/lit/ - Literature

Don't tell me, show me

>>6375343
>It's very evocative and soothing
That's the problem –it's most often not. You're thinking of actually good prose.

>>6375343
they are usually ignorant people or willing retards. The would read thomas wolfe and say it is objectively worse than hemingway or some thing.

Purple prose is pretty prose that falls flat. Purple prose that hits the mark is called William Faulkner or Nathaniel Hawthorne or...

>>6375343
the only thing that writing has to be is good. You can be purpler than Oprah if it's good.

"His love for purple passionately blossomed in the depths of his purple heart.

His adoration of the excessively floral grew, my dear reader; he was smitten, intoxicated -- purple vapors rising from purple pages with a purple scent so strong it left purple rings of floral emptiness circling his quivering nostrils. Oh, divine color, thou ask of thee: paint the man, paint him purple!

From his bulbous head of receding downy hair, to his over-walked toes that know too well the blisters of cheap, faded, un-purple leather. Paint him. Bathe him. He will bask in the searing radiant purpleness of our most sacred color; each ray bringing another superfluously sweet adjective, another painfully unnecessary adverb, purple beams of purple purpleness until sweeping arcs of purple ejaculate."

- The color purple, by Dave Purpleson

>>6375641
nüb ook oov

>>6375690
Some people are just turned off by overly stylistic writing. There is nothing inherently wrong about it but to some people its like trying to force Bukovski to dress up and attend a formal dinner party

because if done excessively it can convey basic information in a needlessly excessive and convoluted way for no good reason

>>6375716
>convey basic information in a needlessly excessive and convoluted way for no good reason

"I don't like it" is a perfectly good argument when it comes to aesthetics.

I agree with the fact that imagery can be "overdone," but I fucking hate people who see something approaching poetry and go "hurr purple prose!" Fuck off, if everyone thought like that then every novel would read like Shoplifting from American Apparel. There is literally nothing in fiction that doesn't have a place somewhere, whether that be "purple prose," second person, future tense, excessive adverbs, etc. There are no absolutes in fiction.

>>6375343
you fucking niggers i thought purple prose was a meme because it sounds funny but yall ngigers are too serious because its an actual thing

>no laffs on this board

>>6375629
TW is a god and without prosodic rules in place such as reductionism he ends up occasionally in incredible places-- the ending of look homeward angel was like heroin

>>6375723
subpar bait

>>6375690
>bulbous head of recedding downy hair

>>6375725
true. aesthetics have no rules so the only test is whether its good or not. and this is good. it makes me feel better that 98% of people who write aesthetic prose are terrible because it adds to the value and magic of those who are great

The richness of language comes from the fact that many words are created in order express complex feelings or situations. Good writing takes advantage of these words in order to convey a large amount of information in an economical fashion.

Purple prose takes a small amount of information and stretches it out with content-light word choice.

>>6375800

So literary aesthetics are merely an extention of linguistics put to the purpose of ideology?

>>6375762
I find your excessive use of the n-word to be problematic. Please cease before you trigger someone you racist breeder.

>>6375699

>>6375813
>proving my point that this board is too serious. not because racism is funny but because excessive shocking language reduces its power and is ultimately funny and liberating for everyone

Have you ever been to 4chan?

>>6375343
Purple prose is clunky and needlessly obfuscates sentences. Example:

Bruised and battered yet richly and ovrercreamed purplish prose has a tendency to, on certain pressing occasions when one is completely engaged with the literate arts, needlessly complicate and obfuscate with a bombardment of unnecessary and egregiously tangantable details which clunkify prose lacking in any real cerebral fiber until one inevitably reaches the end of a sentence and several things have been unquestionsbly said but all bespoken poorly.

>>6376201
Have you? The joke flew over your head, nigger.

>>6375762
>Not already knowing what purple prose is

>>6375787

What the hell? Aesthetic prose actually exists?

>>6375725

With aesthetics being geared toward emotional appeal are they inherently fallacious?

What Barthes thought:

Le réalisme socialiste français a donc repris l'écriture du réalisme bourgeois, en mécanisant sans retenue tous les signes intentionnels de l'art. Voici par exemple quelques lignes d'un roman de Garaudy : « ...Le buste penché, lancé à corps perdu sur le clavier de la linotype... la joie chantait dans ses muscles, ses doigts dansaient, légers et puissants..: la vapeur empoisonnée d'antimoine... faisait battre ses tempes et cogner ses artères, rendant plus ardentes sa force, sa colère et son exaltation. » On voit qu'ici rien n'est donné sans métaphore, car il faut signaler lourdement au lecteur que « c'est bien écrit » (c'est-à-dire que ce qu'il consomme est de la Littérature). Ces métaphores, qui saisissent le moindre verbe, ne sont pas du tout l'intention d'une humeur qui chercherait à transmettre la singularité d'une sensation, mais seulement une marque littéraire qui situe un langage, tout comme une étiquette renseigne sur un prix.

>Thus, French Socialist realism mimicked bourgeois realist prose by mechanizing all the intentional signs of Art without inhibition. For instance, here are a few lines from a novel by Garaudy: " (...) leaning over, throwing himself headlong on the Linotype's keyboard (...) joy was singing through his muscles; his fingers, light and strong, were dancing (...): the toxic vapors of antimony (...) made his temples throb and his arteries thump, intensifying his strength and exaltation." You may notice that everything here must be expressed with a metaphor, because the reader has to be notified that "it's well written" (meaning that what he is consuming is Literature with a capital L). These metaphors which seize each and every word, far from being the intention of a mood trying to communicate the singularity of a sensation, are only a literary mark that denotes a type of language—as a pricetag indicates the value of an item.

it gets boring, sometimes you just want something to happen without zooming in on everything first.

>>6375357
Pleb advice