/lit/ - Literature

>>6055299
Capitalism.

>>6055299
>Why are hierarchies taboo in today's society?

Tell that to your boss

>>6055307
Is this not a product of the "New Left"?

>>6055316
Economic hierarchies are more reinforced than they have been, but I think OP was talking about the hierarchy of high/low culture.

>>6055320
>Is this not a product of the "New Left"?
New Left is just an extension of capitalism. They abandoned economic marxism and went for social marxism that was even easier to undergo under consumerism thanks to capitalism.

>>6055299
>Why do people try to claim that reading young adult is just as good as reading literature?
Because "good" here is an undefined quality that means basically jack shit. What is reading "good" for? Why would reading Tolstoy be "good" while reading the hunger games not? Who dictates what's "good"? The academics, writers, history? Why is being "good" important, necessary or relevant? What do I lose by not being "good"? Who does it hurt? Does it hurt me? No? Why should I care then? Does it hurt someone else? Why should I care? What's the purpose of being "good"? Is it scientific, cultural, moral? And again, why should I are? What's the real difference between YA and the canon? Who said so? Why should I care?


Leave your spooks at the door.

>hierarchies taboo
There just isn't any evidence for Illuminati and similar cults.

>>6055385
>What's the real difference between YA and the canon?
There is more to obtain from the canon than YA in terms of stimulating ideas, but for those who cannot obtain anything more from Moby Dick than The Fault In Our Stars, they feel anger because they perceive themselves as intellectually lesser, since what supposably was there they could not see.

>>6055413

>stimulating ideas
Like?

>>6055413
There are also more variants of sentence structure and a bigger pool of terminology in most important works than in YA, where the language is simplified to appeal to a bigger audience.

>>6055385

You can define a work as good by the amount of growth it enables you to experience as a person, and that works that are not good are ones which are too shallow to provide any real channel for growth, and that people who find shallow work to be good are just people who haven't experienced much personal growth via a medium. Thus, reading good versus bad works enable you to save limited time that you have by enabling you to grow more in a shorter amount of time, and thus good works should be sought after and bad works discarded.

That is how I always understood "patrician", "pleb", and "pleb taste" anyway, even though I dont use those terms. There's nothing inherently bad about reading YA if you stand to learn something from them, but your time would be better spent reading something with more value in terms of what it can teach you (or at least the emotions it can elicit).

>>6055385
I agree with this in part, but I think there is a concept of good that lies in taste that can be statistically gauged.

I think that the majority of people who study English seriously (as in, at least attained a bachelor's degree) in the subject would not find those works "good." And yes, that is purely conjecture. But if it is true, then why wouldn't we lead the labeling of what is good and what is bad to people that have some level of expertise in the subject matter?

I think Hume wrote a treatise on this, and had a good defense on there being an actual "good" and "bad" in art.

>>6055413
>>6055434

Why is any of that "good"? Why is this important, necessary or relevant? Can you prove it? Why should anyone care? What's the purpose?

>>6055320
>Economic hierarchies are more reinforced than they have been

So what you're saying is that OP is wrong?

High/low culture in opposition to each other was an invention of the 19th century anyway.

>>6055435
>You can define a work as good by the amount of growth it enables you to experience as a person,

Yes, you can also define good to mean a purple cat that can play the piano. Why should your definition mean anything more than that one?

>>6055441
>Why is this important, necessary or relevant? Can you prove it?
We left the need of universal human thinking in the 1700's because it was silly, soundless and didn't help bring new ideas.
Why is it important to live more? Would you be able to justify the need of medicine outside of human society? Why don't we just kill sick people? Why do we have complex feelings about disease instead of accepting it?
Nothing related to human thinking exists in a vacuum.

A more complex work simply is more complex, animals wouldn't understand the difference between simple and complex human constructions either (except goats, they love towers). We humans find more content in a more complex work, while a simpler prose and less demanding ideas tend to make you think in simplified terms; just like any interaction influences how you think. But no one cares how or what you think and there's no absolute objective truth around it.

>>6055430
I dunno mate, out of the last few books I read, I Claudius was a thorough exposition on Machiavellian politics, and Moby Dick had some of the most psychologically interesting characters I've read in books, as well as the some of the prettiest prose I've read, and brought up some questions on religion. Even if you're only reading for plot or action they both deliver in spades. Out of the little YA I've read they've all been filled with boring characters and dime a dozen ideas.

>>6055436
>But if it is true, then why wouldn't we lead the labeling of what is good and what is bad to people that have some level of expertise in the subject matter?

Because you're deferring your freedom of thought and judgement to an institution. what purpose is there in doing that?

>>6055443
>I mix up 19th century with 17th because I know nothing about history.

>>6055450
It shouldn't unless you want to. It's usually called inter subjectivity and that's how humans have always interacted.

>>6055461

Then you understand why hierarchies are being ignored.

>>6055436

People would be more likely to listen to the people qualified to make those judgments if the ones making them were willing to help others understand why. I realize its mostly due to time constraints (though often mixed with a healthy dose of superbia), but when your choice is either "read something you can enjoy on your own" besides "read something that I tell you to you pleb faggot lel", most people will go for the former, and so the resulting assertion that "my tastes equal yours" is just a defense mechanism resulting from someone who either doesn't want to acknowledge their "inferior taste" or is too far gone to even know they developed a taste for the "bad." You see it a lot in food as well actually.

>>6055473

Then there's no reason to even defend the notion of a hirarchy.

>>6055477
Except when they aren't. People chose to do it or not, societies never actually mattered in that regard. Do youreally imagine some french farmer during the 1700's shared the interest in clothing and gardens that some bourgeois in Paris?

>>6055482
There isn't unless you want to. Some people will agree with your arguments, some won't; some people will take your ideas and expand them and some others might take them to show how wrong they think you are. And everyone is right, because human ideas aren't universal truths.

>>6055385
We understand the world through the language
The more mastery of a language a person has the more complete and complex their pool of concepts and ideas is
The more complex and complete your pool is the more complex, intricate, well thought your ideas are
The more well thought your ideas are the more intelligent and critical you become

This makes one less likely to be controlled, less likely to fall for the traps of life etc. And this is just a simplified depósitos of one of the ways to approach it.

Literature has a lot of merits, I'm sick and tired of having to explain why complex things are better (more practical, beneficial, etc) than simple things.

>>6055492
Ok, then. What are you even arguing for?

>>6055487
>Do youreally imagine some french farmer during the 1700's shared the interest in clothing and gardens that some bourgeois in Paris?
No? What's your point with this?

>>6055505
>depósitos
Jesus fuck, cellphone
>depictions
Is what I mean

>>6055468
Errr no.

The word 'culture' as applying to art wasn't even invented until the 19th century.

>>6055450
just because the word is nebulous doesn't mean it doesn't have a definition.

>>6055505

>Literature has a lot of merits, I'm sick and tired of having to explain why complex things are better (more practical, beneficial, etc) than simple things.
How are those things "better"? What are they better at? Why do you assume your values are universally accepted? Why do you know assume that there arent people out there who can read harry potter and experience something similar to what you did when you read Ulysses?

>>6055492
>>6055487
And I'm not saying "you can't know nuthing". Just that some aspects are simply about finding people who agree and disagree with you and learning from them and with them, trying to find the final truth is some platonic lie that should had been dropped centuries ago.

>>6055507
> What's your point with this?
That intellectual hierarchies didn't exist among farmers in the 1800's just like they don't exist among regular workers right now. Even in the 50's when the US government actually had money in art it still was something that snobs cared about and the regular joe found funny and silly. The idea of hierarchies being taboo right now and not before doesn't correlate with reality.

You can still feel there are less standards than at some other random time you chose, but you'll have to make an argument comparing those two context.

>>6055513
>/ñ/
a/s/l ?

>>6055524
I'm interested. What is the source of that evolution of the term culture?
I'm pretty sure culture was mostly invented to cement the idea of nation and with it independent states ruled by humans and not god chosen people.

>>6055532

Good is a meaningless sentiment. It could in fact mean a purple cat playing piano if that's what the sentiment is derived from.

>>6055545

A purple cat playing a piano would be good in that it would cause us to re-examine what we know about cats and lead to the potential growth of knowledge we have as a collective species. A purple cat playing piano in a world where we know purple cats playing piano is not good in that it does nothing.

>>6055543
>That intellectual hierarchies didn't exist among farmers in the 1800's just like they don't exist among regular workers right now.
They did and they do. Just not about te same things. A 19th century farmer wouldnt give a rat's ass about painting, but what about farming technique? You don't think they called each other plebs if they didn't know how to properly use a hoe? Even nowadays take the most low class people and still have intellectual hierarchies. About sports, sex, entertainment, celebraties, religion, etc. Look at plebs in general. They might think you're a classicist for saying Harry Potter isn't good lit, but they would then they go ahead and say Lil Wayne is even real music.

>You can still feel there are less standards than at some other random time you chose, but you'll have to make an argument comparing those two context.
I would say there are more standards nowadays. but that's just me.

>>6055435
There are different ways for a work to enable you to experience, though. Are you familiar with the concept of exemplary/cognitive/affective fiction?

>>6055565

But I actually meant it literally. In where the word "good" means "a purple cat playing the piano". In the same way one can use the word to mean "complex", "satisfying", "impressive", or "useful". It has no definition. It has only an implied sentiment that is derrived from the context in where it's used.

>>6055567

Pardon the typos.

>>6055567
>there are more standards nowadays
There are more sets of standards, undoubtedly. More scales demanded too, since there are more works to force into them. I'm not sure people would be as adamant in their ideas as they used to be, though, so in that regard some standards are laxer (like eating etiquette or how you regarded old people).

>>6055594
You pardon mine, we're more than even.

>>6055543
>I'm interested. What is the source of that evolution of the term culture?

This is from Culture and Society by Raymond Williams:
>The fifth word, culture, similarly changes, in the same critical period. Before this period, it had meant, primarily, the 'tending of natural growth', and then, by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture OF something, was changed, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself. It came to mean, first, 'a general state or habit of the mind', having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean 'the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole'. Third, it came to mean 'the general body of the arts'. Fourth, later in the century, it c came to mean 'a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual'. It came also, as we know, to be a word which often provoked either hostility or embarrassment.
>The development of 'culture' is perhaps the most striking among all the words named. It might be said, indeed, that the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the world culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy and class, in their own way represent, and to which the changes in 'art' are a closely related response. The development of the word culture is a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to these changes in our social, economic and political life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored.

>>6055605
Cool. What were the other 4 words?

I like when a text mentions a definition from the encyclopedias and it's awfully evident the intent behind it, like defining citizen as an owner of land. We take a lot of words for granted when they either have a lot of baggage behind them or are actually much more modern than we think.

>>6055659
The other ones mentioned. "Industry", "democracy", "class" and "art". All of which acquired new meanings in the Industrial Revolution around the turn of the 19th century.

>>6055385
You are presenting a false dichotomy between objective aesthetic value and complete relativism.

>>6055466
there's great utility in that...

i hope you have a PhD in every single subject you possibly can, otherwise you're claim that there is no purpose in that is bunk. we can recognize when people know what they're talking about when we aren't in fact, experts in what they are.

The book you're looking for is A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. There's a whole series around it, but it explains the basics of The Law of the Jante.

>>6055545

It's not meaningless. If I walk down the hall, bang on my neighbor's door and take him outside and point at two car's and say, "that car is better than that car," then he will understand what I mean by that statement. Although he would probably be worse off because I brought him out into the snow.

In both of these cases you clearly understand what I mean by better and worse. And you do know what someone means when they say Ulysses is a better book than Harry Potter. This goes back to what I said earlier about more distinguished tastes. Sure, there is no REAL definition of better and good. But you understand it fine enough.

Goes back to what I said earlier: I rather take the opinion of someone that has read a lot of books than someone who reads casually. And if that point needs to be argued. I really don't have anything else for you. Might as well hire an electrician to fix your toilet.