/lit/ - Literature

I'm cringing hard. This is like one of those "Objective comparison charts" you find on 4chan every now and then.

>>4351976
I like how he gives the girl more credit because she's a girl.

>>4351988
Man I wouldn't even care if he didn't write shit like
>How did Ellis/DFW/Franzen approach a theme and how to write a story? They would find a theme derived from current topical subjects that the mass media/audience would find interesting, for example “Rich kids are crazy nihilist drug addicts” “Our parents are getting old and families aren’t close anymore” “We can find spiritual value in things like AA or athletics.”

I mean, that's so objectively wrong and stupid I can't help but think Cicero is being purposefully disingenuous. If this was satire it would be hilarious.

>>4351976
>implying you can't rank something objectively if you define "objective" and "good"

>>4351998
You sound stupid.

>>4352004
You listening to a recording of yourself?

>>4351993
For all we know, it might be satire. Noah cicero, with the exception of a few, seems to have a disdain for the alt-lit community as a whole.

thought catalog is objectively shit

>>4351998
If you can get everyone in a room to agree what's 'good', you can set a subjective parameter for reference but you still cannot rank it objectively.

>new methods

But DFW already predicted the methods of alt-lit even before they appeared in his CY essay.

I like noah cicero and disliked this article.

>>4352030
What are some articles by Noah Cicero that you like?

I'd find it so much easier to engage with DFW's critics if I could find more who aren't superficial, poorly-read mouthbreathers. I'm not going into the specifics of why this guy knows nothing (DFW didn't engage with the beats/gonzo/et al.? Please), but I'd like to say something more general about the consistently low quality of attacks on DFW which is probably more a function of the low quality of commentators nowadays than of the unassailability of his work.

I find people make several distinct mistakes in reading DFW, which this article pretty much runs through like a checklist:
1. Assuming that because DFW's style is convoluted, it's somehow not naturalistic or is anti-naturalistic (which also begs the question of the existence of 'naturalistic speech').
2. Lumping DFW in with reactionaries like Franzen.
3. Somehow claiming that other people write 'more' from experience than DFW (cf. Ennet House as a pretty thorough refutation...)
4. 'aaaaaa middle-class white dude! check yr privilige!'
5. Ignorant critiques of maximalism in general. ('Why do you need to write about the IRS to write about boredom?')
6. Finally, writing more out of contrarianism than out of a genuine commitment to literary criticism.

I think there are real criticisms to be made (Infinite Jest in particular was a creature of its time - it fought the good fight against the Lacanian demon of passive infantilism when it turned out that, with the internet, Baudrillard was the real horseman of the cultural apocalypse), and I have yet to hear any. Specifically, I have yet to encounter more than a handful of critics who appear to have more than a passing familiarity with the intellectual history of either literature or literary criticism - instead, I mostly hear facile, politically or socially motivated sophistry. If clearer evidence was needed that humanities education in the West is slowly flatlining, I cannot imagine what form it would take.

>>4352252
I copied and pasted this comment from where I'd commented on this article for another website, which is why I sound like a bit of a twat

this is a really bad thing

>>4352252
yeah, DFW's prose is super super naturalistic, and he's all about a time and place in Pale King. This article is so awful.

> the story is not autobiographical

Infinite Jest is basically autobiographical, Pale King purports to be in much the same way Lin's books do. What a shitty idiot that wrote this

>They believe in literary topics, such as discussing the ‘future of literature’ or ‘if novels are dead’ even though in reality, those topical articles do nothing but promote the writer, and don’t actually influence anything.

Pretty sure Tao wrote an article about the future of literature too

>>4352252
>Infinite Jest in particular was a creature of its time - it fought the good fight against the Lacanian demon of passive infantilism when it turned out that, with the internet, Baudrillard was the real horseman of the cultural apocalypse)

What a cringeworthy sentence in an otherwise mediocre and substanceless post. "Ignorant critique of maximalism"? You're not even good at saying nothing.

>you lost, and now we need new methods

First of all Noah is being a class-warrior faggot (and I'm working class enough to say this without being defensive of some upper class) by attacking DFW, Franzen and Ellis's upper-classness.

Sure they didn't have to work for a living and therefore had enough time to develop very well researched stories etc, but that shouldn't undermine what they did. Wallace's Broom of the System is, he admits, largely a philosophical work for example.

The thing with this "literature of boredom" is that even shit-tier writers like Zachary German can defend the shitiness of hteir books by claiming "It'[s supposed to be boring!" or "it's supposed to appear as though I didn't care much about what I wrote!"

Yes, post-modernism doesn't work well as a long-term strategy to develop literature, as irony is an emergency raft which doesn't stay afloat for long. But claiming that "borealism" is the answer just seems like an easy way out

>>4351966
DFW's horrible comprehension of the things he read is enough for me to give him a pass for being upper class or whatever. Read anything he wrote on linguistics or math and enjoy the lulz.

>>4352320
I'm rushing through this bullshit, I could write an essay on how DFW fails to address the problems of hyperreal consumer society because he was preoccupied with attacking an autistic, Freudian-Lacanian kind of narcissism which now seems dated in a world where narcissism is the baseline of social interaction instead of a deviation from it. But this is a post on /lit/, not a term paper.

the anti-DFW attacks on maximalism are ignorant - they completely ignore that maximalism was created and still exists for a reason, and that even if you don't agree with it it can't be dismissed as 'unnecessary'.

also, if you're going to attack the 'substancelessness' of my post without any substantive reasoning in support, let me be the one to lower the quality of the discussion even further by telling you that you are, in fact, both a faggot and hitler.

>>4352333
>let me be the one to lower the quality of the discussion even further by telling you that you are, in fact, both a faggot and hitler.

I like you.