/lit/ - Literature

>>18487876
Maybe this chart will help you.

>>18487876
Extremely bloated 19th century prose. By that I mean a woman getting up from her chair takes three pages with no paragraph breaks. Some people are into that I guess. I read golden bowl and turn of the screw, I kinda enjoyed it while stoned

Turn of the screw was pathetic. It reads like My First Frame Narrative from Fisher Price.
The prose drove me bananas. So turgid yet lifeless and devoid of personality.

>>18489219
holy filtered

>>18489223
I'll go to war over this one. Tell me i'm wrong. The frame narrative actively undercuts the stakes and horror of the governess's madness, the prose is never funny, moving, clever, nor beautiful, never justifies the sprawling sentences that james mutilated with comma splices, the prose is also nigh-objectively lifeless and objectively verbose. Also, the narrative and characters are all one dimensional.

>>18489268
you’re embarrassing yourself. perhaps stick to dosto and wellbeck little buddy, leave real literature to the big boys

The ones I own are:
The Awkward Age
The Ambassadors
Wings of a Dove

which do I read first?

>>18487876
I've only read In the Cage, Wings of the Dove, Golden Bowl and The Portrait of a Lady. I'd say In the Cage is the most accessible and is around 200 pages long. If you don't enjoy it, it's unlikely you'd enjoy anything by Henry James. If for some reason the premise of the story isn't interesting, The Portrait of a Lady is the next most accessible from what I've read.

>>18487876
I've only read his ghost stories, but it is my opinion that his writing is overwrought.

James is basically every single thing that's trash about Victorian writing in one convenient package. I hear him get compared to Proust a lot but I don't see the similarity at all.

Let me give you a quick rundown on every James novel ever to save you time.
>America is better
>no Britain is better
>no u
There you just read his complete works.

>>18490847
you really should start with some of his earlier work and short stories, lest you too turn out like the whinging gargoyles in this thread. but out of those, the awkward age

>>18487876
I barely made it through the Portrait of a Lady and I like long books.

>>18490935
Same, that was my intro to James too. And I just don't get what he was trying to accomplish with it.
In books with no plot, you can focus on the prose, but it had none. And in books where prose takes a back seat, you can enjoy the story, but it has no plot either. It's almost as if he knows what makes enlightening compelling reading and he intentionally went out of his way to do the exact opposite.

>>18490840
Lmao, seethe harder. You can't argue it. Screw is dogshit.

Having to read The Turn of the Screw in high school made me think I hated literature.

>>18490847
Any. They are all masterpieces.

Here is one (1) sentence from The Golden Bowl. Make of it what you will.

“She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another–the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase.”

>>18492275
There's a 9 page sentence in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz.

For my American lit 1820-1900 class, I had to read Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Turn of the Screw. Washington Square was the best one

To me, that’s not literature.

>>18490847
The Awkward Age. James’ later works are not a good entry point and will turn most readers off

>>18490910
You just didn't understand it. That's okay, but don't like an authority on this when you clearly aren't.

>>18492390
Sebald is sleep though

>>18492597
isn't awkward age late james?

I ordered those three because I read his best works were published around the turn of the century

>>18493311
They are but they are also final boss tier

John Cowper Powys on Henry James:

"One does not, in reading these great authors, savor the actual style on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so to speak, of straightforward colorless narrative. But there are no “blank spaces” in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost say—so strong is this subjective element in the great objective aesthete—that James writes novels like an essayist, like some epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the lines and colors of mediaeval art. This essayist attitude accounts largely for those superior “inverted commas” which throw such a clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.

.....

The world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia of psychological beauty—some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd—where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their “great places” in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code?"

"No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and whimsical playfulness--sparing literally nothing.

.....

The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be called moral. The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the pleasure--both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more discriminating consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of excitement--partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,--that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm--as with all the supreme masters."

T.S. Eliot on Henry James

“James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."

Pill me on The Bostonians

>>18487876

>>18493486
This confused novel, produced four years after the publication of the very fine _Portrait of a Lady_, is something of a disappointment. It appears to me that James was attempting too much in this story about a dynamic public speaker (Verena Tarrant, a name that evidently resonated with Edith Wharton, who named one of her major later characters Halo Tarrant) caught between two equally selfish and manipulative cousins seeking to control her fate from opposing motives. As the focal point of our sympathy, Verena offers little in the way of sophisticated characterization or realistic psychology (unlike Isabel Archer, the protagonist of _Portrait_); she is, rather, sacrificed to the bitterly humorous satire James directs toward the figures of the much more well-developed characters of Olive Chancellor (ardent champion of women's rights) and Basil Ransom (a Confederate veteran of the Civil War and equally ardent champion of "traditional" gender relations). The satire is what makes this novel the flawed work that it is (one of the major works that James did not include in the New York edition of his writings): he is not criticizing the movement for women's rights, but rather those (even women) who seek to control women's voices for personal and/or monetary reasons. Yet, by so vividly painting Olive's character at the expense of Verena's, James becomes complicit in denying Verena her voice. Similarly, by making the end of the work a tragedy (with the "victory" of Basil Ransom), James blunts the impact of his dark humor: everything in the book basically comes to nothing, leaving the reader (this one, at any rate) deeply unsatisfied.

It is, nevertheless, interesting and satisfying to see James experimenting with narrative point of view (the narrative voice is, at times, omniscient and, at other times, pointedly and frankly, purposefully _not_ omniscient), as well as with characterizations that are less traditional and explicit than his earlier works (and, indeed, of anything else produced in the nineteenth century). This novel, therefore, shows a stage in James's development toward his more mature and brilliant novels to come.

>>18492597
Ignore this. Awkward Age is one of his most obtuse, 99% dialogue, and deliberately opaque triple ironic dialogue between characters who play a game never to express themselves directly

Read pic related most recently. In a way its utterly barking mad. Its a conventional travel book, but in all his maddening late baroque complexity - he seems to have written it entirely for his own amusement with no condescention to a possible audience
The descriptions of the New England countryside and the slums of New York are very vivid - he goes on a tour of dives in the Bowery which is hilarious to imagine.
The best bits are when he brings his psychological perspicacity to bear - long ruminations on immigrants at Ellis Island, the process of Americanization, the alienation of being surrounded by foreigners, and the mindset of white southern gentlemen

Are his travel writings worth reading?

>>18494292
None of his work is worth reading.

>>18494292
A little tour in France is very comfy and accessible

>>18492039
>seethe harder
i'm not the guy trawling every james thread with "Fuck Henry James" as my name, fella

>>18494997
damn

>>18494997
>i'onknowhatashitpostbe
Fucking idiot

>>18495485
You got btfo'd dude

>>18495502
Agree to disagree

>>18492401
Based, haven't read any other Henry James yet but Washington Square is fantastic. The hatred he ended up developing for it makes me wonder if I'd enjoy his other later stuff

>>18495507
cope

>>18495557
Agree to disagree. This is all besides the point. I haven't been refuted.

>>18487876
The best examiner of the human psyche the U.S. ever produced, along with Melville and maybe Hawthorne, the Twain of Huck Finn, and Faulkner. Ease into him with the short stories and Washington Square.

>>18495599
Huck finn can get the smoke too, what a meandering mess of a book. Talk about a 5th grade character study.

Henry James is the king of literature

>>18495571
>I haven't been refuted
>refute my subjective opinions
Reddit is wild today
For me, its 'What Maisie Knew'

Fuck Henry James is the most based poster on all of /lit/. Keep fighting the good fight brother.

>>18495839
this

Bump

bump

>>18495839
not even a servant

>>18497289
subjectivism is what's reddit

Bump

>>18500384
So wrong

Which book should i read if I find the idea of novels about high society, gossip, marriage, tea, etc to be extremely boring and I want to torture myself with a well respected work for people with taste in those things?

Is it portrait of a lady?

>>18487876
ignore him and read william james instead. remember, if you have to pick between reading the fat guy and the trim guy, always go with the trim guy

>>18502580
>Not reading both
Not gonna make it

>>18487876

He basically insisted that jews do not belong in any White nation.

I’ll leave it up to others to decide if he was correct.

>>18502775
Jews are white