read the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer essays, they're full of really great, practical life advice. Johnson also seems to have suffered from depression, and many of the essays are about living with and working through what he called "melancholy." So they're very relevant even today.

>>13780800
The fuck is your problem then?

>Any advice to aspiring writers?
Yeah, wtf are you doing? Just give up already.