/lit/ - Literature

When /lit/ was postmodern and anti-tradition.

Where u at /lit/ bros?

>>16384288
I'm on page 158

>>16384134
i just finished GR and i loved it
whats more though is i'm worried now nothing else will feel as dense detailed and rich in comparison
am i fucked?

>>16384195
I'm about to blow your mind:

You can be postmodern and a traditionalist.

>>16384481
How

>>16384479
There's always Finnegans Wake.

>>16384492
You acknowledge the specific desires that following tradition will manifest and abandon their claim to objective truth.

>>16384479
You can always reread it

>>16384479
hope you read V. and CoL49 first or you spoiled yourself, as I did

>>16384134
aka the reddit chronicles. if you have these on your shelf youre a guaranteed consoomer, left leaning incel

>>16384544
i intend to
>>16384498
i intend to
>>16384557
i did read V and also adored it
trying to get my hands on bleeding edge next or is it stupid to read him out of order?

just picked up a copy of delillo's white noise based on /lit/ recommendation wish me luck lads

>>16384134
>20th ce
>a*glo tradition
lmfao start w/ the sumerians

Still a baby (18)
2 years ago I got filtered by the first 200 pages (dropped it for a month) of InfiniteJest but over the next 100 pages I settled it and had a great time reading the rest of the book

I recently began Gravitys Rainbow and though I was filtered by the first 50 pages I feel myself slowly settling in the more I read

What do I need to know before being able to read Ulysses?

>>16384134
Why are this books so memed? I have been here for two years. I don't even know what it's about.

>>16384795
Those were the three books old apolitical /lit/ used to discuss most often. Threads about them became so common they were eventually deemed the meme trilogy.

>nu-/lit/ hasn't read the meme trilogy
In fairness, neither did old /lit/

>>16384773
Read the Odyssey and some of Joyce's other work beforehand. Dubliners will give you a really good Joyce primer.

>>16384492
It's literally the entire basis of neoreactionary and nrx/acc thought.

>>16384795
They're simultaneously extremely popular and very hard to comprehend. Many people who find themselves reading them don't have a strong literary background and as a result denizens of /lit/ view champions of these novels as annoying fanboys sperging out over literature way past their reading level. Hence the novels' association with pseudo-intellectuals and holier-than-thou redditors.

Only read IJ so far, which should I do next?

>>16384773
Read a lot of classics. A LOT. From all eras before Joyce. Read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Those alone might scare you off. Ulysses is a tough book to read and there's no guarantee that you'll actually get any from it.

>>16384479
Pynchie is just a rip off of Faulkner mixed with the former's extensive high society connections

>>16384773
At least read
>Odyssey (and therefore Iliad)
>Hamlet
>Dubliners
>Portrait
These would be very nice, and you should read them anyway for other lit and for their own sake
>Divine Comedy, and therefore Bible, and since you've now read the Bible you might as well read Paradise Lost too
>basically entire western canon lol
Oxen of the Sun in particular contains pastiche of Swift, Sterne, Gibbon and more, so having read Gulliver's Travels/Tristram Shandy/Decline and Fall... would be good, and reading them in between readings will change how you next reread Ulysses, but they are by no means necessary

>>16384795
There is no fucking way you've been here for two years and haven't at least picked up by reputation what these three long and/or difficult, autistic, thoroughly memeable 20th century novels by autistic and memeable (even outside of their specific trilogy member) authors have in common

>>16384588
>trying to get my hands on bleeding edge next or is it stupid to read him out of order
Read him however you want. Nothing's like Gravity's Rainbow but Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are within the "postmodern doorstopper" category. While they aren't GR part 2, you'd probably appreciate them.

You might look into more "postmodern doorstoppers".

>>16384288
Just started today, on page 6. The characters are already insufferable.

>>16384134
I don't read prose fiction.

>>16384877
You mean crypto-leftists and feds?

>>16385898
lmao what does that even mean?

>>16384773
You legitimately don’t need “prerequisites” for Ulysses. If you know the Odyssey, Hamlet, and Catholicism, you’ll pick up more references, but even if you went in 100% blind you’ll still be reading an incredible character study with some of the best prose in the English language.
The biggest tip is to accept you won’t understand everything your first time around, and keep powering through even if you feel totally lost. There are websites that have detailed breakdowns of every chapter’s plot beats.

>>16386050
I was able to read Gravity's Rainbow and enjoy it the whole time even though I was frequently lost. When I tried to read Ulysses, I was frequently lost but dropped it about a quarter of the way through. Am I missing something when it comes to the book?

Fuck maximalism there I said it

>>16386113
You should read A Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners if you want to try reading it again. What was the specific thing that made you drop it?

>>16384479
But have you read Mason & Dixon yet? Cause if not you've got something even better coming.

>>16386188
It didn't feel like the book had anywhere it wanted to go, or a destination in mind, if that makes sense. Reading GR and M&D, I didn't get that feeling.

>>16386214
I read A Portrait first so when I started reading Ulysses it became clear to me that it's about the two characters Stephan and Bloom. It's also about what it means to be Irish and what it means to be a modern man. I don't know if other anons will agree with those 3 things but that's definitely what I thought it was about. The second last chapter is the culmination of these things in my eyes so if you want a concrete destination that's where the book steers to.

>>16385526
>no Bottom's Dream

>>16386256
It's al about style, anon.

>>16385901
>anyone that doesn't scream Jooz 24/7 is a federal agent

we get it already /pol/

>>16384479
there’s a world of maximalist literature friend, unfortunately i’ve read none of it so therefore cannot provide suggestion

>>16384134

>>16386203
damn really? i need to cool off with something that isnt such a tome but im pumped for that now

>>16386413
alas

>>16384892
>tfw I genuinely love Ulysses and Finnegans Wake but have to say that Portrait is my favorite novel so that people don't think I'm a pseud

>>16386274
I remember anons hyping this book up when the English translation was first dropping, and then I never heard of it again. Is it any good?

and again as farce

>>16386695
Just don't expect it to be the same as GR. It's still zany and complicated but it's less explosive. It's more sincere and warmer than GR.

>>16386749
that sounds great thanks for the rec

>>16384288
601. Could have finished it months ago if I wasn't slacking. Feels bad now that Uni is back in session. :(

>>16384479
Women and men by McElroy

Just got thru the drunk dad section in IJ. Holy shit I’m such a fucking failure.

>>16386913
Fuck golf and fuck spiders.

>>16384479
Other Pynchon Novels
DFW
Joyce
Barth
DeLillo, specifically Underworld
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Gaddis
Vollmann
Faulkner
Powers, specifically the Gold Bug Variations
Cohen, specifically The Book of Numbers

>>16384288
Read it 3 years ago, wanting to do a re-read eventually.

>>16384588
Read Tcol49 if you want a similar but compressed experience as GR.

>>16384773
That its harder than GR

>>16384795
The joke is that ij is shit

>>16388273
haha got'em

pure trash

>>16386951
>>16386951
I see you get off shitty pseudoscientific plot details no one gets except in the 'how to read...' books.

I still can't believe people think this is literature when people like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Melville and Shakespeare etc. exist.

>>16388643
lmao suck my dick

>>16384795
Big books, more to talk about.

>>16384795
Pleb filter

>>16388643
How is it not literature?

Brandon...come back

>>16388418
filtered or triggered by facts that get in the way of his narrative