/lit/ - Literature

>reading for the plot

http://youtu.be/N8SvTuYNrkM

>>6183930
sometimes it's not the story but how the story is told.

a shitty plot could turn out alright if delivered well enough.

>>6183939
>>6183974
>putting style over substance

>>6183981
>not putting style over substance
in an age when your opinions weigh more like air than lead, why wouldn't you privilege style?

>>6183939
>>6183981
>>6183987

Every time

>>6183974
pretty much any Hemingway book

>>6183930
Anything by John Edward Williams, nigga.

>>6183987
I don't care about the weight of opinions in our age, I care about the book. Prose and plot are important, but prose doesn't make me feel anything, it's nice to read, but it's not why I read.

it's plays not books i guess, but shakespeare does the best fucking plots

>>6183981
>plot is the substance of a book
Jesus Christ
Jesus fucking Christ

>>6183974

I see the overall delivery as narration, which is is a larger concept than plot and also holds things like style.
Though I suppose something like exposition is more important than plot, since simple things can seem convuleted to the audience if they aren't allowed to see the big picture. But then again it's a game of semantics whether exposition is part of plot or not by definition.

Now I already fear that these things have clear definitions and I'm going to be an object of ridicule.

>>6183993
This is just an observation, but I feel like plot differs from story or coherence.

>>6183993
> special made books
Why the fuck would you do that? Joyce's shit already came scrambled from the editor.

>>6183993
>the unit of prose is a sentence
no m8

>>6183981
substance is important too. I'm not saying it isn't.

I'm just saying that a bad plot delivered poorly will be a bad read. and a good plot delivered poorly will be a bad read. while either delivered well has the potential for something good.

for example campfire stories. you might've heard the same story from ten different people. but someone will tell it better than the rest for sure. that's a good storyteller. that's a good writer.

>>6184008
>author's defining quirks and the traces author left in and within their use of language makes him/her feel nothing
okay

>>6184021
How are quirks and traces supposed to make me feel?
>Haha the way Joyce said that is so Joyce

Prose is wholly dependent on plot.

>>6184028
>Prose is wholly dependent on plot.

to some extent but not wholly. they are interconnected.

a lot of writers don't know what they are going to write and just write. they don't know how the story will end until they get there. Many famous authors do this.

>>6184028
>How are quirks and traces supposed to make me feel?
The prose is what conveys the meaning, take the famous last page of the Stranger he says 'devant cette nuit chargee de signes et d'etoiles, je m';ouvrais pour la premiere fois a la tendre indifference du monde', 'before this night imbued/charged in signs and stars, i opened myself for the first time to the gentle/tender indifference of the world'(idk), that sentence gets pretty close to the purpose of the entire novel, showing the revolt of the protagonist against meanignlessness, by contrasting the meaningful 'signs' he sees and inanimate 'stars' above, then explicitly stating he opens himself to the world's absurdity and finds comfort in his own ability to rebel against it, to choose, and to believe, etc.

This is also the plot of the story more or less, but it would be impossible to get the meaning across as fully by just enumerating his actions and psychological states. Man does not feel, man kills, society judges his not feeling, man understands that even though the world doesn't feel he still can, man condemns the murder he perpetrated using his own conscience, accepts his death.

Neither of these tools are subservient to the other, but one of them could be used just as easily in a philosophical essay, the ideas of the plot, and the other is purely a trait of literature, the meaning in the prose.

>>6184061
>society judges his not feeling,
as opposed to judging the murder i meant of course, they judge his lack of caring about his mothers death
the point there being that society at large is full of false beliefs about the purpose world, which have to be thrown away in recognition of the absurd before you can then rebel against it, Mersault represent someone who has done the first stage but not the second

>>6184011

underrated post

>>6184061
>'devant cette nuit chargee de signes et d'etoiles, je m';ouvrais pour la premiere fois a la tendre indifference du monde', 'before this night imbued/charged in signs and stars, i opened myself for the first time to the gentle/tender indifference of the world'
I thought one of the biggest parts of prose elitism was that it can't be translated?

>>6184088
if a book was all prose it would have no substance, it would be entirely style

>>6184090
Well not fully, but you can get the gist of it can't you. especially in a french>english translation, I mean we have a lot of words in common, and they often have nearly the same connotations

>>6183930
The Eternal Husband from what I've read so far.
It's psychologically and emotionally enticing, it leaves you with so many feels throughout, and it really is amazingly written. It's complex in a way, but doesn't rely on its complexity to be good. It's simply amazing.

Even without Swift's phenomenal prose Gulliver's Travels bare plot conveys it's themes exceedingly well.

>>6184141
sort of agree, the stories lend themselves to virtually every culture. possibly not part 3.

>>6183930
In terms of its effortless form, pride and prejudice probably has the most 'perfect' plot.

its just a shame that perfection is so inexplicably tedious

Gravity's Rainbow

The Odyssey objectively has the best plot ever, even though it's not technically a book.

The Old Testament

I don't understand why people think that plots, and the way they're displayed are the opposite of style or aesthethics. It's the architecture of a literary piece, and architecture has a lot to do with aesthetics, not only functionality.

>>6186125
^
everyone seems to distinguish between aesthetic and artistic value, when really each is bound up to the other

>>6185740
>objectively
referring only to The Odyssey's objective qualities, please explain how your statement is true.

Most anything written by George Eliot or Henry James, especially Middlemarch.