/lit/ - Literature

Gravity's Rainbow it is!

Corrections is pretty mediocre tbh, if your body is ready, go for GR.

>>1031721

The actual OP here.

I haven't made a decision yet.

>>1031720

Oh? I've heard nothing but praise for The Corrections.

>>1031749

> Oh? I've heard nothing but praise for The Corrections.

This is /lit/, where anything popular is hated upon. People here will also try to impress you by saying Infinite Jest is a children's book.

The Corrections was good, but depressing. Gravity's Rainbow (my favorite book) will fuck your mind. It's up to you...

>>1031763

I'm reading infinite jest at the moment, currently at a 20 page (plus 10 in footnotes) chapter about a retarded children's tennis game or something.

I'm really hating it, I wish it would move on with the plot.

>>1031788

>postmodernism
>plot

lolno

Does GR pick up the pace after Beyond the Zero?

>>1031763

Also if you just go on Amazon you'll see it has more 1 star reviews than anything else. So it's not even an unpopular opinion.

>>1031799

That's what happens when so many hipsters pick up a book they won't understand.

>>1031799

>amazon reviews
>valid literary criticism

>>1031794

Sure.

Not sure what you're expecting, though. It's post-modernism, not Stephen King.

I read seventy pages of Gravity's Rainbow.

I read 453 pages of The Corrections.

>>1031806

Correct. Most Amazon reviews consist of the following:

1) I DON'T GET WHY X AND Y HAPPENED OR WHAT Z MEANT. THIS BOOK IS STUPID. I HATE IT. 1 STAR.

2) THIS BOOK WAS OK. I HAD TO READ IT FOR SCHOOL, BUT IT WAS BORING, IT NEEDED MORE ANGSTY VAMPIRE ROMANCE. 2 STARS

3) IT WAS THE BEST BOOK EVER OMG IF YOU DON'T READ THIS BOOK YOU'RE STUPID BECAUSE I THINK IT'S THE GREATEST I THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT BECAUSE I LIKED THIS PART AND IT'S GREAT BECAUSE IT'S GREAT. 5 STARS.

>>1031806

I hate you, seriously. First you tell me I hate it because it's popular, then I mention Amazon, which represents the average reader, not academics, and... what? I don't even know. All of my hate.

Infinite Jest is shit-tier. It takes the advances of Joyce, Pynchon and others and milks them down to a nice vague 'whatever'.

>>1031825

Also I know he was influenced by Kafka, but I don't think page long sentences work well, maybe it's the English language, but I don't like them, especially when you have footnotes in them.

>>1031825

It's shit tier within the genre, but saying it's shit-tier in the context of all literature is fucking retarded.

It contains some of the finest writing of our time and is definitely a catalyst for thought.

If GR is a 10, then Infinite Jest is a 2. But if The Davinci Code is a 6, then Infinite Jest is a 9.

>>1031835

If you don't like long sentences then stay the hell away from Proust. He goes on for pages without a period. So you'll probably think he's "stupid" or something...

>>1031793
>Doesn't get what postmodernism is.
>Read some Paul Auster for postmodernism with a plot.
>Like the New York Trilogy

>>1031825
>Infinite Jest utilizing the approach of Joyce in any way

I... What?

>>1031837

No, in the context of serious literature, which is the only literature there is, it's shit-tier. The very fact that you identify serious literature as a 'genre' indicates what a deleterious influence 'DFW' has had.

ITT: kids mad at what they don't understand.

>>1031850

No... I identify post-modernism as a genre. You're the genius who thinks "serious" is a genre. Pretty cute.

>>1031846

You see how you FUCKING SCUM THINK, MY GOD!!!!!

I NEVER SAID IT 'UTILISED THE APPROACH'. GOD, 'UTILISED'!

Stop reading now, it won't do you any good.

What makes Infinite Jest postmodern? Just a few points because I didn't see it.

did you honestly spend $500 on a fucking iPad?

>>1031857

Seen this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sQrxAorDo

>>1031853

No, because Joyce is not post-modernist. You said 'the genre'. There's genre writing and serious writing. People who call literature a 'genre' are disinheriting themselves.

>>1031860
Wallace talked a lot about trying to reach a human experience or discussing problems in society in his work, regardless of how "surreal" the story may have gotten. His reading of realism was a sensational experience of relation.

Additionally, when the term post-modernism came up in literature he would mainly discuss the term in regards to authors who have become "self-aware of their work through critique and public response."

I think a lot of anon are going to have different readings of the term, but there's just some ideas to throw out there.

>>1031869

No, because Foster Wallace was cancer.

>>1031876

Says notable lit critic anon, whose insight is valued Harold Bloom's.

Oh it was supposed to be surreal? I thought it was just exaggerate, e.g. everything was over the top, if there's say a tall character, then DFW would write about how he's 8 feet tall and needs 3 chairs to sit down. Or like how that addict was in a toilet for three days. Everything is like that, also a lot of urban myths...

>>1031895
Not necessarily. I was using the word surreal to describe what you're calling exaggerations. I guess a more neutral term would be "things that ordinarily don't happen commonplace in reality."

Just for grins:
>Yeah, Norman’s gag is that he literalizes the option. He’s going to forget the diet and keep eating until he grows to "infinite size" and eliminates loneliness that way. This was Wittgenstein’s double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense dot, or you let it become the world—the exterior and everything in it. The former banishes you from the Garden. The latter seems more promising. If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there’s nothing "outside" language for language to have to picture or refer to. This lets you avoid solipsism, but it leads right to the postmodern, post-structural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language. Heidegger’s the guy most people think got us into this bind, but when I was working on "Broom of the System" I saw Wittgenstein as the real architect of the postmodern trap. He died right on the edge of explicitly treating reality as linguistic instead of ontological. This eliminated solipsism, but not the horror. Because we’re still stuck. The "Investigation" ’s line is that the fundamental problem of language is, quote, "I don’t know my way about." If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it, get the lay of the land so to speak, I could study it "objectively," take it apart, deconstruct it, know its operations and boundaries and deficiencies.

>>1031889

Go back to tvtropes you lightweight, you're having to appeal to authority to prove Foster Wallace's worth.

>>1031916

wtf is tvtrops you faggot?

>>1031922

tvtrops? No idea. tvtropes is your favorite website, nigger.

>>1031930

Oh, okay. Now continue with your idiotically pretentious dismissal of Infinite Jest as "shit" or go back to your LOTR thread, dunce.

Kids be hatin' because they don't quite get it. It's okay, really.

>CAPTCHA: flarter CONSTITUTION

>>1031788
Escutcheon is one of the best parts of the book. The parts that blend real life with the game world are hilarious.

There's not a plot that's presented with a neatly wrapped bow, but the 200 or so pages after that were the easiest to read for me.