/lit/ - Literature

>>16101266
Always heartening to find The Professor's work posted here

>>16101266
>imm so le superior to all those sheeple
Why so predictable?

i least you admit you're a brainlet

>>16101266
I wish DFW could be dismissed as dumb. Then we could listen to types like OP

The character narrating is a tryhard narcissist

>Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.

Fucking dropped. I can already tell this is written by somebody who thinks they are smarter than they actually are.

>Experience is no doubt the first product of our understanding, while employed in fashioning the raw material of our sensations.
Fucking dropped. I can already tell this is written by somebody who thinks they are smarter than they actually are.

>>16101266
i mean he wrote one of the greatest modern novels, so you have been retroactively refuted by a book you didnt read

There are many, many passages in IJ that would be utterly trashed if they were posted in a /crit/ thread

>>16101407
you could say that about any book

>>16101407
>utterly trashed
You think that counts for something, faggot?

>“That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!


Fucking dropped. I can already tell this is written by somebody who thinks they are smarter than they actually are.

>>16101407
Literally everything gets trashed on anonymous hindustani oyster picking forums

>>16101266
>Wardine Be Cry
He couldn't even get ebonics right, was he that sheltered of a self-hating white? Did he ever leave his parents' university town?

>>16101717
that's how negroes really talk you jive turkey

>>16102217
No it's not, they would say "wardine be crying," no one would fucking say "wardine be cry" like that. DFW is a hack of the highest (or maybe lowest?) order.

>>16101266
Yeah Wallace has some mark of genius in him but he was too much of a schizoid (not schizo, there's a subtle difference). I wish that he wasn't dead because there's no doubt that he would be a voice in today's ecelebrity culture. Perhaps his claim to notoriety is immortalized by what could have been rather than what he was.

>>16101266
you have no fucking idea what's in store. if you weren't addicted to the internet you would have finished those 20 pages and actually have been blow away by the revelation of it all. unfortunately you have developed that addiction to the dopamine "likes" on FB
your generation isn't worthy of reading great novels

>>16102246
He would be insufferable in this day and age, would definitely succumb to TDS, would probably got #MeToo'd anyway. He chose a good time to die.

>>16102257
>your generation isn't worthy of reading great novels
True, probably why he reads Infinite Jest. Each generation gets the literature they deserve.

§1

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

>>16101717
the brainlet /lit/ meme of IJ. I'm convinced most people who post this ebonics meme never read the book. This passage is two or three pages in a thousand page book, and it's early enough that a brainlet who doesn't understand the book will use his social justice muscle to prove this book isn't too hard, it's "racist", or that "cant get the ebonics right" as justification to give up the actual work of fucking reading. You are really a moron of you perpetuate this meme and your wigger muscle is being hugely butthurt by a white man not "getting ebonics right"

>>16102264
that wit just blew my mind. you're so smart. you're actually using sarcasm. or as it's called, irony. what most great writers have called "the crutch of the weak (or feeble minded)" Oh, shit. That means your mind is feeble

>>16102274
If they had read it they would know that the narrator of that chapter is young, uneducated and strung out on crack, to expect her to speak the queens english is more than a little ridiculous.

>>16102274
>>16102279
The real feeble minds spend time reading 1,200 tomes of meaningless bullshit fiction and then waste their time defending their poor choices. You could have read every Greek play in existence in the amount of time you wasted reading IJ. Your loss, not mine, I don't waste time on midwit books that AOC considers masterpieces.

>>16102291
Already read the greeks. Fairly dissapointed on how little thay had to say on modern society.

>>16102291
I read it three times while you spent your time playing minecraft and jerking off. good on you

>>16102291
There are only two options in life: read Infinite Jest or read every Greek play in existence. What is your choice, young master?

>>16102322
Your mustache is askew.

>>16102291
>greek plays
>not meaningless bullshit fiction

>>16101266
Based and checked

>>16102265
I'm so glad I read DFW reverse chronologically and started with TPK. What a gorgeous opening.

>>16101427

>>16101266
DFW is garbage. The same fractured, decadent writing typical of the impulsive and weak modern author, bloated to high-heaven. God forbid he exercise some restraint (but restraint doesn't sell or provoke). And then his obnoxious crying about sincerity, even though he fueled so much of the very thing he lamented against with his playful-ironic style. What a shame. Imagine what Dickens would have to say about DFW?
>>16101276
And then, since it is a massive book of garbage, of course it seduces idiots like this, since anything illusive, contradictory, vague, and enigmatic is taken advantage of and valued by hipsters like you to differ yourselves, nothing but a slave to the fashion system.
>>16101281
He isn't dismissed as dumb, he's dismissed as a bad, decadent writer who cannot exercise restraint because he is a weak and impulsive decadent.
>>16101303
>>16101318
Seeing as though Kant is an idiot who upheld the difference between reality and appearance, and that Gaddis isn't much better then DFW (though definitely better), then your comments as parody of the OP don't really hit.
>>16101360
A book is not great because it is popular. It is great because it itself is great.
>>16101407
Yes, because it's garbage created by a decadent.
>>16101414
No, you couldn't.
>>16102257
Blown away by the airy garbage that is that book. God forbid someone expects art to be enjoyable, instead of bloat and excess.
>>16102274
Hard/easy doesn't have anything to do with it. It is laughable shit. To realize THIS book is one of the crowning works of fiction of the 20th century, praised everywhere, after reading those pages, and you start to realize the full extend to the degeneration of art and spirit. Good writers no longer exist.

>>16101266
Based, Bill Gates has it in his reading list so dropping it is based

>>16102265
>Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted.

>For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Fucking dropped. I can already tell this is written by somebody who thinks they are smarter than they actually are.

>>16102430
I do not think I have read a better first chapter, probably my favorite couple of paragraphs ever.

>>16101266
>heads and bodies
Did he mean people?

>>16102492
Some are brains, some are jocks.

>>16102447
I don't like DFW either, but he's better than mass-reply fags

>>16102492
They might be people, but how can I truly know? They barely even seem autonomous. Just shambling masquerades, a swath of heads and bodies. If only they realized how woke I was.

>Wardine Be Cry
Wow what a masterpiece of modern literature!

>>16102586
>Wow what a masterpiece of modern literature!
Wow. What a masterpiece of modern trolling!

>>16102611
Wardine Be Cry is a criticism that has never been refuted and never can be, it’s inherently trash and can only exist in the type of bloated novel that DFW writes. It should have ended up on the cutting room floor, but then again so should most of DFW’s work. He was the most insincere author of the late 20th century, and that’s saying something. This is the kind of literature nepotism gives birth to, I guess.

Do you have to be a druggy or addict to enjoy DFW? I can’t relate to most of what he writes about. Or maybe you have to be American to understand

>>16102645
Poor bait. You never even read it.

>>16102502
mass reply is better than me waiting a minute to seperate my posts one by one for autists like you.

>>16102687
None of his work requires that, none of it is about that.

>>16102687
Forgot to say, the only thing really American about his writing is the language. The themes apply more to the so called developed world, but most of his themes are fairly universal.

>>16102712
What are his themes? I’ve watched Idiocracy and based on the IJ plot summaries I’ve read it sounds like that kind of social commentary.

>>16102718
>IJ plot summaries
It is not even remotely plot based and answering that question is sort of antithetical to one of its main themes. Just read some of his short stories if you want to get an idea, most deal with fairly universal subject matter. Here is a very short one.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a500/incarnations-burned-children-david-foster-wallace-0900/

>>16102447
mass reply cancer. would rather read DFW

>>16102739
I should add, I suspect IJ is a novel that is actually better to read in translation if it is translated into your first language, the highly idiomatic nature of his language in the novel would be more of a distraction for ESLs than anything.

I would be curious to hear from anyone who has read both the English and a translated edition. How do they compare? I know DFW had difficulty with the one translation he read, but he also wanted it to be translated. Sort of want to brush up on my German and read the translation to see how the themes tranlate.

>>16101266
Good for you op

>>16101266

Well you are exactly right and DFW himself would agree because this was the essence of his entire struggle in life

>>16101407
The only things that get praise in /crit/ threads are posts with beige prose and posts with frequent use of "nigger."

The point of being surrounded by heads and bodies is that Hal is basically depersonalised and can't see those around him as people.

>>16102430
Yeah if anyone asks where to start with DFW, the answer is a short story (Good Old Neon, preferably) then TPK, then non-fiction (Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun thing). Only then should IJ be read.

>>16102265

I'm sure DFW had read the first two pages of Suttree.

>>16101266

The reason he only sees heads and bodies is because he's become an emotional retard due to a combination of drugs and mental breakdown. You might have figured that out if you read more than one line.

>>16101266
>modernism/postmodernism
Based.

>>16102502
This.
>>16102447
Extremely based, but also cringe.

>>16102447
That’s quite a lot of opinions for someone who seemingly doesn’t know anything about IJ.

>>16102447
I see you like the word "decadent"
Stop using it until the point it sounds vicious

D.H. Lawrence would probably retract the accusation of endless self generating neuroticism aimed at Joyce and Proust but only to redirect it at this cryptoprostestant dreck. Also, you can tell purely by stylometry that DFW fans are self hating numales.

>Wardine be cry

how did he get away with this

>>16102447
>THIS book is one of the crowning works of fiction of the 20th century

Nobody, or at least nobody worth taking seriously, considers IJ to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. That doesn't mean it isn't good

>>16102265
>coins of sunlight

DFW stole this from the last sentence of Nestor

>>16104000
His fans have never interacted with a black person in their lives but know that they should love and defend them because the same media that told them to love DFW told them to love black people.

>In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Fucking dropped. I can already tell this is written by somebody who thinks they are smarter than they actually are.

>>16101266
Lmao, good luck reading a book ever again.