/lit/ - Literature

>>16686209
Cervantes was a dude, OP.

>>16686209
That's not Don Quixote

>>16686217
>>16686224
Cringe

>>16686209
>George
>female

>>16686209
Alongside Moby Dick it’s the greatest in English. Shame more people here don’t read it because >”muh, roasties can’t write xP”

>>16686209
Alongside Moby Dick it’s the greatest in English. Shame more people here don’t read it because
>”muh, roasties can’t write xP”

>>16686854
Most posters aren't like that, there's a tiny fraction of trolls like that and a bunch of other outsider shitters

>>16687037
quit fagposting

>George Eliot
>Female

bro look at their name... stupid...

>>16687067
All names ending in -e are either feminine or homosexual.

I love her. A favorite. Pillar of the western canon

Not sure if you're all just brainlets or shitposting but george elliot is the penname of mary evans

>>16686854
ok, andrew delbanco

>>16687231
>Mary
>female

>>16687075
me

>>16686209
I'd like to understand what makes it so good. All Middlemarch posting is "it's the best" with no substance.

>>16687269
What do you expect from lit college roasties and trannies who browse this place

>>16687075
is it pronounced George Eliot or Georgeee Eliot?

>>16687413
An insight or even a parroting of some authority's criticism.

>>16687269
still waiting

>>16688273
I’ve never read it.What don’t you like about it?

>>16687269
It's like Dostoevsky but not as Slavic it's pretty based bro

>>16687269
>everyone who’s read it says it’s great.I don’t believe them

>I’ve never read it.I don’t think it’s all that great.

Is this your brain on lit?

>>16687269
Its not that great. It's better than the average dry, boring dribble the anglo produced through most of the era but its still not that great.

People who praise it tend to be english lit majors.

>>16688539
They didn’t say that.

>>16688539
Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, huh?

I'm asking what exactly makes it such a good book, exactly because I haven't read it and nobody has provided answers. Never claimed it wasn't, you absolute retard.

>>16686209
that's a man

>>16686209
Based

>>16688649
nah, just a 19th century woman. they were manlier than soiboi zoomers.

What are your favorite novels by female authors? I’m looking for recs. I really like Wise Blood, Mrs. Dalloway and My Ántonia. Going to read Nightwood later this month

>>16688719
i dont read books by women or jews

>>16688719
Cliche but Wuthering Heights.It caught me off guard as I expected something totally different.A masculine writing style, potential unreliable narrators and an inversion of the romance genre were a few things I enjoyed about it

>>16686209
Yes, but the greatest novel is Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji.

>>16686209
“I am the son and heir of nothing In particular”

>>16687479
Sry but you ain't getting that from them :/

>>16688853
...im the son and heir.........of nothing.....................in particular............

>>16686854
I don't read it because N btfo of her

>>16687269
George Eliot is foremost an amazingly charming narrator, so much so she feels like another character in the book itself, very hospitable ans good humored. Then the characters, undoubtedly archetypal but somehow fresh and human despite the narrowness of Victorian moral sensibilities. She takes simple themes and elevates them with masterful psychology and endless wit. Her points are clear and digestible yet handled as if they were complex as Borges. And her prose, Eliot’s prose succeeds where Henry James so often fails or just barely approaches, she is the sovereign of verbose, web-like blocks of text on a page because she manages to make them hypnotic and surprising. And now the world of Middlemarch itself, it’s not far from what we’d call “world building” in a fantasy novel, except were in a grounded English township with all the coziness you’d expect from one in the 19th century. Finishing Middlemarch is like leaving a very sweet friend, a moving, hilarious, clever friend who is somehow without pretense in spite of their blatant genius. Read Middlemarch.

>>16689328
Thanks. I'll read it after I finish with The Charterhouse of Parma

>>16687269
it's really, really good. >>16688394 is right. the honeymoon chapters will make you want to go to italy.

Jorge didn't invent the love triangle. Sorry cupcake.

>>16689877
Correct. Racine did.

>>16688394
>like Dostoevsky
Bad sign
>less Slavic
Not helping

I've read Silas Marner and it's romantic kitsch crap. No value.

Here's a paragraph chosen at random. Pay attention. There's not a single definite image. Not a single living verb. It's all abstractions, all pseudo-morality, pseudo-psychology, a waste of paper and words. Pure poison for the neurons:

>Nobody in this world [what about those in Mars?] but himself knew that he was the same Silas Marner who had once loved his fellow ["loved his fellow"? cliché, sentimentalistic, pseudo-Biblical expression] with tender love [love me tender, love me true, all my dreams fulfill, for, my darling, I love you, and I always will!], and trusted in an unseen goodness [an unseen abstract noun? unbelievable]. Even to himself that past experience had become dim [pronouns, adjectives, abstract nouns, yet again...].

If Oliver Goldsmith had been able to write even more useless words than he did, he'd become George Eliot.

Anyway, I do come from the country of Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa, and have read Cervantes, Boccaccio and Flaubert in the original; so maybe I am naturally unfair when judging English novels, as I am tempted to compare them to the obviously superior Romance traditions; besides, I have no patience for meaningless verbosity and housewife Christianity...
Austen, Bronte, and Dickens are equally fraudulent, though even they were better George Eliot (specially Dickens, whose faults are nearly saved by his talent as a caricaturist).
Still, there are many great English-language novelists, though none of them was English: Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Joseph Conrad, R. L. Stevenson, James Joyce, Herman Melville... I don't see why an English speaker should waste his time with Victorian novels - or any 19th century English literature outside of a bunch of very good poets and few important thinkers - when they can read Melvile, Conrad, or Laurence Sterne instead.

>>16689328
>amazingly charming
>fresh and human
>narrowness of Victorian moral sensibilities
>masterful psychology and endless wit
>clear and digestible
>hypnotic and surprising
>world building
>all the coziness
>like leaving a very sweet friend, a moving, hilarious, clever friend

George Eliot is kitsch crap and this is proven by the fact that her admirers, including you, write like someone who enjoys being fed with kitsch crap.
The only thing worse than her style is her worthless brain, her inability to question received dogma, as correctly detected by Nietzsche. Housewife Christianity, made-up fairy tales for those allergic to ambiguity and truth.

Certainly kitsch crap, and perhaps even an Anglo propaganda tool. Be suspicious.

>>16687037
Go back

>>16687075
Basée

>>16686217
>>16686224
Gallardísimo y encomiable.

>>16690048
Lol the Nietzschean thinks he’s above Eliot because
>le themes are too Christian!!
I swear this stuff writes itself. What do you read, Hemingway?

>>16690032
Oh I found your other post. Edgy Brazilian, that’s a new one. I get it now, it’s
>me only read big brain book, Joyce, Melville, Conrad!! No time for dumb Christian book, morals are le spook!!
I’ll never understand this type, as someone who reads from Bronte to Faulkner myself. This notion that all good literature must be complex and all worthwhile philosophy must be unorthodox, it’s as if you need to be dazzled with the aesthetics of intelligentsia to feel secure. Very weird.

>>16690290
I read Dante, Camões, Cervantes, Molière, Chaucer, Leopardi, Pound, and Borges.
And I am not a Nietzschean.

It is revealing that you immediately think of Hemingway, because it shows that you are stuck in the Anglo canon. This is also why you mistake George Eliot's housewife Christianity for real Christianity, but housewife Christianity is not real Christianity, merely the castrated version of it.

>>16690318
>all good literature must be complex and all worthwhile philosophy must be unorthodox
>complex
>unorthodox

None of that was even slightly suggested in my post.

>>16686209
Mill on the Floss is better

>>16688719
Only female author I ever liked was Evelyn Waugh. All the rest were pure cancer.

>>16688797
I'm 700 pages in and it's not the best novel ever anon

>>16690331
yeah anon I like her too!

>>16690319
>>16690323
I think of Hemingway because he’s usually the fit for your type, alongside Bukowski. It’s not my fault you come off that way. Also your list confirms my point, whether you admit it or not. If you exclusively read those mentioned and look down on the Eliots, Brontes, and Austens, then yes, you come off as a typical moody /lit/ “intellectual”. Somehow I’ve managed to read Borges, Pound, Chaucer, Goethe, Baudelaire, and more while managing to appreciate the beauty of tactful simplicity when it’s done. And considering you like Chaucer, I’m surprised Victorians are a problem because he isn’t much more challenging thematically. Read whatever you want, but looking down on simplicity will make you look like a pseud to anyone who can appreciate the full spectrum of literature. It’s not a matter of personally liking it either, but acting like it hasn’t earned a spot in the Canon is just narrow.

>>16690379
>your type

And what is my type? The type that makes serious demands from the authors he reads? The type that has no patience for mediocrity in literature?

>the beauty of tactful simplicity when it’s done

You mistake simplicity for cliché and theoretical orthodoxy for dead dogma.
Fernando Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro was the simplest of writers, yet he didn't write in clichés; Dante was orthodox in his Christianity, yet he never stopped questioning the Catholic Church and seriously pondering the reasons for his beliefs, studying very deeply the classics of scholastic philosophy, as well as pagan and Islamic writers.

George Eliot, in Silas Marner, is pure conventional morality dressed in conventional, overly verbose, highly sentimental writing. Nietzsche was completely correct in his judgement.
If that is the sort of literature you like, there is no problem whatsoever with it. There are many people who love reading the newspaper. There are many people who love Lord Byron's love poetry. I do not care. But do not mistake simplicity for cliché and theoretical orthodoxy for dead dogma.

A writer who could write that book in the age of Whitman, Mallarmé, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky should not be deemed a great writer. Except for an entirely predictable comment on industrialization - something which Blake had done much earlier and better - Eliot paid no attention to the questions of her time in that novel, as if she were unable to properly observe and absorb it. This is the mark of a mediocre writer: one who copies dead models and is oblivious to urgent necessities and immediate possibilities. Silas Marner is sheer Oliver Goldsmith, but with more words. I truly felt like I was rereading The Vicar of Wakefield, so high and frequent were the waves of 18th century Protestant sentimentality that the author was trying to drown my brain with.

>>16690438
>Do not mistake simplicity for cliché
>Silas Marner used as Eliot’s encapsulation
That’s her most sentimental work and even her fans agree. Let’s talk about Middlemarch, and how she handles simple themes such as the constituents for healthy marriage, the faults in rampant intellectualism, and more. The argument scenes between Rosamond and Lydgate exemplify Eliot’s strengths . We see how expectations, ambitions, delusions, and miscommunications quickly ruin a marriage that, outwardly, had all the prospects for success. Is it common knowledge not to marry for the wrong things? Of course. But is it still impressive to execute this point with psychological precision in all of her characters? Yes. And that’s where you fail to appreciate Eliot’s genius. I’ll be the first to admit it doesn’t lie in critique, philosophical innovations, and the like. But within the confines of simple truth she wrote life-like characters and situations, of which Tolstoy himself was an admirer. You fail to understand what separates a cliché from a simple truth when it comes to writing, and it’s largely in how adroitly the point is handled. Look at part 1 of Goethe’s Faust, how long have we been telling the story of a man who deludedly seeks divine achievement and fails? But it’s not cliché when Goethe does it because of how well it’s done. Look at King Lear, how simple is it that we shouldn’t take flattery over honesty? And it’s one his seminal works. If we arbitrarily label themes cliché just because they are more or less common knowledge, I think we’ve misstepped. And don’t get me wrong, I get what you’re TRYING to say because even with my aforementioned points, Eliot still shoots for even more common truths. But again, that is her beauty, dwelling in the grounds of common sense and turning it into something sharp and meticulously done. We cannot have a serious discussion about Eliot using Silas Marner alone, it’d be like discussing Melville by using Typee.

>>16690331
Simply epic

>>16690521
>That’s her most sentimental work and even her fans agree

Whatever. I am discussing George Eliot as the author of Silas Marner specifically, which, as I said, is the only book of hers that I read.
And I will probably never read the others. Maybe I am missing something? After spending more than 200 pages trying to tolerate the intolerable, I strongly believe that I am not; and, if I am, nobody will ever read all the books, so I have no reason to be sorry.

>But it’s not cliché when Goethe does it because of how well it’s done

George Eliot does it badly, very badly in Silas Marner. I have posted a paragraph and showed why it is done badly.
The clichés I reference have not so much to do with the themes (although these too are presented in entirely predictable manner), but with the writing, i.e., the words used. Literature is made of words and a good writer needs to write things in new and interesting ways.
George Eliot uses such expressions as "nobody in the world" (redundancy dressed as emphasis), "loved his fellow", "tender love"... These are all used up expressions that I would expect to find in a newspaper article, not in a novel; and, from a tone perspective, they all tend towards the superficially sentimental, so characteristic of the era. Eliot's sentences also abound in abstract nouns and useless adjectives.
It is 19th century kitsch, like Bouguereau, or Tchaikovsky at his worst moments - sophisticated and well-done, but still kitsch.

>We cannot have a serious discussion about Eliot using Silas Marner alone, it’d be like discussing Melville by using Typee.

So be it. I will not offend my hours by reading Middlemarch, for the same reason that I will not offend them by reading another Stephen King novel. There is no point.

By the way:

>Look at part 1 of Goethe’s Faust, how long have we been telling the story of a man who deludedly seeks divine achievement and fails?

Actually, stories cannot be clichés. Stories are frames. What matters is what you put inside the frame. This is why many different works can be done using the story of Ulysses. I have no quarrels with Silas Marner's story. From an aesthetic perspective, the story in a book is almost always irrelevant. Eliot's clichés are in her words and thoughts.

>>16687255
Underrated

>>16690438
>The type that makes serious demands from the authors he reads? The type that has no patience for mediocrity in literature
Lmao
>>16690878
>So be it. I will not offend my hours by reading Middlemarch, for the same reason that I will not offend them by reading another Stephen King novel. There is no point
Do you have cancer or something? Doctors said you had 2 years to live?
Literature, and art in general, must have a point?
What a pretentious faggot. Borges would laugh at your pompous ass.

>>16686209
>pic unrelated

>>16692238
I think he’s saying it’d be pointless to read their works actually. But all art has a point one way or another, and that said, reading exclusively cerebral literature is quite pompous indeed. I can’t understand how people can deny genius on account of its content being too palpable. To each their own I guess.

>>16690032
Someone hasn't read Thomas Hardy...

>>16692238
You should know by now that lit is a pseud board.It’s all about posturing and appearance.Great, simple books are cast aside as “high school tier”.There is a reason that long, difficult books are meme’d here.A good reader can appreciate both simple and complex books and admire the beauty of each

>>16686209
Fuck Casaubon and Ladislaw. Lydgate should've married Doro.

>>16692741
Doro should’ve stayed single and developed cottages.

>>16692238
>lmao

Harry Potter fans also laugh at me when I tell them I refuse to read J.K. Rowling. You are showing the same reaction. When are you going to call me "grandpa"?
Keep in mind that, because I am a polyglot, my possibilities of reading are (literally) vaster than yours, so that I have much more to investigate than you have. This is a blessing and a curse. You don't need to read 17th century Spanish philosophy - it's mostly untranslated. But I can and therefore I must, and someday I will.
This is why I have no time for Eliot. If my only horizon were the English channel, I'd probably read Middlemarch someday; but I can read books in a few languages, and am learning more, so that my "reading list" demands a much higher level of selectivity than that of an American high school student who wastes his time with sentimental novels about Victorian asexual morality. I need to reject many books if I wish to read well. See Schopenhauer's essay on the subject.

>Borges would laugh at you

"Y tengo la impresión de que una novela extensa es no sólo excesiva para el lector, que no puede leerla de una sola vez, sino para el autor también. Todo esto vendría a ser una repetición de lo que dijo Poe: There is no such thing as a long poem, un poema largo no es más que una sucesión de poemas cortos, y que la emoción estética exigía una lectura. Creo que el cuento puede darnos esa emoción. La novela, en cambio, nos da una serie de emociones, y nos deja solamente su recuerdo. Creo, además, que en el cuento corto, tal como ha sido practicado por Henry James, Kipling, Conrad y otros, puede caber todo lo que cabe en una novela. Es decir: que puede ser tan denso, estar tan cargado de complejidades y de intenciones como una novela con mucho entusiasmo, y hay un momento en el cual se siente que esa lectura es, acaso, menos un placer que una tarea. En cambio, en el cuento no. El cuento, como el poema breve, puede darnos una sensación de plenitud continuamente."

"BORGES [to a question on whether he enjoyed reading female authors]: Of course. Emily Dickinson, Lady Murasaki, Silvina Ocampo. Three. Jane Austen, no. My mother enjoyed her; I never could."

>>16692628
"This consists in not taking a book into one’s hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time — such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind." (Schopenhauer)

>>16692709
>A good reader can appreciate both simple and complex books and admire the beauty of each

Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro, La Chanson de Roland, Flaubert's short stories, François Villon, much of Antonio Machado, some of Dante: very simple, and very well-written.
George Eliot's Silas Marner: very simple, and terribly written.

It is not about simplicity, it is about originality, richness of ideas, concision, rejection of empty of words, precision of vocabulary. In short, it is about the living writing of real literature versus the dead writing of newspapers and rhetorical pamphlets. George Eliot is in-between: a serious novelist, but a kitsch and conventional one.

>>16690331
the folks are missing out on the irony of this post since sofia coppola was indeed a female (assumed so since there is no contrary testimony)

>>16689328
You are making me not want to read it if your only points are your ignorance of the Victorian era and 'I thought the worldbuilding was comfy'.

>>16693622
What novels in English do you like?I’m gonna take a wild guess and say you’re hostile to them for some reason that has nothing to do with literature

>>16693767
Lol then don’t read it

>>16686209
I ordered this book and will start it by the end of the week.I’ve read a majority of lit’s top 100 so I have some feel for this board’s taste and will make an unbiased review when done.I’ve stupidly neglected women writers far too long and am trying to atone for that presently

>>16693610
At the end of the day, Middlemarch was good enough for Tolstoy and somehow not you. You don’t need to go on in circles saying the same thing , just accept that people who read at multiple registers will find you pompous and move on man, there’s nothing to convince anyone of. You have a weird attitude about literature and some people dont like it, you don’t need to justify it to us. It’s genuinely surprising you spent this much time in a thread to talk about an author you don’t like.

>>16693928
Had you read the thread, you'd know I've already mentioned some.
I like Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Thomas Pynchon, J.K. Toole, Vladimir Nabokov, Herman Melville, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and more.

Feel free to take whatever wild guesses you want.

>>16693958
Good luck anon. Just read what you want don’t fall for the /pol/ drivel.

>>16693610
You must be a blast a parties

>>16693975
Are you aware that it has been common practice for millennia to write entire essays about authors one dislikes?
I sometimes spend my whole day discussing and reading literature. There is nothing special in discussing authors I dislike, specially when it offers me an opportunity to describe the precise reasons why I find them unsatisfactory.

Tolstoy was a Christian moralist who rejected Shakespeare, Dante and himself due to religious and moral reasons. Which still didn't stop him from fucking his wife all the time and dying in humiliating circumstances. Tolstoy also considered Uncle Tom's Cabin a magnificent novel and seems to have preferred Chopin (a great composer indeed) over Beethoven and Wagner (obviously greater ones). He was very peculiar and mistaken in his aesthetic assessments.

>>16693996
I suppose you are right. Harry Potter fans have told me the same thing, and they are very numerous.

>>16693939
I will be reading it, I just wanted you to know you're a pseudointellectual loser farting odourless gas.

>>16695066
Yeah ok, when you read the boom for yourself I’m sure you’ll get what I’m saying. I enjoy her so I get excited to recommend her to people, no ones trying to come off highly intellectual about it. I don’t think anyone whose read it would disagree about what I said is present in the book, whether or not they like the way I said it. Hope you enjoy anyway.

>>16689328
Holy shit imagine writing such a gay paragraph

>>16686217
basado

>>16687269
I read it and don't even remember what it was about, it was so forgettable. They're just memeing.