/lit/ - Literature

>>15152575
Why didn't you finish? You were closer to the end than to the beginning.

I drop out to read fiction full time.
But i also skipped irl classes and never read the assignments so who knows

Some brainlet girl accused another girl of fucking the prof because she was getting shit grades on essays while the other was getting As. It was a total fabrication since nearly everyone but the brainlet was getting solid grades.

>>15152575
Hail burger education

>>15152575
I got this junior to study with me in hopes that he'd have better notes and understanding of the texts than I did. The guy practically zoned out every lecture and understood the materials less than I did despite me being absent 3ish times for the semester. He needed an explanation on what Platonic forms are and the study session became me tutoring him

>my teacher going full circle in her religious beliefs and philosophical stances she preaches the gospel in one class and trash talks jesus in another

>>15152586
Ultimately I would have ended up completely broke by the time my degree was up. There were some family matters that screwed me over.

>KNEECHEE
was a frequent pronunciation from the most tryhard kids.

>>15152688
He was just teaching you like Socrates

>>15152688
did you smash his twink cheeks?

>>15152575
>philosophy and film studies professor
>regularly have people with dreadlocks tell me I'm wrong
>have people tell me I don't respect queer cinema

I just want to write papers about my favorite parts of philosophy ffs I hate teaching you retards

>>15153031
Once overheard a girl in my Japanese class complain that her film professor wouldn't write her a new syllabus because she couldn't watch R rated films.

>>15153046
I've had so many faggots complain about queer cinema I know make people watch all of Hellraiser. Not getting to watch R films isn't even in my top five complaints I get every semester.

>I didn't think I'd have to watch films
>I didn't think I'd have to read subtitles
>Why are so many of them black and white
>Why aren't we watching contemporary films
>Why aren't there more black people in these movies

>>15153066
>I've had so many faggots complain about queer cinema I know make people watch all of Hellraiser.
This is incredibly based, but how do you justify it?

>>15152575
We went to an undergraduate conference and of of the students from our department was this fairly reserved and somewhat nerdy kid who was double majoring in computer science. He wrote a paper on absurdism or something along those lines, it was hard to discern because of how he presented it.
I guess he had this idea of adding another dimension to the presentation where he'd do funny "absurd" things. He put on a squeaky clown nose and would squeeze it periodically. He at one point got out of his chair, put the chair in front of him, and then tried to sit in it by stepping over the back of it one leg at the time and getting slightly caught straddling the chair. At another point he started drinking water from a thermos but for way too long, deliberately letting it spill down his chin and all over his clothes. When quoting a British philosopher, he put on a British accent, and at some point where he used the word "qua" he just took off with it going "qua qua, quaquaqua, quaqua, qua".
Now we had all partied the night before and gotten up at like 5 in the morning for the sake of the conference, so the effect was surreal. Some people were angry, the rest were stifling laughter with stifling degrees of struggle. I tried to laugh more openly since I figured he was trying to be funny, but the whole thing was bewildering and almost certainly not coming across as he meant it. One of my friends compared it to a fever dream. The kid was doubting himself pretty quickly too, looking up at us on occasion and going "I know..." almost shamefully. At the end of it he seemed in kind of a daze and I felt really bad for him, but in hindsight it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen and it became kind of a legendary event. Ironically, some people ended up reading his paper after and apparently it was actually really good LOL

>>15153107
The director is a gay man and I use it to teach Deleuze. It's the best queer cinema that's not filled with gay dudes and awkward silences.

>>15153066
this is why I couldn't work in academia

>>15152661
All I'm going to say is that if I was a literature teacher I would definitely be fucking 21 year old students.

>>15153172
Lit girls are ugly inside and out. The odds are good but the goods are odd.

>>15153168
I just want to do my research and teach classes about it. Apparently that's entire too much to ask.

Ive had some genuinely autistic philosophy tutors who didn't understand how to teach nor mark papers.

He marked undergrad practice excercises as if they were supposed to be profound original PhD theses, and whenever someone made a joke about the topic at hand he would take it 100% seriously and be completely confused.

>>15153066
to be fair hellraiser is pretty extreme

>>15153313
sounds like a prof i have right now

>>15152575
My senior year of high school I took composition offered there by the community college. I just showed up and goofed off in the back of the class. It was a really nice experience actually. Right away from the first assignment I knew I wasn't going to do any work and after a bit everyone knew I only showed up for the banter. After I failed the semester the professor invited me to drop in whenever (I only had 2 other classes). The best bit was watching everyone else read 11k word articles and struggle to write essays while I just chatted and never turned in a singe paper. My parents never found out either because the class didn't show up on the high school transcript.

>>15153116
Ah I did something similar. Good to know before don't completely look down on me.

>>15153376
*people
Why the fuck would I type before?

>>15153333
They wanted gay cinema explained via post structuralism, they got gay cinema explained via post structuralism. Fuck man, Deleuze's or Baudrillard's work can have a field day with Hellraiser.

>>15153376
I mean it's hit or miss, just know you're taking a heavy risk and if you're not already effective and confident with being offbeat then you should probably be cautious.
Or you could treat it as breaking your shell and becoming that much less sensitive to the fear of embarrassment through a trial by fire. The world is your oyster

>>15153066
I’ve seen this statement more than once. The first time I thought it was made up but I’ve now seen it enough times to know this is real and you actually make them watch Hellraiser.

>>15152968
yea that guy was probably a genius

>>15153504
Yeah I regularly post about the sheer retardation of teaching grad students classes in philosophy and film studies

>>15153066
Checked. What films do you have people watch?

>>15153716
It's a course where we apply more difficult concepts of post-structuralism to films, so a blend of Tarkovsky/Bergmann/Kurosawa/Vlacil/Resnais. The course calls for watching ~4-6 hours a week in addition to class work.

>>15152575
Professor explaining Plato's Gorgias in some intro ged course. Some autist raises his hand and starts talking about being a knight of faith.

>>15153066
>I didn't think I'd have to watch films
>I didn't think I'd have to read subtitles
>Why are so many of them black and white
christ, didn't realise film students are just as bad as theatre kids

>>15153116
>Now we had all partied the night before and gotten up at like 5 in the morning for the sake of the conference
Classic.

A physics major who minored in philosophy during a Kant seminar would not shut up about how one of his physics professors showed them in MATLAB once what a not restricted to 3 Dimensional space looks like. So for like 3 minutes he explained what the horse looked like in a 5D room. In the same seminar there was a 60 year old physicist who wanted to do a philosophy degree and would non stop mock Kant by saying "In our physicist facility (Max-Plank-Institut; one of the msot prestigious institutes in the world) we would never do that or think like that" and then try and bring in physics examples.
Thank God the prof had a master in physics himself (next to theology and philosophy phd) otherwise an ignorant prof would have thought that these schizos in someway msut be right.
The next semester I was gonna be in a seminar with that same kid again and after like 3 days where it was certain he would stay I dropped the class jsut ebcause of his idocy.

bu
mp

I don't do philosophy, but am involved in Humanities. We were discussing the politics surrounding resource extraction and the topic moved onto oil drilling and a girl in the group went on some weird thing about how the Oil drill was analogous to the male penis and thus it was like raping the earth, pounding it etc etc.

Though in-fairness pretty much no one took it seriously and laughed and even she did after saying it. But at the start she was genuine about it.

>>15157575
>tfw you will never dick down Gaia

>>15153476
Personally, I love oysters more than the pearls, but I'm always a little confused when people drop that line. It's way more accurate than most people think, but mostly because they say it as though it's hopeful and not sobering.

>>15153757
Given the time and circumstances in which these directors worked, I'm curious how you relate post-structuralism. On the one-hand it makes sense, because their cinematic approaches certainly different in similar and extreme ways from the obvious and somewhat rigid narrative forms of pre-War cinema; on the other hand, it would seem only Tarkovsky would acknowledge himself outside the more "structuralist" attitude toward art, but in such a different context given the unique intersection of the Russian poetic and spiritual tradition with Soviet modernism. Also, have you considered having them watch Symbiopsychotaxiplasm?

>>15158756
So this is a grad-school class, with a large amount of what I'm doing is about applying ideas of theory to cultural objects. It's less about context of a given piece, and more about applying theory directly. With these slower arthouse films you can throw a ton of different theoretical works at them, and see how they both work and fail in the same move, then pick up the different pieces.

>Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

Yes, but imo that's a little too easy to analyze. One of the main goals of the course is to confront people with films that act as an Other, and force people to attempt to breakthrough to the other side. Tarko is great for that, and some of the more out there Bergmann stuff like Persona is great as well, especially where one of the characters may or may not break the fourth wall.

I'm not saying this out of personal bias, I'm saying this because its my observation throughout two philosophy degrees: The absolute worst, most uncreative, most arrogant, cringe and shitpilled classmates I encountered were the atheist materialists who somehow stumbled into philosophy. We had this one kid who would sperg out whenever the professor would mentioned "god" in a thought experiment, like "lets say god removed this object from normal dimensional space but left its properties otherwise intact". Its a figure of speech which has no bearing on the content of the rest of the sentence, not a statement of theological weight, but this kid would go nuts every time. He constantly made snarky comments about any theist philosopher, and thought that Aristotle was "wrong" because "muh quantum physics". I met several of him over the years, each worse than the last.

>>15158868
Dude I feel you, there's not a single part of philosophy where people don't mention God either, so they'll never shut the fuck up. You either get one of those in a class, or a Judith Butler wannabe who can't make a point without over using the word hegemony.

>>15158859
Hmm. Since I'm working more from a cinematic perspective than a post-structural philosophy perspective, I don't know that I agree with this approach. I'd go so far as to say that the candle scene in Nostalgia is perhaps the most traditional, most anti-modern scene to ever be put to film and that to the extent that Tarkovsky is anti-structuralist it is because he seems to reach for a pre-structuralism in which there is an absolute understanding without rational mediation, as though there were a conceptual opposite to Foucault's Chinese encyclopedia. I think it's for this reason that I was curious about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm; certainly, it is the easiest to analyze, but it would seem the whole purpose would be to move beyond analysis towards the working recognition of post-structural concepts; in this simplicity, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is remarkably effective for demonstrating the treachery of images and the crisis of the real, especially before engaging with non-commercial, non-modern cinema, training wheels for post-modern, anti-consumptive film watching for those raised on Eisenstein-based montage narratives.

Putting this aside, if you're more interested in the image-as-post-structural-object investigation, have you considered incoporating contemporary photography along with cinema? It would seem like Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, the Dusseldorf School, Lee Friedlander, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha would pair exceptionally well with these films. Also, personally and selfishly, you might be interested in the work of a couple friends of mine: Chase Barnes and Drew Nikonowicz.

>>15159019
Yeah, I can see why you disagree. Something I should have mentioned is that graduate degrees in philosophy require people to begin producing their own work. A significant role of this course is to help people with their ability to create independent/original ideas. The idea you put forward for Tarkovsky, for example, is almost the opposite of what I want people to write in the course. The goal is to take a specific idea from a thinker and apply it to a given film. Taking Hellraiser, I use it to show how Deleuze's Becoming-Animal plateau from ATP can be applied, specifically with the Cenobytes acting as the barrier between the human/non-human groups. The way you talk about Tarkovsky is what I don't want students to do, but the way you look at Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is. Incidentally, Nostalghia is by far my favorite by Tarkovsky. The discussions on the untranslatability of poetry are paired so perfectly with the cinematography.

I'll check out those photographers. Have you seen Jean Baudrillard's photography? It's quite interesting, as are his comments on photography. With photography, I find that from the perspective of applying theory to an object, you have to look at all the works of a given set, or the photographers entire work. I'm not sure if I could fit it in, but I might take a handful of photographers works, and make an extra credit assignment from it. That could be neat.

>>15152942
Is this an American thing? Where do they get the idea there's a fucking "ee" sound at the end of the name?

>>15159132
That's what I find interesting about the film-makers you've selected. I get why you'd like Tarkovsky's films for your philosophical purposes, and I've definitely encountered critical readings which support it, but I think his own writings resist this kind of approach. Of course, for the development of philosophy, the attitudes of the film-makers themselves are somewhat irrelevant, so long as the images themselves demonstrate the theories of relationship pursued by the post-structuralist. After all, it would be somewhat absurd to suppose that Velazquez had any intentions similar to Foucault's reading. In another somewhat interesting turn, I'm not really surprised that you would be seeking to have your students avoid a reading like mine, because in a certain sense, I am probably something of an ideological enemy to you. After passing through post-modernism from a naive transcendentalism and existentialism, I am now a pseudo-monarchist and traditional Catholic. Perhaps strangest of all (and there are few people I can adequately express this to,) I am almost indebted as much to the first chapters of The Order of Things as I am to The Confessions. As I see it now, there appears to me to be a secret window inside of Post-modernism, a phantom thread that so unravels the philosophical and and theological errors of protestant/renaissance/enlightenment thinking so as to reveal the dormant medievalism modernism was meant to bury. With all that in mind, however, I must also admit that I am less familiar with post-modern philosophy directly; rather, in a somewhat eclectic fashion I've groped my why through an independent analysis of contemporary art. Looking at Baudrillard's photography now, it seems very interesting. If you like that, you will almost certainly like the photographers I've named. And while I'd almost certainly agree it is difficult to apply much theory to a single image (beyond some rare examples) the benefit of the photograph as opposed to the film is that they are more quickly read. But here are some examples from Wall I think you would appreciate: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/jeff-wall/jeff-wall-room-guide/jeff-wall-room-guide-room-1

And here are Nikonowicz and Barnes:
http://www.nikonowicz.com/
https://stateless.site/

We all studied under Joe Johnson:
http://www.joejohnsonprojects.com/
And Travis Shaffer:
http://travisshaffer.com/

If not for your class, I think you'll find contemporary photography especially interesting. As my religious ideas have shifted, however, I've found I can no longer really make the work I used to make, nor really care much for what I used to care for.

>>15159466
Nice dubs. What Tarkovsky writings have you read? I've been meaning to get more into them, but I haven't had as much time to do that as I'd like. Most of the stuff I work on is about mass media rather than more artistic works.

I'd honestly rather talk to someone who disagrees with me over someone who agrees with me. There's a fascist Hegelian on here I was talking to last week about transhumanism and human evolution that I fully disagreed with, but his points were really interesting. His reading of Deleuze was neat as well. I was reading Brothers Karamazov the other day and actually thinking about how a return to religion would look today. The main idea I've gotten out of post-structuralist thought is how we continue to detach signifiers from signifieds, and how meaning is coming to be completely lost. I actually think a return to religious thought would reinject meaning, and force signifiers to be reattached to signifieds. There's a hollowness at the center of things that I'd like to see gone. Thanks for the photographers, I'm a big fan of photography myself. Though my pictures are B-grade Ansel Adams at best.

>>15159645
To my knowledge, he really only has the one book--Sculpting in Time. In typical Tarkovsky fashion, it's a rather substantial treatise on alternative theories of cinema, delivered almost entirely through what amounts almost to memoir. He simply begins with Ivan's Childhood and then recounts how his own cinematic theory developed through the making of his films. It gets memed a fair amount on /tv/, but I'm generally disappointed with most film studies people. On some level, though, I've only ever dipped my toes in. Another book you might be interested in is Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader. I haven't read it, but I've seen it come up in interesting articles a number of times.

You're thinking on post-structuralism and its hollowness actually mirrors a lot of my own thoughts before I turned towards traditional Catholicism, though you are probably better read than I was/am. I've developed something of a love/hate relationship with photography. I mostly got into it because I wanted to make images, but it was easier to learn cameras than drawing. Now, I've studied photography pretty deeply from an aesthetic point of view, but I don't particularly like it as a working medium very much anymore. As to that hollowness, though, there a couple things I might like to point out, at least as anchors of investigation. It is worth considering that the Gospel of John is essentially the transitional literature between Judaism and Christianity, and is therefore, essentially, the foundational work of Western literature. And how does it begin? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In this simple sentence, I think we can begin to make an essential distinction between rationality and reason. That is, if we get at the root of the word "rationality" we see the emphasis on divisibility, discretion, and finitude. But, as we can even see in math now, experience cannot be so easily dilineated. And yet, if we accept a distinction between what is reasonable and what is rational, we can avoid the emptiness of signifiers without signifieds. If we reject the rationalist view that quantity is the irreducible being, and instead say that quality is the irreducible and that quantity is only a subset of quality, then we can say that our experiences are reasonable and logical and have objective meaning without needing to maintain so rigidly the structures that post-modernism has, for the most part correctly, dismantled. Consider with this also two long-held but oft-forgotten dogmas--God is the Author of Life, and God is Beauty. Suddenly, when God is put in his proper place as the origin of all things--the center of being and beingness--relativism and absolutism are fused into a single perspective. That is, everything has absolute meaning, but that absolute meaning is found by each things relative position to the sole absolute, which is God.

>>15159852
Tarkovsky's diaries are published as well, I've seen excerpts from them where he talks about his ideas, or other people's films. Thanks for the Schrader rec.

The thing that's drawn me into the idea of having a religious resurgence is how Baudrillard (who's also a post-structuralist) talks about how our chasing of rationality has created such complex models of the world that we only interact with the models. How they've become fully detached from the object they're meant to represent, and instead end up becoming more real than reality. That everything gets lost in its' representation. Most philosophers of that era always call for political revolution to solve things (Baudrillard posits it as unsolvable) but it seems to me that a new practice of religion is the only actually possible solution. I know you're a traditional Catholic, but in my limited ideas it seems that a newer practice that fits into our transhuman, mass-media culture would be the way that it could eventually become the fundamental aspect of our society. I see the issue as our fetishistic progress of rationality which is taking us away from any meaning, so a system of belief would have to co-exist with our current state of society. What do you think? Maybe it really is an solvable problem.

>>15160001
No, I think that's exactly right. It is precisely this kind of thinking which lead me to where I am. Foucault recognized that so long as a revolution uses the same language as what it revolts against, the new structures will be the same as the old structures. In my own observations with a mind towards real politik and a rejection of modernist/deist/objectivity/rationalist attempts at man-made order, political revolution has seemed truly impossible; that is, power is a real, objective thing, and systems of control are largely aesthetic regimes and nothing more. And here we would seem to hit the central difficulty--by modern, liberal capitalism, we have pursued objective order by way of individual incentive without a superordinate morality. We have thought--without any real evidence--that if each person acts in his own material interest (but without consideration for supernatural meaning) we will somehow arrive at a utopic society. But, while the post-structuralists have been almost entirely right in their criticism against modern philosophy, it would also seem that some agreed upon meaning is necessary for there to be any society at all. And so this gets us to the need of a religion, or at least something like a religion. But the problem is this--religion requires sincere belief, but reaction against modernism is almost exclusively accessed either through irony or naivite. There of course has been some call for a return to sincerity, but how does one become sincere, without having some meaning to sincerely express? So then, what is there to believe sincerely if modernity is rejected? I understand you're thinking that a new religion must develop, but I don't really see how this accomplished. And here is what's interesting--to most people, traditional Catholicism is a new religion. Many nominal Catholics today eschew things like the Rosary for either being too old-fashioned and simple, or else to demanding or else not personal enough. These arguments are all according to modern, rational thinking. But, is there a better example of a devotional which breaks through the simulation? Can the prayer be said to exist exclusively in the contemplation, or the recitation, or in the beads? Or rather, would the prayer exist between them and by their relationship? Further, the historical narrative of the Rosary provides an immediately accessible meaning, while at the same time the sense that it has been wrongly forgotten satisfies the revolutionary urge while providing a tangible, non-commodifiable, non-consumptive action. Keep in mind, this is all in reference to the Catholic teachings of sanctification which are perfectly parallel to transhumanist ideas, without any class or structural limits to distribution which are inherent to technology. And the pursuit of this asks for idiosyncratic communication. For example, rather than working to pass ideas through an academic sieve, I am instead here, speaking to you, as one person to another person.

>>15160241
Thanks for the conversation, you've given me some good ideas to mull over. I always come to the same idea that individual human beings can find some form of meaning/salvation/etc but humanity as a whole never will.

Majoring in philosophy is a top meme. Literally only people that do it for undergrad are edgy white kids who are mentally unstable, unsociable analytic r/atheism nerds, or trust fund babies.

>>15153116
holy fucking based

>>15160450
Of course, and I almost certainly agree with this last point. Free will exists. By traditional teaching, the whole world will never be converted. In fact, many saints suggest fewer will be saved than will be damned. But it stands to reason that truth will always be more durable than non-truth, and therefore it seems unlikely that meaning ought to be discovered again with each generation, while acknowledging that for men to be sincere they must seemingly discover the perpetual truth independently and for themselves