/lit/ - Literature

No, at least not necessarily.
Why do you ask?

>>20907963
Look at that guy's face. Do you really think he has anything of value to say?

>>20907968
Why do you think I ask? Obviously I want to know if reading literary criticism will help me become a better writer.

>>20907970
https://youtu.be/S9ieF7LVbyI

He is against the trannification of the humanities, you can't judge every single thinker based on physiognomy.

>>20907970
Since its an obviously intelligent face, yes.
You probably think looking like the gigachad meme makes smart people admire you...

>>20907971
You wil know more about literature, including what makes bad books bad. Whether you can apply it is up to you, as always

>>20907963
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BATPzXjmV_s

>>20907963
LOL.

>>20907968
>Why do you ask?

Pedantic faggot Reddit phrase.

>>20907963
Probably. Never having read any literary criticism suggests poor reading, which means necessarily you will not be a great writer. You cannot write off the whole field, especially good stuff (recommending Hugh Kenner to start) can certainly provide new angles for great literature that can help you write something new
>>20907968
I guess. Why wouldn't he?

>>20907963
No. Most literary criticism uncovers depth that’s accidentally in texts due to the ambiguities of language. If you purposely try to put those depths into your own writing, it’ll become heavy- handed, and clumsily academic.

>I have never for instance verified a quotation in my life. William Hazlitt once said if you can't quote it from memory, you have no right to quote it at all. I remember everything, and so I write it down that way

>>20907963
Maybe. Has anybody read this?

>>20909251
I actually had to read Flight to Lucifer for a fantasy course I took in college. The day we were scheduled to discuss it the professor's first question was, 'OK, now, how is Bloom's novel different from the fantasy novels what we've read so far?' A bunch of people raised their hand and answered but none of them seemed to be saying what the professor had in mind. He kept saying, 'Yeah, what else?' Finally nobody had anything to say and he waited a few seconds before saying, 'Well, let me phrase it another way. Was there something in Bloom's novel that eluded you?' Silence. 'Something, perhaps, that you would have liked to see, but didn't? Something that was either absent, or hard to detect?' Ah, of course! My hand shot up. 'Yes, Anon.' 'Talent,' I said, 'There was no discernible talent!' The professor and I broke out into hysterical laughter. 'You couldn't discern any talent!' 'None!' he shouted and started rolling around on his desk like a turtle on its back. My face was red and I was wiping away tears. We laughed for about five minutes before it died down to nothing but brief aftershocks of giggles. 'Oh man,' he said. 'Good lord. All right. Remember to read the rest of it for Tuesday, and (shouting over everyone packing up) see if you can discern any talent!' And he pointed at me. 'This guy,' he said. 'Woo.'

I think it definitely can, it really depends on the work of criticism you're reading. An Essay On Criticism is actually good advice for any kind of writing and changed how I write a lot over the years

>>20909260
What the fuck. 100 dollars?

>>20909379
Screenshot.

>>20907963
I'ma read criticism from writers I like (mostly). So give me some Eliot.

>>20907963
Reading in general makes you dumber. You should instead be fucking. Perpetually.

>>20907963
reading what a seething jew who can't write and wants to destroy you and your culture thinks about people who could write is not going to make you a better writer, no.

>>20909527
We get it, you read Harry Potter professionally.

>>20907963

It depends of what literary criticism you are reading. If it analyses the technical aspects of the writing it might actually pay off. Critics who write this kind of books spend years reading original manuscripts, sources for the works, and studying the ways in which the authors use the tools they work with to give their books the final effect (for example: how Shakespeare creates metaphors and what tricks he use to make his imagery so impressive, or how Tolstoy concentrates his microscopic details and realism mostly on facial expressions, gestures and mental impressions that characters make on other characters instead of details of clothes, buildings, rooms and other less interesting aspects of reality).

By reading such books you can end up saving time: realizations and perceptions that would take you several readings and years of immersion in the work of your favorite writers could be pointed out to you in a single good book of criticism. You’re almost buying the years of dedication and effort of a person distilled into a volume of pages that can be read and understood in a few hours.

These are the kind of books that help one get better at writing. Critics like Bloom that just make assertions and opinions without any proof are mostly worthless.

>>20907963
STFU OP

>>20909260
Classic.

>>20907963
No, at least not necessarily.

>>20909552
Can you give me an example of such a critic?

>>20909563
NO

>>20907963
If read critically a would be writer could pick up
some clues or road signs that could direct their
writing in the direction of what publishers are looking for ?
But becoming a better writer ?

>>20907970
Bloom was actually pretty based. Look into him some more. He may have been a yid with some dumb views, but he was a great literary critic, especially when it comes down to the Canon and what should and should not be added into it.

>>20907963
It makes you a better reader, for sure.
The final redpill is realizing that the best literary criticism is akin to poetry and that what literary criticism does is take an existing matter, remake it (like Renaissance poets would do with Classical myths) and remake the reader in the process.

>>20909527
he must have destroyed it really thoroughly because you truly don't have whiff of culture about you

>>20909764

Yes. If you want to become a better poet and use Shakespeare as a model you could study these books (and pay attention to the ironic fact that most of these books are obscure and basically unknown while stupid books like the one written by Bloom were bestseller’s):

>The Development of Shakespeare’s imagery, by Wolfgang Clemen;
>The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays, by F.E. halliday;
>Shakespeare’s Uses of The Arts of Language, by Sister Mirian Joseph;
>The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays, by B. Ifor Evans;
>Shakespeare’s Imagery, by Caroline Spurgeon;
>Shakespeare’s Language, by Frank Kermode;
>Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, by George T. Wright;

One of the best books I know about Tolstoy’s style:

>Tolstoy's 'War And Peace', by R.F. Christian

The best book I know about Chekhov’s art and development as a writer:

>Understanding Chekhov: a critical study of Chekhov's prose and drama, by Donald Rayfield

Two great works on the technical and verbal inventiveness of Emily Dickinson:

>Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, by Cristane Miller
>Dickinson: selected poems and commentary, by Helen Vendler.

A great new book on the technical aspects of Dickens work:

> The Artful Dickens, The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist, by John Mullan;

Also:

>Idolects in Dickens: The Major Techniques and Chronological Development, by Robert Golding.

As for a popular critic working today whose articles are generally quite good I would name James Wood.

>>20909552
>spend years reading original manuscripts, sources for the works, and studying the ways in which the authors use the tools they work with
Harmless-drudge-tier take

>>20909552
>Critics like Bloom that just make assertions and opinions without any proof are mostly worthless.
To me, the only value in Bloom is the idea of a western canon and the need of its preservation and the school of resentment and its menace to the academy.

>>20909552
>>20910093
Also, maybe, we should do a criticism chart. Is there something like that floating around here?

>>20910104
I've been sketching it out in my head, but any particular approach will be controversial one way or another. Aristotle's Poetics and a few other texts are guaranteed, but the moment you step into the 20th century you'll trigger people for including or not including Lacan, Barthes, Bakhtin, the feminists etc. I guess Auerbach and Frye would be acceptable to all at least. I love Russian formalists too but they and their heritage are obscure in the anglosphere.

>>20910104
That’d be cool. It’d be good to begin with the pioneers of modern criticism (Saint-Beuve, Johnson, Menéndez Pelayo, Curtius, etc).
A contemporary critic I like also gave this list of critics that could be a good start: Roman Jakobson, Susan Sontag, Leszek Kolakowski, Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, Marc Fumaroli, Gustavo Guerrero, Yves Bonnefoy, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Irving Howe, George Steiner, Marcos Moshinsky, Paul Bénichou, Wilfrido Corral, Cornelius Castoriadis

>>20910133
I really don’t think it matters if people get mad at including poststructuralist or feminist critics. If we were to make this chart we should be equanimous. And Russian formalists for sure should be included, especially because they’re very important outside the English world.

>>20910133
>Aristotle's Poetics and a few other texts are guaranteed
Agreed.

>I guess Auerbach and Frye would be acceptable to all at least.
I vote for Aristotle's Poetics and Frye. But let's keep working at this list;
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of knowledgeable anons in this subject.
Also, I like Tom Wolfe's non-bullshit approach in this area, but then we're talking about another kind of criticism and I digress. lel

>>20907970
he was a hero

Can any academia fags on /lit/ tell me about the current state of the "School of Resentment"? Is there any pushback against it to rediscover the classics that have been thrown under the bus?

>>20909842
Do you know any like these for Pynchon or Gaddis?

>>20910535
Also does the idea of a western canon actually exist past Bloom? The only other mentions I've seen are books attacking it.

>>20910104
>>20910133
>>20910148
This guy is gold:

>>20910535
It really depends in what language you're working in and even the country you're in. I don't think it's as bad as /lit/ would tell you, though. A lot of academic work might be done from the lens of sociology, cultural studies, identity and the like, but there's also work done from a more literary and orthodox perspective, though perhaps a little rarer than in the past. I don't know, you just have to look for it and for good academics for what you're interested in.
>>20910542
Also depends where you are. Bloom was surprisingly popular in Latin America, for example. And during the last part of the 20th century there were a lot of discussions around Bloom and the idea of the Western canon in the region. I don't think it's discussed very explicitly anymore, though ––with some exceptions, and sometimes from different perspectives, like Bourdieusian literary studies. But you'll still see many academics talking about the importance of studying non-canonical texts or including new texts within the/a canon. And of course there will always be some criticizing the idea of a canon in the first place.
Critical work is always, whether consciously or unconsciously, working to comment, criticize, expand or reduce the canon, so I think that might be why many don't bother to talk about the canon explicitly.
>>20910547
Fun book. I would read the chapter for a particular work when we read said work in class.

>>20910578
I live in west coast USA but grew up in the rockies so I never experienced any of this stuff until recently. I'm a STEMfag but I always found this stuff interesting from a casual perspective.

>>20910601
The US is probably where the kind of work associated with the School of Resentment is the strongest, but even there canonical texts are still being read and studied, though they've certainly come under attack and are still being criticized by some.
But the canon is kinda an organic entity that has been in gestation for centuries and is always becoming, so even after all the attacks to it it has survived, if only as an imaginary map.

>>20910578
I started writing a response, but yours covers basically everything I wanted to say.
IMO on /lit/ the canon is treated as too much of a clear, distinct object. It has always been fuzzy and contentious and varying a lot across countries. It's much more of an implicit than an explicit list, and mechanically trying to add or remove a writer from the canon seems pointless. Once the writer actually gets ignored and not assigned as reading we can talk about decanonisation. But e.g. feminist critics publishing dozens upon dozens of books on Shakespeare (criticising or praising him) rather than trying to put some obscure female writer from the period into the forefront, tacitly admits the cultural position of Shakespeare.
Also Bloom wrote about the issue in a really dramatic manner, I have a feeling it was all a bit exaggerated.

>>20910446
>I'm pretty sure there are a lot of knowledgeable anons in this subject.
lol, no
for antiquity, you could also include Pseudo-Longinus, Horace (Epistola ad Pisones), Plato (Republic, the sections on art, Ion is also great)
I've read plenty of Barthes and I'd say Criticism and Truth works the best as an intro to him.
I'd also include semiotics, Lotman's Structure of the Artistic Text is my Bible.
Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature would probably work as a great intro to theory for most litizens, though it's largely ignored today.
Regarding the rest, my knowledge is quite unsystematic. One could make use of Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, to pick out the important names and key texts.

>>20907963
>>20907963
Good contemporary writers and books to read on Criticism since Bloom passed?

>>20910662
>Also Bloom wrote about the issue in a really dramatic manner, I have a feeling it was all a bit exaggerated.
Do you think a guy like Bloom would exaggerate stuff?
Look at him. The man was suffering!
They were coming for his shelves here. And the guy was on the verge of crying.

Plus; you're not an academic,
thence you're not in your 'identity lane'!

>>20911192
>you're not an academic
How do you know that?

>>20911211
>How do you know that?
Alright. But you're a man (male), and thus wrong. So just shut up, bigot.

Read Bloom's novel to find out.

It depends on who you read and what you read.

James Wood is one of the great literary critics of our time, whose own writing and thought process is almost as beautiful as the novels he writes about. His critical dissection of Edmund Wilson (another famous critic in his own right) is brilliant, stating that:
"So Wilson's three great childhood inheritances - his interest in neurotic collapse, his neoclassical aesthetic, and his belief in a positivist historicizing of literature - frequently lead him away from an aesthetic account of a work toward biographical speculation and cultural instruction. Wilson is a superb elucidator of the pleasures to be had on first looking into Proust or Das Kapital, but it is hard
to find any sustained analysis of deep literary beauty in his work."
Not only does he outline his criticism of Wilson in a clear and cogent way, he also develops his own theory of what constitutes good criticism, and in general good literature: stuff that's focused on beauty rather than biographical renderings or how much the author self-inserts into a text.

A lot of literary criticism/theory is genuinely unreadable crap, like Derrida and Foucault, too focused on obscuring its arguments to make any clear sense, but there's beauty to be found in stuff like "The Anxiety of Influence" or "On Truth and Lying in the Non-Moral Sense", or even Barthes' "Mythologies" which is not only a demonstration of semiotics at work, but also shows how one can close read even the every day facets of life, how a glass of wine can hold so much meaning, and theoretically one could reflect that sensibility in one's novel after reading it. I also think of CLR James "Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways", a postcolonial reading of Moby Dick, that I felt after reading could make a writer conscious of all the possible interpretations of their work, and so influencing them to write in a way where the work has a lot of interpretations.

>>20911233
I also see craft books as their own form of literary criticism. George Saunders just put out one analyzing the Russian writers and what makes their stories tick from a very formal perspective. How does x Russian author employ repetition? Why do they employ it? How do they develop a thematic throughline in a short story? etc. etc. These kinds of books that reverse engineer great stories down to the level of craft so as to give the aspiring writer tools to mimic and mutate are also a kind of good criticism. I teach creative writing, and I try to read at least one new craft book a year, and see what I can incorporate into my classes and my own writing.

>>20910662
>Lotman's Structure of the Artistic Text is my Bible.
redpill on this one, anon

>>20911233
>A lot of literary criticism/theory is genuinely unreadable crap, like Derrida and Foucault
Neither Derrida or Foucault were literary critics, and reading them as such is always a problem. Foucault, for example, at best studied literature inasmuch it was a cultural product and as an object that can talk about its time, but not as literature as such. Not trying to read them as critics makes it easier to approach them, IMO. I only have superficial understandings of (some of) their works, but there's also beauty in them sometimes, desu.
>James Wood is one of the great literary critics of our time, whose own writing and thought process is almost as beautiful as the novels he writes about
This is just what I was looking for, thanks anon. I know who the best literary critics ––not only as critics, but as prosists too– for my language were, but I always wondered which were important for American lit.

>>20911286
Very "low-level" explanation of art (mainly literature) as a form of communication. Incredibly reasonable, gives IMO definitive answers to basic issues of approaching art, and versatile in how you can go on to apply it. It's a great synthesis of structuralist and formalist efforts that were going on for half a century before him (but also builds above them in many ways, of course).
Also he anticipated AI-generated literature (the book is from 1972).

>>20911355
I'm working my way through his book The Fun Stuff right now, where I pulled the quote from, and his take down of Paul Auster in there is amazing. He starts by writing a mimic of Auster's style and then explains everything that's wrong with it in such an elegant way. His book How Fiction Works is also worth seeking out.


I know it's film criticism and not lit crit, but I find the writings of Pauline Kael and Adam Nayman to be genuinely good writing. Kael because she was great at seeing from the perspective of the modern audience, and championing artistic newcomers, and had a well-defined set of critical sensibilities; Nayman because he's very astute at analyzing what makes guys like Fincher and De Palma auteurs. He's great at elevating what's often seen as commercial trash into higher art.

>>20911377
Just surprised to see Pauline Kael mentioned and I'm glad.

>>20907992
He looks like your average greek migrant concreter

>>20907971
Bloom falls firmly into the 'construction' phenotype. A common sight in Southern England and North-West to Central France, it betrays a lowly background. Bloom could not conjure. While, like many Europeans, he'll try to trick you using the blank gaze, it is obvious he is one of the unlucky worker ants. He knows he will never create a world like the men under his arm. So what does he do, with his knowledge of how to build? He spends a career knocking down the beauty created by great men. Was the West feeling a revival of pure, pre-Romantic beauty? Well, Bloom's here with his KNOWLEDGE to knock it all down. He invokes in me a level of disgust which is actually quite rare. I'd like to use an example of a Vaishya trying to undo what a Brahmin has done. But the examples are so rare, I don't think I can find one. Please, leave it to the priests and warriors. When the Lord Indra on his chariot arrived at the Ganges to slaughter 6 million Dasyu Varna, the first and only word he spoke was "namaste." Was the Lord Indra a priest? No. Who taught him this word? A priest. Yes, as you seem to somehow know, it is only the warrior whose prana breathes life into the lines of force that weave the tapestry of history. Yet the priest alone can draw these lines. Can we judge the Lord Indra and his priest? Of course--and they can judge us, too. Namaste!

>>20907970
"Lookism" is the single most valuable tool in the critique of a person's work. I'm serious. Look at the Irish writers - all ugly - nothing of value written.

>>20907963
Reading literary criticism doesn't make you a better anything.

Just bought his book on the western canon and oxford's complete aristotle. What am I in for

bump

bump

>>20907974
>he's against the trannification of the humanities
>you can't judge every single thinker based on physiognomy

...

>>20912699
I tried reading The Western Canon and he actually writes like total shit.

>>20912699
I enjoy The Western Canon

bump

>>20912699
I hope you know what you've bought with the Aristotle books
Aristotle is extremely dry

>>20915452
Don't worry, I've prepared.

>>20911372
Thanks. It looks curious.