/lit/ - Literature

lurk moar.

culture has always been for the upper class.

>>16561246
Whats your favorite book anon

>>16561252
It's the youth who validates what are the trendings.

Devil May Cry series made people look up Divine Comedy and works of William Blake. Literature is not dead for modern generation, they just need different source to motivate them to read.

>>16561267
Does literature have to be the "endgame" of "aesthetic" taste? Can't the academia see the artistic merit in that media on its own?

who the fuck cares about what is ‘dead’ or ‘relevant’

>>16561246
> muh muh vidya, please PLEASE validate my choice of wasting my life away
No. Go away, faggot. Video games are a vice that rots your brain.

>>16561252
And where are they now?

>>16561267
yeah I'm sure they're going to develop a serious appreciation for literature by playing video games and not just get filtered by the non-colloquial language and post epic dante memes on twitter

>>16561246
Then why have so many people read Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones?

>>16561246
I literally posted a thread yesterday about this

>>16561252
No it's about IQ not class.

>>16561698
Some video games try to activate your almonds, for the ones who like that sort of thing it's only a matter of time before they stumble into literature through their childhood or higher learning.

>>16561672
Because it concerns why would any sane mind want to be a writer, if not for screenwriting.

>>16561702
Two of these things were from the 90s. The other one isn't even as impactful as the other two.

>>16561246
plebs have never understood shit and most of the gamer retards of today would have been reading penny dreadfuls a century ago, the real problem is that taste has been democratized. in the 19th century century, some barely literate factory goon would have at least realized that his betters had an understanding of greater things, so he took it as a matter of course that there must be something to highbrow literature since the fancy rich people liked it. a person might not have understood the classics, but they recognized that the canon had a valuable impact on their society and was worth it if you were big brained enough. which is why even working class people up until your parents' generation larped as well read when they often weren't.

now that history is all racist and must be torn down, the proles think they know better than the evil white men of the past. as usual, this is america's fault

This discussion gets so meaningless once you become older. You either read literature or you don't. Only young folks care about what culture is 'relevant' or 'dead'. I mean it makes sense that people discuss it here, most people on /lit/ are probably below the age of 25.

>>16561258
In dead culture, yes.

>>16561750
>the real problem is that taste has been democratized.
/thread

>>16561258
Garbage argument. Trending does not equate to impact, trends die in an instant but movements in cultural influence will resonate over time which can only be noticed when looking back from what appears next.

>>16561282
Stupid questions. Academia DOES see the artistic merit in literature. You keep whining about literature being dead because the masses who are NOT part of academia.

>>16561680
They sit above you. You do not see them. You live in a sad, ignorant bubble where everything is simple.

>>16561717
Honestly, the most influential and meaningful works of art came from the dark recesses of the mind. People argue that those writers who kill themselves deserve no merit, I disagree. You have to be considered insane to some degree if you are genuinely intelligent enough to see what others do not and write something worthwhile among the droves of apes that drag their knuckles everywhere.

>>16561836
Felt the same thing reading this thread. When I was younger I cared what was popular or not, after 30 I only started caring about what I found interesting and understood others are the same.

>>16561750
The isssue is suffrage being avable to all, 2 centuries ago it wouldn't matter that the majority was composed of plebs who didn't read it does now.

>>16561891
>You have to be considered insane to some degree if you are genuinely intelligent enough to see what others do not
Pure romanticism. How do you want to be taken seriously?

>but movements in cultural influence will resonate over time which can only be noticed when looking back from what appears next
Yes, but aren't these movements made by the youth, propagated by the youth, accepted by the youth, and cultivated by the youth?

>Academia DOES see the artistic merit in literature
I meant the videogames artistic merit.

>>16561252

Culture isn't only defined as finery. Something as simple as table ettiqute falls under that definition.

Waiting for other people to define every approach you bring to life isn't very elite though. In the modern day we have mass produced AI and data defined 'culture'. Who gives half a fuck about what is defined for you as culture? Notice the garbage for what it is and use the tenacious thread of genius that's always run under the mainstream and always will, and work on your transcendence.

History repeats itself, and you're not wrong for noticing a dearth of talent. It still exists, but our >>air quotes<< culture discourages and censors it so that things conducive to breaking down distinction takes center stage artificially. You can't win the fight against the times, so look for how to twist them to your advantage.

Incorrect. I can’t imagine how sheltered and oblivious you’d need to be to even entertain the possibility that this is true.

>>16562085
Well, show your evidence that OP is wrong, so.

>>16562132
Nah, how about he proves his statement has any validity first. Didn’t see any evidence for his argument at all. Burden of proof, so. So. So, so.

>>16561246
People watch series, movies and play video games. Very few read novels on a regular basis.
The people who make money or deal with it professionally like authors, journalists etc. either don't see it that way or don't want to say it since it would backfire.
They somehow cannot say that everything new is shit, boycott it and focus on everything older than 50 years. So they push and advertise authors they know. Sometimes there is an angry article that the new stuff is mediocre but it doesn't stop the machine from running.

>>16561246
Nice syntax, you braindead faggot.

>>16562168
English isn't my first language, of course I won't be as fluent as natives.

>>16561750
Indeed. The democratization & industrialization of the arts pushes greatness into niches, while the most stultifying garbage imaginable becomes ubiquitous.

It's also worth noting that the considerably different mediums of today must have different developmental impacts upon the brain.

>>16561246
so long as there are narrative heavy mediums their backbone will always be the written word as the best intermediate between a story's conception and whatever medium it's cast in afterwards. there's probably more screenplays written now than ever before. wether you'll count that as literature proper depends on your definition, i guess.

novels are probably a niche medium, yet forever tethered to media that are more culturally relevant (tv shows etc) since the craft of the screenwriter and that of the novelist are closely related and at heart both are storytellers.

>>16562293
very well said

>>16562293
My problem with that reasoning (and it's a very good reasoning, should I say), is that if it's all storytelling, it's better to just go the more social/cultural relevant, like films, tv movies or games. The other way to put this is that there's no incentive to be a novelist anymore. It's kind of a dumb move if you want to be a novelist nowadays when you could be a screenwriter for the other medias and actually have an impact in the world.

>>16561267
Xenogears made me read Nietzsche.

>>16561836
This is a very individualistic and myopic take. I'd argue that the consumption of media is so constant that it has become an important facet of our phenotypes. Long-form reading won't turn a moron into a genius, but it will have an effect on the expression of genetic potential (especially through childhood/adolescence).

>>16561256
Probably Harry Potter.

>>16562291
> stultifying garbage
has been ubiquitous in print almost (but not quite) since printing was invented, and before that it was the same but live events

>>16562399
Eh you’re exaggerating. A bit, Rooney’s Normal Peope has nearly a million reviews on Goodreads and it just came out. Many people are still readers and it continues to be a celebrated trait, however the quality of what people read is debatable. Was just at the bookstore yesterday and it had a good amount of people despite covid. Go to the Strand in NYC and it’s freaking packed. It’s not really dead at all imo, if anything, poetry and drama would take that cake.

>>16562437
do not talk about literature then

>>16562476
Oh and nonfiction is still incredibly popular with the rise of leftism on social media, which in turn may bring people over to fiction.

>>16561252
That’s funny because all of upper class culture is the working class and peasant culture of eras past.

>>16562399
Novels and screenplays are completely different art forms, they aren't interchangeable. Screenwriters have no control over the finished product, they are at the mercy of directors and studios, and they receive very little recognition for their work compared to novelists. And no one has control over what is culturally relevant, chasing popular trends is not a good reason to write anything.

>>16561246
why care for bygones
there's nothing to talk about
the chance of a resurgence of some cultural phenomenon in the same sense you romanticize is literally 0%. you can infer that much from the table of contents of a history book
that being said not romanticizing the past by mourning also means opening the possibility for a rebirth
did we stop singing because of the advent of the radio? lol
literature has numerous unspoken advantages over pre-narrated and pre-imagined media like gaming. immersing yourself ina book and letting your imagination soar is a different experience entirely. there're probably more i'm forgetting to mention
stop being so narrow minded. your sense of the scale of things is narrow enough to see that something's lacking but somehow not wide enough to see there're things that could be done about that. i wonder why that is

and yet here we are

>>16562579
also i bet you some snob back in the cave man era was all like "this is RUINING cave paintings for everyone. why is nobody talking about painting being culturally dead?" upon the discovery of the written language
guess what we're still drawing

>>16561267
>Implying the people who discovered the Divine Comedy and William Blake through Devil May Cry are functionally literate

>>16561246
/lit/ has always been something enjoyed by a minority of the population. Actually GOOD /lit/ is enjoyed by an even smaller segment of the population. With the massive rise in easily accessible entertainment (internet, vidya, tv, sportsball) people see even less incentive to commit themselves to investing in a long and educational book. Our society has completely deep-fried its dopamine receptors.

>>16562505
?????

>>16562505
The only instance where this is true is armchair historians. Most "upper class culture" doesn't originate from Ukrainian peasant traditions.

>>16562596
>guess what we're still drawing

and that's a terrible metaphor because in the visual arts it is pretty much universally understood and hardly even controversial that the old masters were the GOATs and nobody today is comparable lol.

>>16562703
>metaphor

analogy, whatever t. brain fried from drawing atm

>>16562703
surely nobody in the visual arts consider grug's cave scribbles superior to any old artist nowadays
my point still stands
though i do acknowledge the decay from renaissance artistry. i promise ill make drawing great agin when i get around to it
also can i just say i really dislike the online visual arts community? idk what it is but they all seem to have this insane victim complex
hate to armchair psychologize because i tend to project myself but i just wanted to say this for once as it's been on my mind for ages

>>16562747
grug was dumb and barely even human. OLD GOOD, NEW BAD would more accurately be stated as THING PEAKED ALREADY, NOW IT DECLINES. if somebody in the renaissance said grug was better they would be wrong, but in 2020 there is a very observable consequence of the destruction of higher education and art in the western world. americans/anglos and to a lesser degree other yuros are currently getting BTFO by chinks and other developing peoples because while university in the US is largely a pyramid scheme where half the people there are social media addicted retards who read harry potter (and this is leeching into europe), in china the newly wealthy slants force their kids to play piano and study math to larp as aristocrats.

westoids are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and committing suicide in the process, and the cherry on top is that many of them are aware of this and cheer as it happens because
>white america/yurop bad, PoC and foreigners good

>>16561252
Mass literacy killed literature regardless

>>16562839
> Mass literacy killed literature
--Plato, probably

>>16562453
I disagree — I think the consumption and ubiquity are at a different order of magnitude after industrialization/democratization. The medium itself is also part of the stultifying effect (e.g. video vs. print, comics vs. plain text, simplistic computer generated beats vs. relatively complex instrumentalist-dependent folk music, etc.).

>>16561246
In Chinese, popular literature is going through a cultural renaissance... the majority of live action adaptations, donghua, and manhua are based off of "net literature" that gets published online. Of course, since you need to know an "alphabet" of approximately 8,000 characters just to scrape by, there is a certain degree of elitism built into the fundamental structure of the language itself.

That's one of the reasons I'm learning Mandarin. My working vocabulary in English is roughly 35-40,000 words, so the "data storage" requirements of the language don't intimidate me. English literature may be dying, but there's other food being served elsewhere.

>>16562798
I'm a different anon but I also disagree, someone uninitiated could consider Michelangelo or Rembrandt or Salvador Dalí the GOAT as opposed to Pollock, but that is only because the reputation of these great people of yore is so immense that everyone can and will find familiarity and beauty within them immediately. Most people tend to also refuse to dig deeper than a first look out of contempt for "meaning-to-be extracted", usually also putting the abstract shitposting label on them, and instead marvel for hours upon something immediately grandiose at face value. Truth is, there is no greatest painter. There isn't even a better painter than (x). My favorite is Istvan Farkas because he terrifies me more than any other. As soon as art is perceived as something to be raced, as something to compete, it ceases to be art.

>>16562903
You should read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

>>16562921
>>16562903
Funny these two came together, because there's a huge cultural shift towards technical excellence of musicians in China right now. Bilibili is rammed with people playing instruments, especially traditional ones, at ever-increasing levels.

>>16562951
>he got trolled by western intellectuals into thinking some drunkard meme faggot's paint drippings are as valid as da vinci

this is how the chinks win dummy.

>>16562921
I just find reading it such a PITA, I just can't store the characters.
I think it's partly because I find it hard to describe them. Say you're in France and you drive past a shop that says "Freins" and you don't know what it means. You can look it up later in a dictionary easily enough. In Chinese, the same word might be 刹 and it's unlikely I could recall it later to look it up just from a quick glance.
So I find myself exposed to thousands and thousands of characters, but few ever go in because I don't make the connection with the meanings before they're gone.

The simple fact of the matter is that literature can never be as immersive or engaging as superior audiovisual mediums. The only thing that's keeping lit even somewhat alive is that there are enough failed screenwriters and "idea guys" who don't have the connections and talent to make the movies or video games they really want to create, so they settle for writing books. If the barrier of entry for making a film or game ever gets lowered to the same level as writing a novel then literature will truly go extinct.

>>16562960
Looks excellent — I will. Thank you.

>>16563177
>If the barrier of entry for making a film or game ever gets lowered to the same level as writing a novel then literature will truly go extinct.
I think this nails it.

>>16563374
No, because writers will still have the urge to write and there will always be some people who read and prefer to imagine detailed worlds than have them presented visually over an hour and a half. What it would do is eviscerate the market for mass market novels which are basically just film novelisations without the films.

>>16563404
It would specifically destroy the sci-fi genre if you could actually make _good_ sci-fi films easily. Actually, considering how atrocious most human-generated sci-fi films are, AI-generated sci-fi would probably be better.

>>16563021
Chinese modern art is at least as degenerate as Western modern art, it's fine.

>>16562486
>leftism on social media
>nonfiction

Heh...

>>16563177
there is just no other medium to convey extremely complex ideas. You can scratch the surface with movies if by some miracle all the stars align and everything gets done correctly but thats it. You can't come close to literature

>>16563562
You can almost compete with a very long series, but even then unless you intersperse with fictional documentaries you'll struggle to fill in the background detail.
The better films actually lean into this by leaving more unsaid (e.g. Blade Runner).

>>16561672
>>16561836
>>16561901
I've been thinking about this recently. I dub it The Quest for Relevance, this culture-wide obsession with witnessing the next big trend on the ground floor, being constantly in the know and avoiding the oh-so dreaded feeling of MOFO.
Any books for this feel?

>>16563642
No idea on a book, but this bit popped into mind.

https://youtu.be/YlGqN3AKOsA

>>16563642
*FOMO

>>16561836
>>16561836
School makes people hate reading. I didn't enjoy /lit/ until I was out of school and close to 30.

>>16562399
>there's no incentive to be a novelist anymore
Excellence is it's own incentive. Pursuing your own flourishing as an individual will serve you better than posturing for the sake of fame or wealth. If the scent of inspiration leads you to the land of literature, then there you should go. When it is gone, depart. The important point is to be striving, ever striving.

>>16562505
Literally not at all true. Aristocrats were too busy larping as sarmatians to give a fuck about peasant culture

>>16561246
>culturally dead?
Current 'elites' are a mercantile class of vulgarians and their patronage in the arts reflects their values: usura.

>>16561750
Somewhat this

>>16562071
>Culture isn't only defined as finery
The leveling has been across the board; most won't observe 'no business or politics' in polite company (meals/gatherings), and if they do they'll still have a television on at family meals

>>16562505
>all of upper class culture is the working class and peasant culture of eras past
More of the bourgeois of a half-century ago. Ratchet this all the way down -- haute boug reflexively putting little jimmy and little jane in piano lessons, aspirational lumpen obsessively fetishizing law and medicine (and acting as if it has the same class cachet from when university matriculation was still highly regulated and required things like more than a passing knowledge of Greek and Latin)

>>16562651
>/lit/ has always been something enjoyed by a minority of the population. Actually GOOD /lit/ is enjoyed by an even smaller segment of the population.
Readers' writers, writers' writers, ect. Taste is incommensurable and there absolutely is an order of rank that is not being observed by mass media pushers

>>16562951
Pollock at least achieved mathematic symmetry in those splotch fractals, the cartoonist grade Bastiat concrete jungle 'art' is Dada without the satiric intent -- the art scene is the exclusive domain of financial fraud and makeweights for elite blackmarket transactions

>>16564522
Aristocrats would also LARP as people of culture and patronise authors, who did give a fuck (because they were generally peasants with ideas above their stations).

>>16562505
Marxists are delusional

>>16562399
Selling a screenplay is even harder than selling a novel. No producer is going to take a $100 million risk on your 3 hour long furry space opera epic when he can just get his nephew to write a new Avengers movie. And an unproduced screenplay is worth far less than even a self published novel.

Novels have definitely become culturally irrelevant, but the incentive for writers is still there. You settle for writing books after you accept that your film making dreams are hopeless.

>>16561267
Yeah, made them look up wiki articles or youtube "essays", and the ones that actually tried to read it were probably filtered hard.

>>16561935
>Pure romanticism.
You are retarded, literally look up any of the important writers of any time period, this will be true in most cases.

>>16563374
The barrier is as low as it can ever be, you can make movies with your iphone and zero budget, you can make videogames with pirated software, there's thosuands of tutorials on youtube about doing anything.
Yet literature still lives because it's a totally different medium with different purposes. The genius writers will be doing with literature things that can't be done in any other medium, same with movies and videogames.
If you think these mediums are reduced only to muh narrative, you are retarded.

>>16562747
Grug was painting in caves lit by animal fat on a 3d surface with uneven textures using pigments that he gathered and produced himself. Modern artists would shit themselves and die at the cave traversal step.

>>16561267
>Devil May Cry series made people look up Divine Comedy and works of William Blake.
no

>>16561267
>DUDE DEVIL MAY CRY MADE THIS OLD BORING STUFF LIKE, SO FUCKING BADASS WITH COOL SWORDS AND LASER BEAMS AND DEMONS AND PIZZA AND BOOBS AND SHIT MAN
Fuck off sodabrain.

>>16561267
I don't completely agree with gatekeeping but I also disagree with the 'anything goes' mentality, 'it doesn't matter how things are done as long as we get the result'. It is so horribly ugly like a collective cultural application of a mother vacantly staring at her crying baby. How many more analysis videos must there be? Because those are the kind of videos that are birthed by media influence.

why is this board filled with elitist pseuds? I know none of you english major “authors” are actually successful why the need for all the seething?

imagine unironically believing that rich people read, the only people that read anymore are autists on this site, the old and elderly, and tumblr girls. It’s unfortunately a dying art and no matter how hard you cope your mediocre novels on amazon will never be remembered like any work of old

>>16566732
William Blake's poetry collection on YouTube has tons of people coming over from DMCV

>>16566921
There is large difference in quality between the nouveau riche and old money.

>>16566974
a*

>>16566963
Yes some basedboy reddit zoomers look it up on youtube, say some funny video game reference in the comments, then go back to masturbating to their feederism or trap webcomics.

>>16566907
>why is this board filled with elitist pseuds?
Because there needs to be some sort of last bastion before mediocrity overtakes every faucet of the arts.

>>16563177
>The simple fact of the matter is that literature can never be as immersive or engaging as superior audiovisual mediums.
That's because you have a tremendously low spatial IQ.

>>16561246
whores still read

>>16561267
>Devil May Cry series made people look up Divine Comedy
haahhaha

Watch out guys, this dudes got a massive brainer for words

>>16561252
I really hope that the internet kills this. eveything is free. its like everyone spends all their time on the worlds biggest library now

>>16570332
>I really hope that the internet kills this.
It already has, and all of this bullshit is the result you fucking communist.

Watch out guys, this dudes got a massive brainer for words