/lit/ - Literature

>>16439176
Who in the modern world carries this ancient tradition?
By modern world, I mean anyone after Milton

>>16439183
it's almost impossible to do that at the same level as homer, dante, ariosto, milton. you have a resurgence of the myth in romanticism but that's just larping. you have short stories by e.t.a hoffmann, e.a. poe, lovecraft, or calvino ij the 20th century, but they all lack that epic breath. tolkien tried to do something like that in a hostile age, but his work is inevitably weak.

>>16439176
As we all know, Homer wrote epic fantasy stories so that ancient Greek consoomers could have nerdgasms over.
>"OMG LOOK, ACHILLES IS SO COOL! HE'S MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER HE'S LIKE KIRITO LOL!!!"
>"Bro Ares is like, my favourite superhero lmao"
Naturally, there was no overarching meaning or purpose behind telling the story of the Illiad. It was just a fantasy story that possesses only entertainment value. Clearly, it wasn't intended to provide metaphysical, spiritual and mental inspiration to Classical Age warriors.

>>16439256
Wow, that is a stupid thing you believe. Why do you think that?

How does it feel to have such a narrow taste in literature that you can only appreciate 1 kind of book? Also you know very little about literature if you think it just goes “fantasy/epics until the 19th century”.

>>16439256

>>16439203
>that’s just larping
Lmao what? The romantic poets did indeed deal with mythical elements in their poetry. Why are they larping but the poets you happen to like are not?

>>16439285
That's not what I'm thinking dumbass, I'm caricaturing you.
>>16439303
Nice Pepe.

>>16439304
just /lit/ being /lit/... "my authors are based and all the authors i didn't read are cringe"

>>16439324
A caricature is supposed to resemble its subject in some way

>>16439329
>you called Homer "fantasy"

>>16439256
i wrote
> it was just about lyricism, grand mental images, moral values and seek for some meaning in life and death.
this is what literature is about
not your netflix romances.
>>16439337
yes. if a classification is legitimate, homer classifies as fantasy.

>>16439176
I like both desu
I have a harder time getting into poetry I'll admit

>>16439362
>yes. if a classification is legitimate, homer classifies as fantasy.
It's an epic poem. Calling Homer a writer of fantasy is like referring to a five-star French food gourmet restaurant as a "really good McDonalds".
>it was just about lyricism, grand mental images, moral values and seek for some meaning in life and death.
This is much closer to Romanticism than it is to Classical literature.

>>16439256
>>16439362
also, muh
>inspiration
again, literature is not self help retard. it is not "useful" and technically speaking it is not "metaphysical" and the auditorium of the homeric aeds was very far from the "spiritual ppl" whose physiological functions you follow on instagram. you talk like a woman, so i assume you are a woman. i have just one thing to say to you: avoid literature, it is not meant for you.

>>16439176
homer was writing about achilles' wrath (psychology) in the iliad sorry you got filtered brainlet

>that is, nobody before the ninet*en century ever gave a fuck about le psychology meme.
>The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling - 1749
>Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady - 1748

no it's not you fucking retard. you have no idea what fantasy means. also they did care about psychology just subtly and not preformatively (signalling that they are a genre/meme therefore good).

>>16439407
lol
now wrath = psychology
achille's wrath is an event, like apollo's plague. there is no psychological """deepening""" in the iliad. not even in the lyricist of the following 2 centuries. sappho for instance makes an entirely physical description of love. psychologism is a 19th century thing.

>>16439395
I'm sure literature isn't "useful" to you. You're so mentally deformed that you can't even conceive of how literature can be linked to an overarching tradition, metaphysics and model of life. That your stunted mind could even conflate the liberal idea of "self-help" with that of literature as a function of civilisation speaks volumes.

>>16439410
> muh 50 years before
> muh writers completely irrelevant outside of my wretched island

>>16439416
you're a retard anon stop trying to discuss things beyond what your tiny brain can grasp. you don't even know what fantasy means let alone understand bigger words

>>16439431
development of the realistic/psychological novel is decidedly an eighteenth century phenomenon

just admit you're a brainlet trying to flex on things he doesn't understand

>>16439410
>watermarked reaction image with an instagram
Literally kill yourself

>>16439424
>overarching tradition, metaphysics and model of life
you keep repeating the same 3 chilches pretending to pass for someone who actually reads. i understand you need to feel that , say, the iliad is "important" or "problematic" - though above all "useful", like a an electric broom - because you can't enjoy it, so just follow my advice: let literature alone and just keep "unpacking" your "spiritual" and "provocative" netflix series.

>>16439465
>thinks the point is whether it's 19th or 18th century
You and OP together still add up to double digit IQ

>>16439416
Retard. Read Shakespeare. Read Boccaccio. Read Cervantes. Read Sappho. Read the Greek Dramatists. Read the Romantic poets. Your insistence that pre-modern literature was all about epics and “fantasy” whereas literature post 18th century is all about “psychology” just shows that you are severely underread. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with psychological literature. It has its own unique insights and its own special aesthetic qualities. That YOU are unable to appreciate it is only a sign of your narrow-mindedness.

>>16439176
Based.

>>16439491
Basado

>tradition, religion
>existing
>practice of life is something to be derived from reading epics

close the wikipedia page of Evola immediately

>>16439491
> YOU BIGOT

>>16439469
You're an actual extreme grade retard. Believe it or not, once upon a time harmonious societies with coherent civilisations used to exist and the art they produced was tightly associated with an order of concepts and symbols related to tradition. This endows every work with a higher meaning and purpose, beyond pure aesthetics. That you're so fucking dumb the only way from aesthetics you see is down towards utilitarianism than up towards metaphysics is not my problem.

>>16439508
>t. retard
close yourself off from society please

>>16439382
>I AM FAT FUCK
>I AM SO FAT I EAT BOOKS
>IMAGINE BEING SO FAT YOU LOOK AT EPIC POEMS AND SEE FOOD

>>16439508
based.
how fucking low IQ you must be to believe a greek warrior of the archaic age used the iliad as a "handbook for life"

>>16439176
Who cares what white dead old men wrote or the culture of colonisers. The future is fem.

>>16439511
OP is cognitively unable to understand any other culture than the modern world so when he reads Homer all the substance evades him and he's left with some "epic fantasy."

>>16439520
homaaaaa i luv sooow much you're sooow inspiraitionalllll to us aaaaallllllll

>>16439519
>"oh god oh fuck oh god oh fuck he's onto me he knows I am clueless about both Romanticism and the Classical, what the fuck do I do?"
>hmmm.png
>"YOU'RE FAT LOL"
High level discourse.

>>16439524
unlike you i know very well the axiological themes of the iliad, which unlike you retarded mutt i dealt with in original language for 5 years in high school.
you couldn't tell me ONE (1) conceptual theme of the iliad.

>>16439524
Makes me want to kill myself desu
>>16439520
>>16439526
>"When Junger was reading Ariosto's poetry on the battlefields in France, he was really using it as a self-help 'handbook for life.'"
This is the level of intelligence you're stuck with. Your failure to comprehend how a person can derive more than aesthetic value from a work of art is truly incredible.

>>16439362
>moral values and seek for some meaning in life and death.
>this is what literature is about
You shit talk Dostoevsky when all his novels are exactly about that

>>16439544
>actually high-school understanding of the iliad and literature in general
Makes sense

>>16439550
> more than aesthetic value
you see the little petty trick is in that
> more
you uselet philistine helot.
in litereature, there is no "more" than what you call "aesthetic value", like a bank employee. "aesthetic value" is the supreme value in literature, just you can't feel it and you have to make bullshit up.

>>16439570
Are you jewish or schizophrenic? That's the usual trait associated with being unable to comprehend cultures

>>16439566
i was talking about ancient greek, retard, which you learn in high school, not at the university.

>>16439559
What he's really referring to is the dramatic Romantic heroes embodied most perfectly by Napoleon III, he's just too fucking retarded to realise this and conflates the archetype with its literal antithesis, the Classical hero.

>>16439576
> he calls me a jew because he doesn't know what "philistine" means
i swear you mutts are a fucking curse

>>16439176
you're so stupid, I can't believe you can operate a computer and you somehow found /lit/

>>16439584
So yes? You should do a DNA test, you probably have some Ashkenazi admixture and there's nothing we can do to explain cultures to you because you're inherently unable to grasp the concept.

>>16439570
>in litereature, there is no "more" than what you call "aesthetic value"
Caved-in-head-take-brain syndrome. You literally replied to a post where I gave you an explicit example of a real man who was deriving a lot more than purely aesthetic value from a literary work.

>>16439604
you of course know nothing of either ariosto or junger. and obviously junger never said such a coarse thing as the one you attribute to him, let alone the sick, consumeristic idea that in a literary work one seeks "a lot more than purely aesthetic value".

>>16439176
Seek help

>>16439621
stop samefagging retard. the single id count is still 12 from half an hour. you absolute baboon.

>>16439627
The thread showed up on the first again and I just read your OP now. Before I replied to a comment in the thread. I'll make sure to hide the thread next time it pops on the front page. Good luck with your issues anon.

>>16439632
lol
you demented schizo trash, get out of my thread

>>16439618
>you're off to war
>"hey nice war poetry"
>"guess I'll just marvel at the aesthetic value and technical skill used in the work for pure pleasure"
>"no, I don't reflect at all on the possible real world meaning and value of the work, because the work has no value beyond the work"
How can I simplify this any further for you? I think I realised a while ago that you were trolling, but god, even if that were the case this is just excessive.

>>16439645
> that self-help "argument" again
you are dumb and boring and you know nothing of either literature and real life. believing that ariosto can "teach" you something about the war from a practical point of view is beyond my ability to stand retardation.
so, whatever makes you cope at night.

>>16439677
Tell me honestly, do you really believe that my claim is Ariosto can teach a World War 1 soldier about the specifics of use and application of modern war technics? How can your response possibly not be construed as bad faith?

>>16439176
You should've read Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard to understand existentialism and the shift towards psychological literature. The world changes, people adapt, aesthetics shift. Rose tinted understanding of the past is simply failure to understand your time but it's normal, the world is a confusing place.

>>16439256
based, people here are naives if they think that books like Iliad are just the story of a war.

>>16439702
> practical means technological
again, im done with you.
> The world changes, people adapt, aesthetics shift.
you seem to imply that it leans towards the best (as far as it concerns literature of course, we are not speaking of medicine o maths). welll, that's a rose tinted understanding of the world.

>>16439724
>you seem to imply that it leans towards the best
Maybe if you had read Hegel you wouldn't misunderstand simple statements so badly?

>>16439724
> practical means technological
I was referring to technics, not technology, otherwise I would have said technology. Nice to know that you are a troll, though. I just wish you were a better troll. I don't mind being baited, but it has to be fun.

>>16439729
if believing the aesthetics of a previous period was better than the aesthetics of a latter period (my position, which you call rose tinted) is nothing else than a failure to understand your time, therefore the aesthetics aesthetics of a previous period can't be better than the aesthetics of a latter period. therefore the evolution of the aesthetics goes for the better. it's very simple actually.

>>16439758
No anon... Because 0 is not a negative number it doesn't mean it's a positive number. I don't think there's much point in trying to explain this further as you may benefit from reading instead. Kant's antinomies and Hegel's historiography both discuss this.

>>16439532
>Being this new

>>16439948
>everyone is retarded and that's a good thing
>t. you

>>16439544
>btfo mode: auto

>>16439176
If you think that Paradise Lost is just fantasy maybe you should try rereading it and really pay attention to satan motif, there is depth psychology question about his character.

About the popularity of psychological driven books it’s a question of knowledge of the time, the ancient literature is populated with mentions of Hippocrates’ Humorism the psychology approach that “modern” writers have taken when writing their characters could be considered an evolution in this mean.

>>16439176
Absolutely true, based, redpilled, etc., etc.

>>16439304

>>16439176
>not Psychology
>but is Mental images, moral values and meaning

That’s essentially psychology, my dude. At least psychology for the ancients. Here’s a big red pill you won’t read anywhere else. Ensure that this redpill is planted in wet fertile soil, and not on the rocks or in the thorns or aside the path:

The way that ancients thought about things was through image, character, and activity, these things “encoding” or representing tropological or spiritual truths. These stories (character, image, activity) could be easily remembered, and once remembered they become reference points from which specific and complex truths can be accessed. Instead of remembering hundreds of principles and aphorisms, the ancients would remember one story that contains these principles and aphorisms through metaphors and symbols. The whole story can be a metaphor which contains hundreds of other metaphors. When you read an ancient story and come across some strange detail, that detail is almost always a symbol. The ancient world was oral rather than written, as most people learned orally and not through books until perhaps the 19th century. Keep in mind that the ancients had a whole system of memorizing based on mental imagery, the ars memoriae, where things were placed into a mental landscape and symbolically represented, which you can read about in Francis Yates’ work.

The value of these mnemonic stories is that they are easily retained and can be recalled more easily than re-read. You think back and recollect these stories and compare them to your own life, deepening your understanding of your own life.

Take the Holy Grail. Consider how many details seem extraneous: the knight’s vows of celibacy, the virginal nun sister of the protagonist, the king with a wounded cock who spends his time fishing. This tells us that the metaphorical theme is related to sex, or more specifically, the keeping of virginity. Virginity itself means more than sex, but rather the keeping of the Will unsullied by unwasted until its proper end. So in the Bible we have the parable of the 10 Virgins, waiting for the Bridegroom: 5 of them cannot wait and miss his arrival. The other 5 can wait because their torched burn long enough. This is about keeping the Will steady on its goal and not settling or wasting your energy, requiring a “fire” that burns long enough (patience). The Holy Grail is likened to a bright or enflamed cup from which everlasting life is sequired. Why a grail? Because a grail (cup) is a container, specifically for wine. “Water” in the ancient world as per humorism signifies weakness, wine signifies vigor.

So the knight who keeps his virginity and courage must acquire this great cup that brings everlasting life (vigor, livelihood, energy that does not run out. He must acquire it from an old infertile man, who spends his time fishing. Fishing is a form of waiting, in the Bible the Apostles are “fishers of men”...

>>16440645
... The story represents many things, among them the fertile energetic Youth learning from and assuming power from the infertile old Elder, a perennial story. It intimately represents Virginity and Will, the keeping of your energy for a long but worthy end (goal, source). The everlasting life requires a metaphorical virginity. These symbols repeat and repeat from before Christ throughout Western culture. When you get a feel for these symbols you can understand thousands of years of stories.