/lit/ - Literature

Reject Modernity. Reject Liberal-Progressivist (Demonic) Lies. Reject Individualism.

Embrace Tradition, with a capital T. Embrace the Spirit. Embrace the Universal Man as an expression of God, that is, the ineffable Ground of Existence.

>>20903157
How do you stop your trad reaction from becoming a larp though? Just another niche local narrative that gets absorbed by the machine and made into an ephemeral spectacle?

>>20903170
you can't, that's what makes tradlarping retards so fun to watch

>>20903170
You have to reject the very foundations of Modernity and its cohorts. When they shout you down, declare you an enemy, and threaten violence, cancellation, etc. You are doing it right. You have to make yourself poison that the beast cannot consume, only flee from, or annihilate.

>>20903157
>Reject Individualism.
=
>Conform with all around you and forget your identity and self. You are now only part of the mass. And that is a good thing.

>>20903157
What about capital T Transition? Can I embrace that?

>>20903072
Who fucking cares? All the good books still exist, just read those.

>>20903189
Is this tranny gaslighting?

I’m sorry OP but that’s plain wrong, that’s a hot take from 2004 when we all believed the internet would “democratize” us. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see the internet is highly censored worldwide. Sure we have access to some information but if what you’re saying were true we would be seeing localized narratives flourish worldwide and we aren’t. What’s happening is globohomo (globalized homogenization) or what some call neoliberalism is hallowing out all former institutions and infrastructure that was in place for cultural production. Culture is artificially being held back from developing due to no central organizing narrative in society and the people that do try will not be published due to being white/poor/problematic. It’s not even a matter of skin color even black male theorists and creative types are having their perspective erased by black female academics. As culture dies there’s a mass pearl clutching going on and every sector of society is now highly reactionary. Catholicism is on the rise, people are actually identifying With their so-called racial heritage although that was wiped away 100 years ago by the liberal project. It’s obvious what the next step of culture is going to be but we aren’t ready to admit it to ourselves. The west is still the best, China doesn’t even have s reference point for the novel as an art form. The small people that continue to be interested in literature have been and will continue to be western. Thank your local white man for this gift of history.

>>20903181
The faceless mass is composed of atomized, fractured individuals who believe they are free agents. They are not even a unified PEOPLE with their own culture, traditions, and way of being. The Individual worships his own subjectivity and inevitably gets ensnared by the illusions of his own ego, based on his illusion of being somehow sperate from the rest of life.

If you reject Individualism, reject "Me and the World", and instead consider "Me IN the World" you will see that it's impossible to separate yourself from the rest of existence; that we are expressions of Divinity, and can take part in Eternity if we so choose.

But that's impossible if we simply worship our petty "individuality" based on half-registered impulses we confuse with being ourselves.

>>20903072
On the one hand, the early 20th century modernists were already dealing with this problem. They already saw themselves as writing for "the happy few", trying to keep culture afloat in a sea of mass produced dreck. On the other hand, I think they'd be even more horrified to see just how far things have degraded. At least Joyce lived in a time where he could become Joyce, Eliot could become Eliot. There was still an organized literati whose mission statement was to keep culture alive. Today we don't even have that, unless you count anonymous weirdos on /lit/.
>>20903189
Man is a social animal and he derives his meaning from the cultural narrative in which he is embedded. If you just want to be an isolated atomistic individual and say "fuck everyone else, I'll just read the classics" then that's just consoomer mentality. You're no better than consoomers who watch TikTok videos, you're just consooming from a different source is all.

>>20903205
>If you just want to be an isolated atomistic individual and say "fuck everyone else, I'll just read the classics" then that's just consoomer mentality.
what if I want to be an isolated individual without reading "the classics" and reject institutions

>>20903205
Then discuss the classics with your family and friends

>>20903210
Based

>>20903199
>>20903202
>>20903205
babbys first 'culture is le collapsing' moment. Ah, the golden days of youth

>>20903232
Die boomer

>>20903232
be understanding, anon. these are all coming all at once, 9/11 and 2008 were the only significant ones in recent memory for the people whose first event it would've been, millennials generally. even crimea was only a blip on the radar. we are seeing many firsts for zoomers and I am extremely fascinated as it unravels.

>>20903232
>le disillusioned nihilist #3248248042
boring cunt. lay off the porn.

>>20903072
Happy 15th year anniversary, Anon. I remember first realizing these things and being like, woah, nobody has ever thought about this, too. Stick around.

>>20903072
It's the transition from Western civilization to globalized technical civilization.

>>20903247
Not at all, quite the opposite. in fact i recognize the trite doomerism from my own long-gone days of porn use

>>20903189
Um sorry sweaty those books were written by old, dead WHITE MALES and therefore aren't really great.

>>20903239
What do these events have to do with anything? I don’t get why people bring these up as if they’re SO TRAUMATIZING OMFG THE KIDS THE KIDS you sound like a fucking Christian housewife. Those events are white noise in the background, the oppression is in the everyday —the people getting poorer and having no culture or anything to even fucking live for. Zoomers will literally tell you this no problem. Those are not life defining events and nobody cares about the wars but people beating the fucking shit out of you for being white everyday so you blow them away in a school shooting (lmfao) will destroy you. It’s obvious you’re some over educated academic faggot that should NEVER have control over any policy.

>>20903355
I am 30 god damn years old.
If you can respond to every problem with “just relax man stop worrying everyone’s always complaining about the same shit” then the logical conclusion is that circumstances never actually get worse for anyone anywhere, which is absurd.

>>20903072
Ultimate high quality is rare and stands out tall.

It's just harder and slower to tell with books because flipping them open at first glance they all look the same. And the average person has a life a speaks good enough English to write understandable series of sentences. So it is hard to stand out, that's why it's strikingly evident when rare and unique and special quality shows itself in the artform, when you for instance read a great novel, compared to dimestore.

However with the exponential leap and speeds of 30 years or so of technoliges, and those youths who grew up emeshed in the cutting edge futuristic speedy informational world, styles and abilities and techniques evolved, so now some anons weird funky hyperlinked, image full, ultra sincere ultra ironic, 1000 page interactive blog novel may be "better" than some books in the cannon.

The literary history stand out texts of cannon, is that time in history and that human development and acclaiment, to be the mainstream account and view of 1000s or so years of stand out and most significant literary accomplishments.

Now things have changed quite drastically in the world and life and technology and culture in the last 30 years, with no sign of letting up.


As was mentioned, goal posts have been changed and moved, there are different fields with unique goal posts, and judgers of quality therein.

This has likely always been the case: best detective novel of the year, of the decade, of last 20 years.

Best western novel.
Best romance.
Best crime.
Best mystery.
Best thriller.
Best sci Fi.
Best drama.
Best period piece.
Etc.

Great works of literature of history can fit into this and that genre, but often they are what do something vastly or unignorably different in positive, pleasing, beneficial ways.

How many books in those above listed genres are there.
How many if analyzed would not be sooo different from each other. They would not stand very far from each other in what they could offer.


The idea of 'better' can at times be hard. 'taste' is an intriguing topic. A decent sized concensus among people can at times be good at time be wrong according to different people.

It's hard to try to be objective without trying to lay out the criteria you're using.

I geuss the trying to be objective would be the understanding and considering of all subjective positions plus trying and succeeding to go beyond them in what they left out

Ultimate high quality is rare and stands out tall.

It's just harder and slower to tell with books because flipping them open at first glance they all look the same. And the average person has a life a speaks good enough English to write understandable series of sentences. So it is hard to stand out, that's why it's strikingly evident when rare and unique and special quality shows itself in the artform, when you for instance read a great novel, compared to dimestore.

However with the exponential leap and speeds of 30 years or so of technoliges, and those youths who grew up emeshed in the cutting edge futuristic speedy informational world, styles and abilities and techniques evolved, so now some anons weird funky hyperlinked, image full, ultra sincere ultra ironic, 1000 page interactive blog novel may be "better" than some books in the cannon.

The literary history stand out texts of cannon, is that time in history and that human development and acclaiment, to be the mainstream account and view of 1000s or so years of stand out and most significant literary accomplishments.

Now things have changed quite drastically in the world and life and technology and culture in the last 30 years, with no sign of letting up.


As was mentioned, goal posts have been changed and moved, there are different fields with unique goal posts, and judgers of quality therein.

This has likely always been the case: best detective novel of the year, of the decade, of last 20 years.

Best western novel.
Best romance.
Best crime.
Best mystery.
Best thriller.
Best sci Fi.
Best drama.
Best period piece.
Etc.

Great works of literature of history can fit into this and that genre, but often they are what do something vastly or unignorably different in positive, pleasing, beneficial ways.

How many books in those above listed genres are there.
How many if analyzed would not be sooo different from each other. They would not stand very far from each other in what they could offer.


The idea of 'better' can at times be hard. 'taste' is an intriguing topic. A decent sized concensus among people can at times be good at time be wrong according to different people.

It's hard to try to be objective without trying to lay out the criteria you're using.

I geuss the trying to be objective would be the understanding and considering of all subjective positions plus trying and succeeding to go beyond them in what they left out

>>20903157
>Embrace Tradition, with a capital T. Embrace the Spirit. Embrace the Universal Man as an expression of God, that is, the ineffable Ground of Existence.

>>20903072
God I fucking wish.
Saturate any 'canon' enough and it will organically cut the fat, which is an interesting concept if you assume a 'canon' already contains many great works, so it will have to pick and choose between several magna opera to determine what gets dethroned to make room for the next.
Maybe it might become sufficiently large enough that its impossible to fully grok it in a single lifetime.

The old cannon exists, and will as itself.
Any new cannon will not be related to it. The world and literature are too different.

So a new contemporary canon should be started, I don't know what year being the cut off, but it's up to different groups of tastemaking intelligencia to build their cannons and be able to defend their case.

I geuss there is too much literature of too broad scopes to have a 5,000 book list of absolute must read incredible contemporary lit

>To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

>>20903157
based and perennialknowledgepilled

>>20903211
Why do you think I come to /lit/

>>20903072
>The traditional gatekeeper of high culture, the university

That's a 19th century, middle class conception. "High culture" as we understood it historically was the privilege of the aristocracy, and to a lesser degree church clergy, though I guess you could make an argument for the middle classes replacing the clergy. Still, until the 18th century or so, if you weren't an aristocrat or a priest/monk, people would simply tell you to fuck off with a few exceptions (such as elizabethan playwrights)

>>20903072
>Is this the end of the “western canon”?

To answer this question, yes, it will die with the west. But there will always be "a" canon, because that's how things work, new hierarchies always bring along a "canon" of their own rather than allowing a free-for-all because power, culture, and education are completely inseparable from each other, each one reinforces the others.

>>20903447
>Those events are white noise in the background
Jesus Christ you people live in vacuums and treat everything like it's in a vacuum, no sense of causality, America is the world and the world is America. your larp about culture and history is the greatest epitome of not having one, you're inhuman abstraction has never existed, it's a cope of ridiculous lengths for you to never reach. "Tradition" and "history" is modernity, these things never existed before it.

America meets reality, it's time to leave the simulation.

>>20903072
the canon is fine, but the "west" is bejewed beyond restoration
the GREEKS are what they do not want you to read!

>>20905697
Why would we want to live anywhere else? The rest of the world is a shithole. Wherever you’re from, get raped you fucking faggot. If that’s how you really feel stop obsessing over America like it’s your highschool crush

>>20903157
Stupid larper.

>>20903072
the egregore of brain networks will advance the reaches of human knowledge. meaning is a personal thing, as the collective, we make faceless progress.

>>20904618
Souce?

>>20903072
Your idea of a "western canon" is in itself a modern invention.

>>20903072
Possibly, but I don't know if the reason for its neglect/decreased influence are so complex. It's a historical process- followed by a second enlightenment

>>20908745
>no, people in the renaissance didn't read the classics!
>no, vergil and ovid weren't some of the most popular poets in the middle ages!

Fuck outta here you gaslighting redditor faggot

>>20908931
Yes, they did but they didn't think of it in terms of a fossilized corpus of literature or in terms of ethno-geographic labels like "western". That's a modern conception.

>>20908957
you only think of the canon as fossilized because you were served up a goyslop education consisting of seethe at "dead white men"

>>20909023
I don't. I like Western literature and dislike negroes. But let's not kid ourselves, it is a modern conception.

>>20908931
pretty sure anons point was that the western canon is a modern invention as most of the great authors and the people of their times didn't have access to the breadth of the works we do today
in someone like shakespeare's time, the pool of great worthwhile literature was pretty small
not everything he and the people back then were reading was the cream of the crop

>>20909023
The 'canon' is just the perfect carrot-on-a-stick for the average /lit/fag, saving endless charts, graphs and lists of those cool boooks you need to consooom and never actually reading

>>20908695
The Pale King.

>>20903170
Any attempt to carve some order and meaning out of post-modernity requires some level of LARP.

>>20903387
I'm thinking about getting this soon because of you Ellulanon

>>20903157
>these are the jackasses taking over /lit/

>>20903884
This faggot literally wrote a defense for a Black Achilles lol.

>>20903072
Nah. The fact that a place like /lit/ can exist, revolving a dozen consecrated authors everyone can talk about, shows the canon is still real and alive. And not every country is a hostile as the US to the idea of a canon of classical works. Your concern is really mostly an American (maybe Anglosaxon) concern.
Whether there exists or will exist a canon of contemporary works is a more interesting question. I do feel that in certain kinds of literature, like poetry but really in most genres, authors have been hesitant to consecrate and canonize themselves and their peers. If you’re really so worried about the canon continuing to exist you have to nurture it. This implies reading and writing about literature and, most of all, trying to make a sense of the mess that contemporary literature is. When approaching literature readers should see themselves as conquistadors looking to civilize and order wild, senseless wastelands.
>>20905638
Even if Europe and America were to cease to exist tomorrow the Western Canon would still exist. You really underestimate how studied Western literature is outside the core countries of the West.

>culture has fragmented into a seemingly infinite number of obscure localized narratives.

Where? Fandom wikis and twitter circles? Discord? Reddit? 4chan? I'm going Thoreau mode. Just need to find one or two people who will tolerate me. Woest case scenario it takes one or two years of effort.

>>20906695
Completely missed the point. didn't get my reference, what a surprise. if you're going to be on a literature board at least pick up a book. Only the inauthentic man can obsess over such an abstract "other" name-calling, you can't seem to engage with actual content. I'm from nowhere in particular, not to you at least, I might as well be right next to you in fact. You're kind love to obsess over problems like they exist on the plane of the void, or that all the "ideas", terms, and epistemes you know stretch back and forward ad infinitum. children ripped from causality, you know your ancestry only to your grandparents, I know America far more intimately than you do. Oppression? I doubt you even know what that looks like. you live in a age of excess of all and none, too much of everything, yet to little too. go back to the spectacle if you wish, it's what raised you after all.

>Why would we want to live anywhere else
you give off the impression of being incredibly Young. You dont leave the country much do you?

>>20912075
Geographically too. So what are your specific plans?

>>20903072
God I wish that were me.

>>20903447
>TRAUMATIZING
anon... it's about these events being orchestrated to move stocks a certain direction to the benefit of a certain group...

>>20914405
>benefit of a certain group
more like infighting between rival factions of a certain group

Let's make our own canon right now

>>20903157
this guy is mildly retarded and trying to appear like he is not

>>20903072
Like all problems with literature, I blame it on Death of the Author.

Not because it destroyed the importance of authorial intent, but because it’s fucking French.

Anyone good contemporary books/writers on this since Bloom is gone?

>>20903170
>How do you stop your trad reaction from becoming a larp though?
You don't.

>>20903170
>How do you stop your trad reaction from becoming a larp though?

Get off 4chan. Get off the internet in general for that matter.

>>20903072
Philosophy isn't too bad.