/lit/ - Literature

twilight, stephen king, and atlas shrugged

I tried to read Milton, it was too much for my highschool mind. I think modern catered to my sensibilities at the time. What would be a good place to start? I read loads of things from the mid to late 19th century. But before that? I can't really think of any besides shakespeare of course.

>>648460
start with the romantics, realise that older language isn't impossible to comprehend. i personally don't like them, especially keats, but they're a good starting point. i do like colegridge and shelley.

then, if you're still pining after modern ideas and techniques, read the tristram shandy by laurence sterne. it's a shit crazy novel from the 18th century that you'll think was written in the early 20th.

just work your way back. all the way back to chaucer and malory if you want, but i'm still working on that :P

>>648470
I really love Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And Some of the poetry of keats is okay. I've seen a movie about Tristam Shandy but I don't think it was really about the book. It's a pretty cool film, though. Steve Coogan is the shit

>>648448
ｗ Ｅ L c ｏ M Ｅ t o ａ n T ｏ ｐ Ｉ a W H E Ｒ ｅ A Ｌ ｌ ｔ ｈ e A N ｔ S ｌ ｉ ｖ e i Ｎ ｈ Ａ R ｍ Ｏ n y : Ｈ Ｔ t p : / / 8 8 . 8 0 . 2 1 . 1 2 /

Jonathan Swift.

Daniel Defoe.

>>648450
DO YOU REALISE ENGLISH LITERATURE IN GENERAL IS CRAPPY AT BEST WITH ONLY A FEW EXCEPTIONS, YOU ANGLO FAGGOTS

>>648473
yeah, coogan is awesome, and the film is not about the book at all really.
frankenstein is still pretty late, 1818. it's really worth diving into the 1700's 1600's and 1500's in particular. try alexander pope, the dunciad is pretty amusing and epic at the end.

speaking of epic, try homer, virgil, ovid. they'll help you understand where almost all literature comes from. the reason why books are the same stories over and over again is because the greeks and romans wrote the originals, and they wrote them fucking well.

>>648481
not really. i'm really fond of other european literature, and though i know little about it, i admire eastern lit greatly too.
american lit just has the problem of only being about 200 years old. there are some great writers, but it just doesn't compare to the mass of genius that about a thousand years generates.

>>648486
cool, I was thinking of reading some classics. I thought Ovid's Metamorphoses were extremely well written, with a good measure of sex and violence.

>>648495

> a thousand years
>Chaucer only started writing in the 1400s
>before him there was pretty much no such thing as "English" literature
>he wrote in Middle English

>>648497
> about a thousand years
> middle ENGLISH. you still study it on an english lit course. if you're counting old english too it really does go back a thousand years.

>>648501

>you don't understand what i was implying
>english literature before chaucer is like russian literature before pushkin
>it doesn't count

>>648520

>also, why am I using greentext? it is a mystery for the ages

>>648520
I do understand perfectly what you're saying, i'm studying middle english right now. but in any case, i was just making a generalisation for the sake of ease anyway, I didn't mean exactly a thousand years. yes, strictly speaking it's more like 700, even 600 if you want, in terms of modern english. but whatever. i wasn't really making a point about that. stop being pedantic.

the point i was making was that the sheer amount of stuff that has been created, and the quality of that stuff, before the founding of america, is staggering. and that /lit/ seems to ignore it. that is all.

>>648520

>you don't understand what i was implying
>english literature before chaucer is like russian literature before pushkin


to be fair, if you're implying he doesn't understand your lofty argument, comparing it to russian literature is hardly going to help. back to your ivory tower you go.

lurk more, there are plenty of threads like that.

>>648559

It's not a lofty argument brah, and I clarified what I meant right after, don't be such a sillypants

>>648566
well not enough, so here's another!

>>648481

>>648597
i lol'd

bump, let's see if these faggots read real literature.

>>648642

Literature went to shit after Christ, I only read stuff before that.

>>648497
Tolkien considered Chaucer to be the beginning of modern English literature, didn't he?

sup

I like Johnson's Lives of the Poets

>>648672

He was a transitional figure between the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance. You can tell through his writing.

I largely agree with Tolkien, though. I think English literary tradition probably began with authors imitating Chaucer.

Okay, here we are in my area of expertise. Let's talk, OP.

Milton uses imagery like no other? Hmm. Could be because Milton was blind. Images would be of necessity different to him. But you're in good company being fascinated with the blind man's imagery. So was Borges. Or even, if you want a less loftilly Miltonic example, check out the late20th British short story writer John Collier's attempt to adapt Paradise Lost as an unfilmable screenplay. In other words, he honestly wanted to consider if Milton's imagery was MORE visual because he was blind. I think it was. I think the absence of visual stimuli prompted Milton to attempt a sublimity of visual description that has rarely been approached in literature at all.

But at the end of the day, I have to confess that I prefer Lycidas (which I can recite by heart) and Comus and Samson Agonistes (bits of which I know by heart) appeal to me more than Paradise Lost.

Partly because Paradise Lost seems to me what William Empson called it in "Milton's God"---ultimately a terrifying monument to a religion (Christianity) which is based on human sacrifice.

The Faerie Queene also interesting, will discuss in next post....

The Faerie Queene fascinates me for the same reason that Jane Austen fascinates young women, I think. This is literature that is aiming to teach you something about life. In other words, girls read Jane Austen in a certain order...first, Northanger Abbey teaches them how to read bad fiction and avoid learning bad lessons...Mr Darcy teaches them how to read men....then Emma teaches them how to read stupid women....etc etc. If that makes sense. Remember, Austen never has scenes containing men unless there are women present. She doesn't guess at what men do on their own, because she doesn't need to make anything up to tell young girls reading Austen how to understand men.

Well, an allegory like The Faerie Queene is written to give moral instruction (Holiness, Chastity, Justice, and all the rest of it).. But what is most interesting to me about The Faerie Queene is this....Book One is simplistic. Or it would have been to an intelligent contemporary reader. We need footnotes to learn that the Blatant Beast is the Pope, etc. But all that was just flat-out obvious to Spenser's contemporaries.

What's more interesting is that....the allegory gets more complex and problematic in Book 2...then even moreso in Book 3....and it's no wonder that he can't quite finish it, but he leaves the best poetry in the whole damn epic in the Mutabilitie Cantos, which aren't in any book.

IN other words, The Faerie Queene is like a book THAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO READ IT as you go along. The allegory gets more complex because it starts you off by teaching you how to read a simplistic allegory, like an Aesop fable. When he gets to more complicated topics, like Sexuality or Justice, the allegory NEEDS to be more complex, because those topics are more complex.

Fascinatingly, though, Justice for Spenser is a purely retributive concept. Crime and Punishment. What Spenser would have made of distributive justice---ie, John Rawls's Theory of Justice--is anyone's guess. Spenser dismisses the idea of distributive justice with the image of the giant who levels all mountains to the same level. This is a faulty idea of distributive justice, just as in a simpler modern allegory of the same topic, Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron.

But what do YOU like about Milton and Spenser? Because I can go on like this for hours....

>>I tried to read Milton. What would be a good place to start?

Read COMUS, which is a masque (or little playlet) about a Sex Demon who is trying to seduce a virgin in a forest.

Then read LYCIDAS, which is a poem about grief....an elegy for a fellow college student who died in a freak accident.

You can also read L'ALLEGRO and IL PENSEROSO, which are little fun poems written to complement each other, you could call them "Fun Drunk" and "Sad Drunk", since that's what the moods are comparable to. But they are mood pieces.

Milton is a great stylist. But he's controlled and disciplined where Shakespeare is just letting it all flow out. Milton's style is Shakesperean without the spontaneity.

>>649151
Lycidas is great, but I really enjoyed Paradise Lost, even though the religious theme doesn't appeal to me. What I enjoyed was that Milton created a world that made rhetorical sense, so even though the 'message' is clear and central, there are all of these dissenting views dancing around it, and they are often more reasonable and better presented than the central theme itself.

For example, there's the oft-discussed fact that Satan himself is only a villain because we know he's canonically wrong from the start. If you don't accept that premise then his arguments become reasonable, not merely the product of 'flawed logic'.

He is supposed to be enticing, because the darker side of mankind is always enticing, but the real argument opens up when you begin to ask about what definitions of morality Milton is relying on, and how they conflict.

Another example would be Eve waking and trying to kiss her own reflection in the water, indicating that women are naturally sexual and homoerotic. That often gets passed over, but it's the sort of little detail that drew me in to Paradise Lost.

That, and I love going through the Epic tradition from book to book and country to country, seeing how each author was able to reinvent the characters, symbols, and meanings to fit their own philosophies and culture.

Gawain and the Green Knight
Beowulf
Chaucer
Alexander Pope
Henry Fielding
John Donne
John Webster
Philip Sidney

>>648450
I like the twilight saga

>>I like the twilight saga

In that case, discuss the Twilight Saga with reference to Christopher Marlowe's "Edward the Second". Here's what I think....

Stefenie Meyer is a Mormon. Every volume of the Twilight saga reminds you she majored in English Lit at Brigham Young University. Her main characters are named Edward and Isabella, nicknamed "Bella".

WHy would she name them after the main characters in Marlowe's famous gay play? Mormon homophobia? That would explain why Edward in Twilight is twinkly, he's damned for eternity, he refuses to have sex with Isabella, and why everybody on /b/ thinks Edward is a faggot.

Discuss!