/lit/ - Literature

Anything that doesn't read as if it was written at least fifty years ago is shit. Punctuation is important. Don't trust your instincts.

>>3596808

i don't even write bro

>>3596822

but i do enjoy modern lit

>>3596824
/Thread

people will agree that something has a 'certain effect' in a work because there's nothing objective to compare it to. in short, yes you can tell a good story with that style, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a good novel.

A Clockwork Orange

the first example i can think of as an author who told great stories in spite of not being a master of language is jack london

>>3596808

>punctuation is important

laughingMcCarthy.jpg

>>3596895
Wrong file.

GunSlingingMcCarthy.png

in order to fake an ignorant or uneducated person you need to understand them, and even like them. It's been done in Huckleberry Finn and Riddley Walker, Wodehouse was a master at it, and Daniel Keyes did a good job too. What it requires, like the artist drawing like a child, is taste and awareness. You cannot merely imitate: you have to try to express what the person would say or do or effect, if they could, in the language and vocabulary that they would have.

Vance took the other extreme, having cavemen say what they "meant" but expressing it in precise language, the way their hearers would understand them. So you'd get a primitive warrior saying :"Your precepts are unorthodox, and we cannot embrace them without a risk of violating long standing traditions. I would advise caution if you choose to broach these novel notions in the presence of the more volatile of our youthful zealots."

>>3596808
I bet you liked how everyone spoke the same way in Lés Miserables.

>>3596895
McCarthy is a pleb-tier author. Stop saying things like you know what you're doing.

>Agota Kristof

>>3596944
>Vance
who is that ?

>>3597368
shit, i entered sage in the name field a while back and forgot to remove it sorry

>>3597368
Jack Vance. Tales of the Dying Earth etc. Big influence on Gene Wolfe and popular culture in general (mainly via Dungeons and Dragons). Rare case of a fantasy author with good prose.

>>3596980
You sound like an angry 14 year old.

>>3596792
You know I always see these threads and I never say anything, but I think many people here don't understand this, so damn it, here goes.
I'm not going to claim that I'm a great writer or a scholar with a phd, but here is the way I see it: a novel, short story, poem, whatever, is a work of art. The purpose of art is not necessarily to be beautiful, rather to communicate an aesthetic feeling. This can be done in diverse ways, and that's how you can have seemingly nonsensical ramblings of Burroughs in Naked Lunch alongside beautiful prose like in Nabokov's Lolita. Which of them is the better is subjective and up to the reader to decide, but there is no doubt about it that they each communicate their own aesthetic idea in their works.
For example, consider the following: why is the first-person prose in Lolita so damn good? Is he doing it just because he is a great writer and he can, or is there a higher reason? The narrator is a pedophile who is explicitly aware that he is (literally) telling you his story. He does it in such a good way that the reader is irresistibly inclined to his favor. And in the end, he takes it all away from us by affirming that he is a monster, that he took a young girl's childhood away, making us question the power of persuasive speech.
I'm doing it too. Right now. At the very moment that you're reading this. I haven't even read Lolita aside from some snippets here and there, and some browsing on wikipedia. Naked Lunch too, for that matter, but I digress. The point is that language is only a means of communication through symbols. When I write the phrase 'OP is a faggot', the reader doesn't read it and say, 'gee, this consists of 11 characters and three spaces, therefore OP must be a faggot'. He reads the idea communicated through them: OP sucking on a 12 inch black cock; perhaps being pounded in the ass by a 200 lb black man named Jerome while crying like a bitch. In the same way we have to read and pierce through to the idea within

>>3597531
Yes! 2000 characters exactly. For bonus effect, read in the style of Slavoj Zizek.