/lit/ - Literature

>>2828570
>DFW obsesses about*

ftfy

You should be really embarrassed. You made the same mistake that the copy writer for 50 SHADES OF GREY did!

>>2828574
Ah, why thank you. I don't proof read stuff on here, hence .gif (nb the maxim even carries to my using a memebase gif)

>>2828570
>y'all agree that the ethical stuff DFW obsesses is a general part of that whole political correctness shindig of the nineties?
I'll agree, but I think he was trying to do something more with it than what most do, which is either vindicate it or point out its absurdities. DFW tried to firmly ground it in a sense of compassion while showing its clumsiness and its infinite extension of self-awareness being confronted by fear as self-consciousness. A work like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men wasn't just a simple point being hammered home numerous times, look at these awful men, it was multiple points about restraint and lack of tact both wreaking havoc because of a lack of context to delineate which was called for. The men weren't hideous by design, and they weren't monsters made by society, they were just willfully unaware of certain things and simultaneously paying too much attention to others, a coincidence creating hideous insensitivity while trying to maintain a facade of sensitivity.
It's all very confusing and we try to pretend like we're not confused and it all turns out badly because we didn't know what the hell we were doing and we haven't learned and we're not getting better with practice. And so even the hilarity is morose.

>>2828570
Why are you making excuses for a very valid criticism?

Get it through your thick skull. DFW isn't that great. He's like the ironic joke from the 90's that you discovered now.

What Bloom wants with the School of Resentment, which you are proving, is that modern society don't care about quality and actual criticism. If it conveys your opinion - then it's correct.

And that's exactly why you are resenting Bloom now.

Yes, you are a moron.

>>2828621
>modern society doesn't care about quality and actual criticism
Care to explain what quality is? Or what actual criticism is? I've read quite a bit of "Bloom's" "work" on authors (those poor grad students...) and I didn't see much beyond his profession of opinion and his approval or disapproval.

I think he dislikes DFW because his prose is absolute garbage and he shows no understanding of human nature or intelligent thought.

>>2828614
I think with the interviews but generally elsewhere, his purpose was not so much didactic as to be precise in representing postmodern ethical problems and the situations they stem from. So the subtlety you get in the interviews is mostly from this emphasis on representational accuracy and the tales they tell don't seem to be forcing a particular moral on an audience. I suppose, you might at most suggest that they were advocating a certain ethical perspective (general compassion/respect), but his prevailing concern is to explore ethics.

My favourite thing he did was to include an eponymous character in the Pale King, a character that was difficult to sympathize with. If he had included a character that was easy to sympathize, we might accuse him of representing himself dishonestly and arrogantly; if, on the other hand, he included a character that we couldn't sympathize with, we might accuse him of the same thing done in a more insidious and indirect way. If, then, he finally went for a character we could sympathize with, he would in the end be actually involved in this complex exchange to a reprehensible extent, would be assuming that we cared to much and be rather self involved for doing it. This I feel explains his final choice and the subtlety of his dealings with 4thwall gimmicks, as well as the importance to him of exploring ethics, in (I would suggest and so I suppose would you), a non-didactic manner.

>>2828644
> is mostly from this emphasis on representational accuracy

How can they be representationally accurate when the author himself is not talented enough or aware enough of other human beings to writes verisimilitudinous prose that would resemble the speech of actual men?
All of his interviewees have the same anxious, stilted mark printed on them of an author desperate for recognition by intellectuals.

>>2828621
On the contrary, he makes postmodern gimmicks that even Pynchon failed to make relevant to a pragmatic worldview, pretty relevant and clever. If you've spent time reading Barth, Powers and Gaddis, this is actually quite surprising and it's clear who's the deeper thinker and more powerful literary voice. Generally, contempt here for DFW here originates in an adolescent and superstitious prejudice against sincerity and a dilletante's preference for the obscure and non-popular. I suggest you give me reasoned criticisms before getting too personal; otherwise, I'll have to assume I have another moronic narcissist on my hands that thinks they have an original or relevant perspective when the truth's far from that.

>>2828638
I think he's representational skills and emotional nuance is quite apparent in his writing; what are you complaining about? Name an american writer that can trump him.

As for his prose, it's not prose poetry as is the norm for modernist writing (and stuff like DeLillo etc.). As such it's pretty par for the course and authentic to the tradition of prose fiction; compare him to Pynchon. Both I feel can be praised for their style, but it might take a while before you realize how.

>>2828648
Substantiate with quotes...

>>2828648
e.g.
Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naïveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m to really explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the blithe hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction—the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes.

Fuck off, Wallace can't write at all. He has no sense of aesthetics.

>>2828654
>I think he's representational skills and emotional nuance is quite apparent in his writing
He has NONE.

>Name an american writer that can trump him.
Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, Ann Bradsheet, John Berryman, Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemmingway, John Steinbeck, Normal Mailer, Cormac McCarthy, J. D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Boroughs, Dr Seuss.
Charles Bukowski had more talent than Wallace. A lot more.

>>2828665
>Charles Bukowski had more talent than Wallace. A lot more.
Ehhhh, I was the guy defending Wallace even though I don't particularly like him, but you've gone too far here. I like Bukowski and still wouldn't say this. Bukowski was a shit writer with a bleak sense of humor that works very well in a disillusioned niche and no more.

>>2828638

I had a very pleasant laugh at that post, thanks anon.


Besides, it is too early to consider if crappy media darlings like DFW are just overrated or very overrated.

>>2828574

Sorry to ask you a silly question, but are you saying in the 50 Grey Shades text there are such obvious mistakes?

No intention of even picking the books up, but curious. regards.

>>2828665
>>2828665
I meant of the pomo and/or late 20th century grouping of whom you mentioned Pynchon, McCarthy, Bukowski and Ginesberg. Comparing DFW to James, Melville and Hawthorne won't get us far.

Ginesberg's a poet and thus, non-compatible for comparison. McCarthy's great work is a Twain pastiche (Suttree) and generally seems to mine 19th century American lit for ideas (Moby Dick in Blood Meridian, Frontier bildungsroman and Hemingway for the Border Trilogy) so hardly matching him in originality stakes; his general usage of a Hemingwayesque prose also completely abandons the subtlety found in melodrama (because unlike Hemingway, he doesn't hint at anything all too existential at the heart of things) and you're kinda left with sophisticated pulp fiction with the odd bit of clever emotional nuance. DFW is into less trivial subject matter and in general has it much less easy, being more of a pioneer than McCarthy could ever be. If you asked me to refine American literature down to a few authors, DFW would have to be one of them (along with Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway etc.) but McCarthy would be jettisoned.

Bukowski writes crummy memoirs that are easily trumped by the writing of a Bellow or an Updike (only I suppose as far as prose is concerned) and only have the working class factor as a USP. Burroughs is generally just a clever pulp writer that was pioneering in his own way but struggles to be as relevant as DFW because the reality dysphoria that comes with heavy drug usage is a kinda limited problem and only has relevance as an allegory for the intellectual after the fall of totalizing thinking c.WWII.

>>2828662
So, you haven't noticed the pithy and precise diction, unpoetic, yes, but good prose. If you want to prove to me that DFW's bad at representing realistic human interactions (here, you must agree, he isn't; he's allowing a focalized voice to describe the potential moral problems they're encountering in the way they've kinda realized a girl's endearing features to them are her weaknesses and vulnerabilities), there's plenty of other stuff in the interviews or in IJ where we get more characterization in the dialogue. Pick a bit where he's trying to do that and we can further our discussion. You suggest anyway that this segment is a clever and realistic place for someone to be engaging in vocal moral consideration, it being an interview where their moral perspective is under examination and hence they are self conscious about it.

>>2828672
>open dilletante detected

it's a fallacy to assume a so-called 'media-darling' writes badly. you might suggest that there are good reasons for media attention; that his writing has some relevance, or at least, more than Gaddis' misanthropy and Nabokov's smarmy arrogance.

>>2828689
As for Pynchon, that I forgot to deal with, despite Gravity's Rainbow being a very enjoyable read, I'd suggest it's somewhat of a cop-out to deal with the death of totalizing thought in the way he does, as a sort of 'all-is-relative-and-uncertain' chaos of pop culture craziness. It's all a sort of unwarranted paranoia (as the book of course acknowledges to some degree) that loses all touch. Mason and Dixon is a little better, I suppose, but not all too much.

>>2828690
>(here, you must agree, he isn't trying to characterize too hard

>Don't you notice anyway that this segment is a clever and realistic place for someone to be engaging in vocal moral consideration, it being an interview where their moral perspective is under examination and hence they are self conscious about it.

>>2828693

I'm just going to make a wild stab in the dark: you have only read Lolita by Nabokov.

>>2828693

Don't take a sarcastic comment too seriously, you might live longer.

>>2828719
I've also read Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, Pnin and Laughter in the Dark. And no, the arrogance is most painfully apparent in Ada or Ardor (not Lolita)...He's just this wheedling old fool whose prose tends on the masturbatory near constantly. Pale Fire is pretty clever, as a sort of metatextual detective novel for the reader to solve, and Lolita is quite an interesting take on consumerist America and Humbert's pretty shaped, but the others sucked.

>>2828719
>you have only read Lolita
You're seriously going to try and argue that his other works aren't full of appeals to intelligentsia and pedantic eccentricities?
Have you read his short stories before? Whew...

>>2828720
What was sarcastic in that post? It was pretty straightforward and terse to infer any irony from it.

>>2828720
Well, I don't think the sarcasm extended to the implicit dilettantism...something that I feel it's worth crusading against seeing as its a complete distortion of how we should be treating contemporary literature

>>2828727
>Lolita is quite an interesting take on consumerist America
That's... just. Wow. A stunning misinterpretation. Nabokov did not intend to make a single statement with Lolita. Read the afterword.

And I swear to God, if you pull some dead author shit on me I'll flip the fuck out.

>>2828739

>b...but it doesn't matter what the author says. Foucault and all that.

>>2828739
>2012
>misinterpretation
Author's dead breh.

>>2828760
Or as is often said around here, the author god is dead, with the author human being very much alive.

>>2828732
You are guilty of the same thing, that is the real joke here.

ITT second year college essay writing.

>>2828739
>implying the author's intentions mean anything

ISCOOBYDOOBYDOO

>>2828732

>how we should be treating contemporary literature

?

>works are McDs
Enjoys hype writers.

>y'all agree that the ethical stuff DFW obsesses is a general part of that whole political correctness shindig of the nineties?

I don't think that's accurate at all.

Caracalla manages in many words to say very little.

Stop forcing this "dilettante" meme.

>>2828782

>Caracalla manages in many words to say very little.
Yeh, the shame is he said a few interesting things initially.

meme? Is that what it is? I thought he was just being a pompous ass.

>>2828676
>Sorry to ask you a silly question, but are you saying in the 50 Grey Shades text there are such obvious mistakes?

There are actually worse mistakes in the actual text of 50SoG. I was referring to the books jacket, in which the copy writer communicates to us thatthe book will "obsess [...] you." Things don't obsess; they obsess about.

(See badbooksgoodtimes.wordpress.com for selected gems from each chapter of 50SoG. Bless those two bloggers.)

>>2828810
goddamnit
>book's
I just awoke.

Bloom's resentment of the "school of resentment" is far more a school of resentment than its critical target ever was.

>>2828810
doublegoddamnit
>that the
You can tell I've just awoken.

>>2828810
haha thanks for replying, don't worry about the typos. its 4am for me.

regards.

>>2828739
Of course, he wasn't trying to say anything; he was simply portraying consumerist america, look at the motels, etc. It was a nice portrayal, that's all I said; I wasn't suggesting any sort of didactic purpose (which is what you're getting at).

>>2828790
>>2828782
I think I know too much theory and have read too widely for the dilettante charge to stick too long. As for not saying much, look at the stuff that's been shitposted and look at what I've had to respond to. I have to respond on their level and it's almost been a task of educating the dumbfucks how to read properly. If I get good responses, I've got more ambit to take things in interesting directions.

>>2828855
Bad apology for bad posts.

Tedium.