/lit/ - Literature

whelp.

problematic is now a hijacked word and i feel very sorry indeed for each little letter :(

>>6176503
>Worse, she actively goaded another friend, deeply committed to the civil rights movement, with racist jokes. Not only did O'Connor tell the jokes, she apparently relished them, saving them up and spinning them out in a series of letters that have never been published.

>>6176555
If O'Connor were alive today she would probably post on 4chan.

>>6176555
>all the racist jokes are in letters
>that have never been shown to exist

lmao

also

when she used the word nigger she was using it in context of the environment

>holding being racist against people from that long ago

>>6176503
Her complaint about Hemingway is pants on head retarded.
>abloobloo don't be mean to your peers it's not nice

>>6176574
if someone called a black man a nigger back then i wouldnt count it as racist

but if they actively write or speak hate against another race i would call it racist in any age

So in 100 years, what contemporary or near-contemporary writers are going to be considered problematic?

>>6176580
probably people abusing drugs e.g. burroughs

>>6176582
Why? It seems like society is becoming a lot more lax about drug use

>>6176591
they are more lax about drug use in the sense it can help people and make people think in different, productive ways

not getting completely wasted on various substances to the point you go brain dead, e.g. hunter s thompson

>>6176594
Uh, HST's popularity is increasing everyday.

>>6176613
[citation needed]

also you said 100 years

>>6176615
Citation? lmao, all we can do is offer anecdotal insights and hope to generalize them to society. And everywhere I go I find people turning HST into this iconic figure and "Fear and Loathing" into some all-time great classic.

And I'm not the original anon you were replied to.

>>6176503
>problematic
That word again!

whats so problematic about old writers not being perfect? I don't pick books based on whether the author was a good, tumblr approved, person but whether that author can write

I'd read books by Adolf Hitler or Attila the Hun if they knew how to write. It's all that should matter.

>>6176636
vocal minority, i assure you

>>6176698
Well, I'll probably still be on /lit/ in 50 years, so we can discuss it then and see how his reputation as held up.

>>6176503

>problematic

intothetrash.wav

From the article's links to the business insider article about Seuss

>In the ads (from the collection of the library of the University of California, San Diego), black people are presented as savages, living in the tropics, dressed in grass skirts
You mean that pic related isnt that?
Maybe Google is racist or the photographers are.

>>6176820
>censoring their mounds of feminine beauty
>trying to make them feel ashamed about their bodies
Fucking racist AND misogynistic.

>>6176820
I didn't find the arab cartoons to be racist either.Am I missing something?

>people don't even know what the problematic is

Condemning someone who was born before world war II for being a racist is retarded.

The reason we all moved to this anti-racist moral climate is because of world war II and the holocaust. Absent that particular historical event, there probably wouldn't be this huge stigma against racism. It's stupid to judge people for not having the same historical experiences you have had.

Rational arguments against racism of any sort are relatively new. Being anti-racists goes all the way back to Antiphon the Sophist, but his arguments against "racism" (if you can even call it that back then, what he said is that barbarians aren't inherently lessors to Greeks) are pretty poor.

>>6176921
>people didn't criticize racism before WWII
Even Heidegger, who was a nazi and hated jews, thought racism was retarded.

>>6176970
I'm talking about racism being a heresy you fucking nitwit. Jesus Christ I hate it when people who are so dumb they fail at basic reading comprehension respond to my actually insightful posts with these desperate straw-grasping "rebuttals."

>>6176921
>Absent that particular historical event, there probably wouldn't be this huge stigma against racism.
There wasn't a huge stigma postwar. I don't think a serious stigma started to develop (outside of academia) until after the Civil Rights movement. And I don't think it was a serious until Third Wave feminism...that is, being a flaming faggot racist was stigmatized, but racial jokes were not. Similar to how being an over misogynist was stigmatized after after women's lib, but making sexist jokes was not heavily stigmatized until third wave.

>>6176981
>my actually insightful posts
Your insight being that people today judge racists in a harsher manner than was usual 100 years ago. Wow, fucking genius. Also, this doesn't imply that we shouldn't apply our own moral standards to people who lived in times when those standards weren't as commonplace.

>>6176594
hunter s thompson never went brain dead

>>6176555
Based Flannery. Very good triple.

>>6176992
It's full retard calling beliefs immoral, ANY beliefs. Actions, seriously harmful actions, are one thing, but beliefs on their own are not fucking sins. There are plenty of people who are fairly racists and even make racists jokes all the time in the right company, but when it comes to actions are overall decent people, even to other races. Then there are people who who are super anal about any remote racist thoughtcrime but are complete dirtbags when it comes to action.

>>6176992
Dude, you're posting on a literature board and you suck at reading comprehension.

My point:

> The experience of nazi Germany and the holocaust was a pivotal event in the development of anti-racism as it showed the truly horrible depths of suffering racism can lead to; people who wrote before this event therefore aren't as culpable for racism as those who came after it.

Your interpretation of what I said:

> People have gotten less racist over time therefore we shouldn't judge people from the past for being racist.

The crux of my whole point is that Nazi Germany is the historical case study that justified counting racism as a heresy. Everybody is anti-racist now because of Nazi Germany. To hold someone writing in the 19th century to the same standard would be absurd. They didn't have the benefit of having their teachers telling them not to be racist and lecturing them about the holocaust growing up. To not be racist in the 19th century you needed to have uniquely strong ethical insights, because anti-racism wasn't taught in schools. Any idiot can be anti-racist today, anti-racism is the standard curriculum now. So unless you think we should simply dismiss all pre-1950s literature as tainted by pervasive cultural racism I think you have some serious 'splaining to do about NOT judging 19th century racists differently from someone who is a racist in 2015 after being raised not to be racist.

>>6177030
>Everybody is anti-racist now because of Nazi Germany.
Hogwash.

>>6176503
If a piece of writing is good it doesn't matter at all if the author was racist: a writer's opinions have no bearing on the quality of their work, I would say.
This "problematic" thing is, I think, the real problem with Feminist, Post-colonialist and Modernist criticism: it's fine to say that Hemingway and Roth are misogynists, or that Conrad was a racist, but that shouldn't really impact on the General evaluation of their works. I think that really this kind of criticism has overtones of censorship, it always seems to be suggesting that: "this work is racist/misogynist/elitist, so it shouldn't be read" which is really just a terrible, borderline repressive manner of thinking.

>>6177000
he did ten years ago

>#1 is predictably King Lovecraft, for the 1 trillionth time
Never gets old.
You'd think he actually hurt people or supported hurting them in any meaningful way instead of doing the literary equivalent of shitposting on /pol/ in some of his letters and a handful at most of stories.

>>6177080
>borderline

Weird way to spell "full-blown, without a doubt, indubitably".

>see buzzwords "problematic", "toxic", or any variation of a Tumblr speak suffix
>disregard, close tab, shit in my hand and toss it out the window with a dim hope of hitting a leftist

>>6176580
Non-vegan authors

I fucking hate American men for having let this become a thing. Seriously, grow a pair of fucking balls and stop it. I swear if this shit ever reaches the European left, our international relationship isn't going to become any better.

>>6177798
>if this shit ever reaches the European left
It already has.

>>6177030
Dude, this doesn't make any sense. The racism of those who lived up until the holocaust is the thing that made it possible, we have every right to judge them.

>>6177825
well considering a racial heirarchy has been a factor in nearly every civlization/culture in the past 100 years, I don't think the average joe who just generally agreed with everyone to keep status quo should be so harshly judged as he/she was just a byproduct of the culture of his/'her society.

>>6177819
how is he standing in the middle of a river, what if his feet get wet?

>>6177798
What does this have to do with politics?

>>6177859
Right, we should limit our judgment to influential people such as famous authors.

>>6176580
people will be past all this in 100 years

>>6176905
jesus christ, I can't believe he got away with that

>>6176503
Was kind of disappointed this guy wasn't on the list.
>even some Nazis thought Céline's antisemitic pronouncements were so extreme as to be counter-productive.


>And in his Semitic obsession, he sees Jews everywhere. The critics? All Jews or Judaized. Famous authors? All Jews! Cezanne? A Jew! Racine? A Jew too! (It is all spelled out, and Céline analyzes the Semitic spirit of Racine!) The pope, the Church, priests? Jews! The Kings of France? “Don’t you think they have funny noses?” Indeed, during the war, Céline charged that Pope Pius XII and Hitler himself must both be Jews, because neither was making a sufficient effort — in Céline’s view — to transform France into a purely Aryan country.

>>6177908

>>6177908
>>And in his Semitic obsession, he sees Jews everywhere. The critics? All Jews or Judaized. Famous authors? All Jews! Cezanne? A Jew! Racine? A Jew too! (It is all spelled out, and Céline analyzes the Semitic spirit of Racine!) The pope, the Church, priests? Jews! The Kings of France? “Don’t you think they have funny noses?” Indeed, during the war, Céline charged that Pope Pius XII and Hitler himself must both be Jews, because neither was making a sufficient effort — in Céline’s view — to transform France into a purely Aryan country.

lmao that shit is great, celine confirmed for not as shitty as i thought after reading one of his long boring plotless novels....why do french dudes think it's cool to write long boring nostalgia trips about their youth and then why do literary assholes put it in the canon so we all have to read it and pretend it's good...now if celine had written more books about jews like that quote above, then i would indeed agree he is a great

>>6177871
I shouldn't have used the average joe thing, I meant to imply any individual.

Although people of higher power, such as the artists/authors/global leaders/etc. should use this advantage to promote more sweden-ish values, it can be a very dangerous thing to do so, depending location and time.

>>6177944
They also could have just refrained from saying horrible shit you know? Absolutely no danger in that, anytime.

>MORALS OF MAN BORN AND RAISED IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY NOT UP TO STANDARDS OF 20 YEAR OLD FAUX-LEFTIST LISTICLE "WRITER"

>>6176503
>people from older generations were racist

Stop the fucking presses.

Nobody really cares anyway, everyone on that list is dead. Plus society was a lot more racist at every point up until modern day, I'm not saying racism isn't a bad thing, but can you really condemn people for having a culturally acceptable viewpoint in a less developed time?

>>6177825
>>6177871

For all of Human History we've found shit to divide each other. Skin color was just one of those things. Even if you account for skin color you have infighting based on blanket claims generally masquerading a legitimate desire.

You look at the Irish, Slavs, and English. Mother fuckers were mostly white, yet you can find a wealth of literature decrying either side of nonsense; of which is considered attributable to their lineage. You get the same shit with Moors enslaving Nubian peoples literally because they think they deserve it.

It's all shitty and the conflict has been going on for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. I think the issue this gentleman has with your statements is that, prior to WW2, there wasn't a widespread effort to stop such prejudice.

Even then, it's generally agreed upon (essentially implicitly and explicitly at times) that when you read of people hundreds of years ago that they're GOING to have some kind of damning prejudice. It's a fact of life. The issue many have, however, is that bringing it up or even bringing attention to it is largely redundant. Nobody is saying you can't criticize it, but why even bring it up? Most of the time it's ad hominem.

If Newton & Leibniz hated the "uncivilized peoples" that inhabited lands faraway from his own it would not diminish their revolutionary work.

Are we going to shit on the Greeks for hating Persians too?

If Nietzsche was an anti-Semite, in the trash does he go?

>racism
>racism
>racism
>racism
Oh, how awful our lifes were before we invented political correctnes.

>noone was ever wrong in the past because its in the past and they wrote a good book it makes so much sense how dare you make nuanced opinions

>>6178286
>noone was ever wrong in the past because its in the past
For non-objective issues eg. personal views and commonly held values, this is completely true. It was not 'bad' for a Greek to have a slave however many thousands of years ago, it is only considered 'bad' by current standards. Just like at the moment it is considered 'bad' to walk around completely naked, yet at some point in the future, due to societal and cultural changes that we can't currently fathom, it may become perfectly acceptable to do so. Obviously this is just a random example but it illustrates the point.

>and they wrote a good book
Should the worth of a person not be measured by the sum total of their good actions and deeds against their bad ones?

>it makes so much sense how dare you make nuanced opinions
The author of the article didn't have any nuanced opinions, instead the totality of her argument (sic) is 'knowing that some people in the past were bad makes me not happy'. She doesn't give any credence to the point that all of them are dead and so literally cannot benefit from anyone buying their books, nor does she address the point that people are not buying the books because they approve of the author's views or actions, but instead because they simply want to read very good books.

Very obviously the author is a woman and has the very super-liberal SJW mindset of applying modern standards and views to very old contexts. Moreover her point about Hitchens is purely political and simply saying 'warmongering' obfuscates the intricate and carefully thought out arguments that Hitchens made in his books. She is also most likely of the mindset that war is bad regardless of the reasons for it and, whilst I agree that some aspects of the recent Middle East conflicts are dubious, she never happens to go into any detail as to why she thinks Hitchens, or any other of the authors' opinions or actions were 'repugnant' as she put it.

>>6178068
>If Nietzsche was an anti-Semite
He very clearly wasn't, though.
And for the rest, it pretty much depends on time that has passed. A greek defender of slavery is a quite different deal than a 19th century southerner doing so. Same goes for racism, the closer in history a racist is to our current era, the more we are justified in judging them.

>>6177935
>if celine had written more books about jews like that quote above

He wrote multiple books on jews, they are pretty hard to find irl, though.

>http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres6/CELINEtrif.pdf

Here, almost 300 pages of obsessive anti-semitic rants that make the average /pol/ poster seem calm and reasonable in comparison. The whole thing is so unrelentingly hateful and monomaniacal it makes me think he went insane after staring into the abyss for too long.

>I would like it to be proclaimed, absolutely concluded, certified, and universally
trumpeted, that a single yellowed toenail, of whatever sort of crooked, numb-skulled wino of
an Aryan, wallowing in his own puke, is worth a hundred thousand times as much, and
another hundred thousand times on top of that, in any given fashion, at any given moment, as
one hundred twenty-five thousand Einsteins, standing in all of their blindingly astounding
radiant glory… I hope that I have made myself understood?

>>6177952
They never had teachers telling them specifically what was horrible. In 1850, even in the most progressive circles in the world, it was common to be racist. Even most abolitionists were fucking racist as hell and thought whites were superior to blacks. I don't condemn them for it because by the information available in those days, simply being an abolitionist was as progressive as it got. Marx, Bakunin, and all the other left wing idols said things that would be considered horribly racist by today's standards. Are they off limits too?

I'd also add that the anti-racist movement was strengthened not only by the Holocaust but also by science that disproved a lot of the scientific racist theories. Back before the human genome was sequenced it was probably a lot easier to believe that blacks were some inferior subspecies, after all, you had all the subject matter specialists of the day feeding you the doctrine that they were inferior. Prior to certain 20th century discoveries and experiences, racism just wasn't as inexcusable as it is today. Today there's no excuse not to know; then, there was. Being racist in 1850 did not require an ounce of malice or hatred, today it pretty much does.

>>6179225
Interesting as fuck.

>rating Lewis Carroll "more problematic" than Jack London because of awkward photos

What a cunt. He never did nothing to no one.

>>6176905
muh orientalism