/lit/ - Literature

>>12180279
>Is he better than Joyce and Tolstoy
Melville himself would slap you for even saying that.

>>12180279
>he hasn’t read Moby-Dick

>>12180279
I'd say he is one of the few American authors whose worth is not artificially over-inflated for reasons of national pride.

>>12180279
He’s just some bisexual faggot attempting to write the novel Shakespeare never did.

>>12180288
Why would he do that if he didn’t know who either of them were?

>>12180279
Damn he was fucking handsome. High IQ chads have it all.

>>12180279
>Is he better than Joyce and Tolstoy

He is better than Joyce, but Tolstoy is better than him.

>>12180279
American here. He’s very weak. Definitely not better than Tolstoy or Joyce. He’s only better than stuff like Steinbeck or Orwell. He doesn’t stand up to the true greats. That said, you should read him to find out for yourself. You might as well familiarize yourself with one of the most famous novels ever.

>>12180316
He was no chad. He had a manic obsessive personality and led a lonely life because every time he tried to make friends he drove them away by being hyper and offputing.

>>12180741
You have to admit he was handsome and a genius, he had a wife and children

>>12180279
Moby-Dick is his best work, and it is a Great Book, but it overshadows everything else he wrote.

>>12180279
Apparently he was a notorious wife-beater, so he’s a good man in my book

He's good ,but continentals can't speak English well enough to appreciate it. Or Joyce, for that matter. Nine-tenths of the pleasure of reading Joyce lies in the prose itself, but continentals have to talk about his "ideas" and what he "represents" in order to get past the fact that they can really never understand him.

Kind of like how Derrida called Finnegans Wake "the" book or something, but it turned out his English was so bad he couldn't actually appreciate any aspect of it, since it is a wholly verbal work.

He’s better than both desu

>>12180915
comparing him to Tolstoy is so stupid imo. Might as well compare Ibsen and William Blake

>>12180279
read Moby Dick

>>12180741
>every time he tried to make friends he drove them away by being hyper and offputing.
sounds chad af

>>12180733

This is such an awful opinion I really hope no one takes it seriously.

>>12180741
>He had a manic obsessive personality and led a lonely life because every time he tried to make friends he drove them away by being hyper and offputing.
literally me except i'm ugly and suck at writing

>>12180741
Just leave his fucking chimney alone.

>>12180279
>Is he better than Joyce and Tolstoy

no, but he's still fan-fucking-tastic

>>12180279
I'd place him in the same tier as William Faulkner, so right below Whitman, Emerson, Eliot, and Dickinson in terms of national canonical importance and closer to Dickens in terms of the Western Canon. I agree with whoever said the thing about Shakespeare though. Re-reading Moby Dick recently gave me the vibe that he took like 40% primary source material on whaling, folklore, news reports and blended it with 30% influence from King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, etc., and 20% Biblical rhetoric. That's only 10% unaccountable which MAY be original invention
yeah bitch i just quantified melville's anxiety of influence, suck it

>>12181746

It's because he was actively reading Shakespeare while composing Moby-Dick. The reason there's a billion and one asides wherein Melville likes to make allusions to other literary works is because he was engaging and responding to them as he wrote. There are a few books out there which focus solely on the construction of Moby-Dick that discuss this. It's interesting stuff.

>>12180845
Bartleby is a GOAT short story

>>12180279
He is good. He's anti-American in that way.

>>12180316
He was not a chad. Not every handsome man is a chad, ffs. Just look at his letters.

>>12181746
Influnce doesn't mean a work is unoriginal.

>>12181746
He "gave you that vibe"? What a terrific critique.

>>12180279
https://youtu.be/dVNcmGjNW6c
>tfw this played in my head every time the whale appeared

>>12182464
Okay, before I open the link, is this the Jaws soundtrack?

>>12182475
no

>>12182464
this made me laugh for some reason

>>12180279
Wouldn’t put him above either, but on his own terms I’ve enjoyed very few books more than Moby Dick - it should not be passed on. A really great mix of Shakespearean heroics transplanted to a setting where they become weirder, and some really cosy characters (a great Winter read). - also Melville’s short stories can be pretty great, wouldn’t put him above Hawthorne in that form but things like Billy Budd and Bartleby could be an interesting place to start if you don’t quite fancy breaking Moby Dick’s rather large spine yet.

>>12182013
Yes! He did great work, but M-D is a quantum jump. It is bigger than it's author in a way his other works aren't.

Moby Dick is better than all of Tolstoy's major works but Tolstoy is still a better (and more interesting, to be honest) author

I’ve never read Tolstoy and the little bit of Joyce I’ve read has been underwhelming. Moby dick is undoubtedly the greatest American novel though.

>>12180295
tbqh the only reason I like some Transcendentalism is my New England context. If I lived anywhere else in the country I'd see Emerson as a fruity New Englander, but I actually see him as a regional connection to German idealism because I live in Massachusetts.

>>12181817
Truly. I used Harold Bloom’s lectures as a leaping off point. If i recall, we know the influence of Shakespeare mostly via his initial letters to his English publisher where he describes a rough outline where Ishmael isn’t really fleshed out and then by the time Melville is fully immersed in King Lear he has specific character moves in mind and scenes played out (I think the unholy baptism in particular).

>>12180845
Some of his shorter fiction is sublime, approaching Moby Dick.

>>12182451
We have to nuance what we mean when we say influence. In terms of style i.e., what the language is doing and the manner in which it is doing it, Melville’s use of his influences is NOT original. He’s directly working with the two of the biggest influences on the development of the English language (the Bard and the KJV Bible) so who can blame him, but it’d be dumb to call him a genius. A high-tier-sage-god-in-the-parthenon-of-protectors-of-genius, sure, but not a genius. His approach is more of a working writer’s.

>>12182860
>original and genius are synonyms
Check your unchecked assumptions while you're checking my dubs

>>12182860
He definitely was a working writer who wrote one great novel, not a genius novel, but a great one still.

>>12180741
This is me, wife + kids and all

Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.

>>12181746
>Whitman, Emerson, Eliot, and Dickinson

>>12182454
How bout you give me your analysis in clear critical terms when you’re trying to illustrate a general point. My short hand means 1) I fucking read which first and foremost you havent done, hence your inability to contribute anything of effort, let alone of substance, to this thread 2) I researched extensively using academic articles, lectures, collected letters, tangentially related stuff from Lowry, Faulkner, and Kraznahorkai, etc. and 3). If you think my statement itself is anything more than a leisurely contribution to a half-brain dead thread than you can go kill yourself you insufferable autistic faggot.

>>12182870
Yes, in the sense I am using them, they are you fucking faggot. Fight me over it rather than rapid clicking through your shitty .png collection.

>>12182885
Name one thing wrong with any of those writers. I imagine you can’t begin to understand Dickinson. It’s okay, most of American academia can’t.

inb4 amerifag

>>12181746
>Whitman, Emerson, Eliot, and Dickinson
All those are shit compared to Melville. Eliot? Seriously? The Wasteland is not even 1/10000000th as good as Moby-Dick. .

>>12182894
You must lack reading skills, friend--you should be able to tell from context clues that I'm mocking and dismissing your 'sense' (which is really nonsense based on shoddy reasoning, arbitrary categories, and unrefined personal taste), but you're clearly an idiot. Here's another old picture from my "Reaction Images" file.

>>12182905
You’re stupid, then, and if your go to Eliot reference is “The Wasteland” then you haven’t read enough to contribute to this conversation.

>>12180295
Are great American writers really nobody outside of America? I keep seeing people say this and it saddens me because i grew up thinking Faulkner and Whitman were on tier with Austen and Wordsworth.

>>12182908
K big dawg still waiting for you to literally say anything of critical substance. Also again TAKE IT UP WITH HAROLD FUCKING BLOOM.

>>12182914
Not quite on that tier but they're plenty respected worldwide.

>>12182878
It is all of us, anon...

>>12182924
I've only read ~100 pages of Moby Dick so I'm not really qualified to discuss Melville. The burden of categories is on you, my friend.

>>12182914
Faulkner is at least a "somebody", Whitman not so much.

>>12182948
>Whitman not so much.
huh. But he's the American poet.
C'mon, dude.

>>12182947
Imagine admitting you’re a brainlet like you owe it to me or something. kys faggot.

>>12182956
>American
>poetry
Sums it up.

>>12182915
If you think Eliot is superior to Melville, you and I can't have any further discussion.

>>12182964
Because you can’t defend your dumbass opinion? K.

>>12182961

>>12182968
Neither can you, all you did was place him below Eliot because you felt like it. Two can play that game. In terms of the Western canon, Melville is miles above Eliot. Moby-Dick is more canonical than the entire work of Eliot. Say "the whale book" and people know what you're talking about.

>>12182891
You wrote this autistic paragraph and somehow managed to say absolutely nothing, or even offering an actual critique.

>>12183008
Shut up, bozo, there's nothing here to critique

>>12183022
Fuck off, Eliotlover.

>>12182914
Not at all dude. Faulkner was incredibly influential in Europe even while he was still not highly rated in America. Whitman is also influential, Pessoa for example was influenced by Whitman. Poe is also an American poet who is hugely influential worldwide, Eliot is perhaps the most influential poet of the 20th century, etc.

>>12180279
He's on par with Joyce and much much better than Tolstoy.

>>12183939
cringe

>>12183788
>Eliot is perhaps the most influential poet of the 20th century
Milk came out of my nose. Is this what Americans really think?

why suck eliots dick when you have ezra pound

He's a genius. Benito Cereno is one of the greatest critiques of slavery and the American mentality ever written. Half the people who read it today don't even understand that they're practically Amasa Delano.

>>12180279

>wants opinions on person's merit
>wont listen to the people who actually study the person

this is why europe is falling and the "mutts" have moved off to flyover towns with large farms in regions bigger than your country will ever hope to be - this is where your "mutts" live, go ahead and come out here and see how much smarter, stronger and better looking we are than you will ever be. keep pretending white people in america are mexican jews from the city and ignore all history and truth like an troglodyte

Btw, we have more pure blooded german people than you have any people at all in north western europe combined - look it up and see for yourself

stay mad eurocuck.. i would say to shoot yourself, but you have no real guns


And to answer your question, why not pick up a book, read it, and make up your own mind rather than be the follower you obviously are?

>>12183788
>Eliot is perhaps the most influential poet of the 20th century, etc.
He influenced shit.

>>12185549
>Amasa Delano
>masa del ano
>"mass from the anus" a.k.a. a turd

Was this intended?

>>12185302
lmao who is? Ezra Pound could literally be the only other option and he's still american

>>12182914
at least we have 4chan for english-lang-lit... I want to cry when i think about many great european authors that are obscure outside of their country... You heard about Krasznahorkai or Gombrowicz, but those are exceptions, and they are known from age before the internet... I think in general internet caused some serious fall for literature

>>12183939
this is true

and only a native russian speaker could disagree

>>12180279
No American should be considered great in any sphere of culture, so yes, it's a meme. Stick to Europeans before your brain is rotted by American drivel.

>>12180279
He preceded Joyce, so he missed out on particular innovations in writing but he was definitely on par "for his time" at worst.

Tolstoy wrote good soap operas comparable to Dumas. He's several levels below, despite the occasional religious aside or scintillating sentence.

Is there a polite version of saying 'I hope you're roasting in hell since you died Herman Melville!'? If there's not, there should be...Screw you, Melville.

Once on Imdb (books section), I saw some yahoo saying to a naysayer of Moby Dick "It's your loss". The naysayer replied sarcastically. "My loss? On no. What will my boss and my wife and friends think of me when I tell them I gave Moby Dick 1 star?". That's my feeling as well.

This book is only for the pedants, the elite of snootiness, many of whom will be real behemoths intellectually. I persevered with this book just to know how awful a classic can be. I can assure you folks, they don't make them like this anymore.

I don't think I got it. Okay, I admit that. The problem with Moby Dick is not that it's boring. But it's that 99% of people will find it tedious enough not to read it entirely. It's hypnotic in its lack of actual plot. It wouldn't get published today.

Has there been a movie adaptation of Moby Dick? The closest to it is Jaws. That was a masterpiece. Not this book. This book is an editor's nightmare. It is the type of book, that when part of a curriculum of a class will prevent the student from loving books. Unforgivable

If Joyce had read Melville he would have been a fan. They both read and were influenced by Tristram Shandy. In many ways the proto-Ulysses and Moby-Dick.

>>12180279
>I prefer opinions from non-mutts thank you.

>>12189928
>I don't think I got it. Okay, I admit that. The problem with Moby Dick is not that it's boring. But it's that 99% of people will find it tedious enough not to read it entirely. It's hypnotic in its lack of actual plot. It wouldn't get published today.
How do you browse /lit/ and not know Infinite Jest?

Melville is denser and more poetic than Tolstoy, and without question smarter. But I'm not sure if he's "better" because Tolstoy is warmer and more readable. The emotions are different. Melville requires more investment but the payoff is the sublime, horrified awe, the most difficult emotion to successful invoke IMO. Tolstoy is sentimental, which is not a bad thing in my view, while Melville is a Romantic.

At a certain level it's pointless to compare the two. They are all of them geniuses, elite canonical writers who rightfully deserve their place as master craftsman we can endlessly study and enjoy. It doesn't particularly matter if you don't like Melville the Mutt because Melville is one of the most talented people to ever live in the history of human language, and ten thousand fart huffing posters on an internet board could never dislodge him from his throne.

>>12186352
> t. I live on an isolated island where my language is the only one that matters

Doesn't have the same strength across his body of work as Joyce or Tolstoy, but Moby Dick is greater than anything either of them wrote

>>12180279
“The Forge” is the most black metal chapter in literature I’ve ever read, “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” Thee rods weeved together into a new harpoon, like the three Fates. Ahab takes the hammer from the blacksmith and forges that shit in the fire himself. Pure kino.

>>12191392

Moby Dick better than Ulysses? No. Not even a Joyce fanboy.

>>12189928
99% chance this is pasta that some retarded boomer originally wrote on some NPC site.

what kind of absolute moron would try to compare Melville to Tolstoy or Joyce?
Melville used his experiences at sea to write popular sailing/swashbuckling narratives for the general public.
Then he tried to imitate his hero Shakespeare and write shit like Moby Dick... which people HATED so much it made him spend the rest of his life WALLOWING IN OBSCURITY AND POVERTY UNTIL HE DIED PENNILESS and was only discovered decades later by DH Lawrence or someone.
Moby Dick is a great novel for an American but do you homework before asking dumb questions

>>12180945
no it doesn’t

>>12182956
He’s right though, sorry mate