/lit/ - Literature

Tacky the Penguin

finnegans wake

>>6799539
Ulysses is objectively better written but even though I enjoyed it I still like Gravity's Rainbow more.

>>6799539
the dirty dirty sexts my gf has sent me that contrast oh so deliciously with her innocent and lady like public persona

>>6799891
>memeing this hard

>>6799896
she sends me those as well, they're pretty gr8 tbqh

my diary, tbh

>>6799898
They're legitimately good books and I had them before I saw posts about them on /lit/. If anything calling them a meme is the real meme.

>>6799917
I said that to a teacher once and she didn't get the Oscar reference so I called her a pleb, walked in front of the class, pointed my finger at all of my classmates, shouted "FOOLS!, the lot of you!" and stormed out of the room clutching my 3.5x5 notebook

The Grand Inquisitor

>>6799942
if this is bait it is clever bait.

>>6799539
brothers karamazov

Master & Margarita

For what it's worth, J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, called Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King the greatest work of fiction he had ever read.

>>6799887

>>6799539
The Hollywoodland sign, I suppose.

>>6799933
Nice gets, tbh

>>6802016
>guy who wrote about little boys, fairies, and pirates
>for some reason you value his opinion

Invisible Cities

>“And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

>>6799891
>objectively better written
Unless you have an actual objective argument, (i.e. one that proves it in the same way as 1+1=2 can be proven by mathematicians) don't say that shit.

>>6799891
That's objectively not possible.

>>6799967
Not him but it's the best part of TBK

>>6802041
George Bernard Shaw and a great many people who mean more to the world than you ever will, held it in high regard. More to the point, I do as well and I'm inclined to agree with his opinion. He was to his era what Dr. Seuss is to ours. A writer of children's lit who imbued his work with commentary relevant to adults. Also
>not reading Kipling.

>>6799899
my favourite bit was the part about him dreaming that he was his own father.

my fav is probably moby dick, but damn if the trial isn't great.

Four Quartets. I've been carrying that poem around, rereading and studying it, for over a decade now. It's incredible.

>>6802094
care to say anything about it? i read it but got nothing out of it

Probably Gravity's Rainbow. Though Book of the New Sun is up there too. New Sun makes me want to be a better man.

>>6799539
What would a book about that picture be like?

>>6802106
BOTNS is amazing. It makes me feel like I'm reading a book written by fucking aliens

>>6802105
Not sure where to start. It comments on my memory and time, obviously, weaving together images from personal history and lost opportunities, childhood memories from his New England coast summers, the destruction of England's traditions and role during the world wars, and the relationship between poetry and death in all this (one section describes him coming back from a night of volunteer watching for German bombers in London and meeting the "compound ghost" of Yeats (who had recently died), Swift, and Mallarmé, who discuss the uselessness of language and aging in the face of time. Underpinning all this is his Anglican faith and studies into mystics like St. John of the Cross, and Julian of Norwich, so the nature of time and salvation--not just personal redemption, but the redemption of time.
He chooses four locations to centre his poems: Burnt Norton, a Cotswolds manor house Eliot visited, East Coker, is a village in Somerset connected to Eliot's ancestry and where Eliot's ashes now lie in a church, The Dry Salvages, a small group of rocks with a beacon, off the north east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts (where many shipwrecks have happened and where Eliot used to sail as a lad), and Little Gidding, a small Anglican community in Huntingdonshire, scattered during the English Civil War.
There is amazing depth and hidden referencing throughout, but unlike Waste Land, the final product doesn't feel like a collage to the same degree: it's a more controlled and masterfully intellectual consideration of several great themes.

The Odyssey. The only part that isn't incredible is the killing of the suitors

Gravity's Rainbow

or

Invisible Cities

or

Absalom, Absalom!

I'll give one tiny example (which I wrote a while ago) of how much is hidden in the Quartets. If you've read Dante and Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps, this will make more sense.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
(T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton II)

Derek Traversi (and others as well) refer to Canto 28 of Dante’s Paradiso, particularly lines 41-42: “From that point / dependent is the heaven and nature all” (Traversi 110 n26; trans. from Longfellow’s translation of Dante). This is of course the centre of the Empyrean Rose, the heavenly and cosmic Throne of God. In contrast, Helen Gardner traces the still point back to Eliot's earlier work Coriolanus I. Triumphant March published in 1931), and from there to The Greater Trumps:
“Charles Williams told me, and Eliot confirmed, that the image of the dance around the ‘still point’ was suggested by Williams's novel The Greater Trumps, where in a magical model of the universe the figures of the Tarot pack dance around the Fool at the still centre. Only Sybil, the wise woman of the novel, sees the Fool as moving and completing all the movements of the dancers” (Gardner 85).
.

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

(con.)
The Fool, of course, is unique among the 78 tarot cards as having no suit or number. One might also consider the “bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind,” an allusion to the Cumaean Sybil’s leaves on which she wrote prophecies, as reminiscent of Tarot cards. According to Humphrey Carpenter (in The Inklings) it is the Christian's duty to perceive "the declared pattern of the universe" — the "eternal dance" of Williams's Greater Trumps — and to act according to it.
"The sun is not yet risen, and if the Fool moves there he comes invisibly, or perhaps in widespread union with the light of the moon which is the reflection of the sun. But if the Tarots hold, as has been dreamed, the message which all things in all places and times have also been dreamed to hold, then perhaps there was meaning in the order as in the paintings; the tale of the cards being completed when the mystery of the sun has opened in the place of the moon, and after that the trumpets cry in the design which is called the Judgment, and the tombs are broken, and then in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead."
— The Greater Trumps, Ch. 14

Charles Williams is an academic super-naturalist. He predicates modes of existence other than those perceived by the senses and known by reason and takes for granted that the natural order proceeds from and is dependent upon a reality which is invisible and which operates by laws transcending those discoverable in the physical world. He is eager to insist, however, that the supernatural is not divorced from the natural; one is not to escape from sensory illusion into spiritual reality. It is rather the true form of the natural, so that one knows the supernatural through images within the natural. A lifelong Christian, Williams challenged the Church's traditional asceticism with a 'theology of romantic love' urging a positive reassessment of sexuality, and emphasizing 'Co-inherence', or the interdependence of all people and ultimately of all things in the Divine. In a theory that interestingly foreshadows Levinas’s charge of infinite responsibility for other humans, and a fundamentally ethical basis to consciousness itself, Williams champions a Doctrine of Substituted Love. In The Greater Trumps’ climax, it is the realization of her responsibility for all other characters in the novel, both “good” and “evil”, that allows the protagonist Nancy to regain control of the unleashed elemental power of the Cards and return them to their rightful positions in the Dance and the universe

La Chute by Camus
Les Mis by Hugo

>>6802136
Aliens that are really into modernist lit.

...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Easy

>>6802144
Agreed in full, nice post anon.

>>6802144
great response. thanks

>>6802070
You honestly think because shit writers lived two centuries ago it makes their opinions more valid?

>>6802162
i googled the post and found this

http://www.illuminati-news.com/golden-dawn-and-fantasy-print.htm

what gives? illuminati??

>>6802231

it's from Gravity's Rainbow, which involves the illuminati briefly

Ulysses.

The following sentence:
"You didn't stop reading this at 'You didn't stop reading this at 'You didn't stop reading this at the following sentence: "You didn't stop reading this at

>>6802231
Bizarre. Somebody's ripping somebody off with that paragraph. Perhaps I lost a reference in my draft, or they grabbed it out of my essay (which used to be on-line). I'm honestly not sure which. My paper overall is about the use of the tarot in Williams, Eliot, and Calvino.

>>6802254
Whoops, 1992! Looks like I'm the guilty party. Good thing I didn't write that for a course:)

>>6799539
The insideously arbitrary posts of 4chan users of course.

War and War

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
On the Road
Middlemarch
the Salinger oeuvre / Glass family stories

>>6799545

>>6802051
1 + 1 = 2 can't be proven though.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

>>6804070

>>6802430
mfw the spoiler was too short to be peace so i knew it was war before i 'opened' it

>>6800553
mah nigga

You read any of his other books? The White Guard is also great.

>>6800553
I just started this today and I'm loving it so far.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima is probably my current favorite.

>>6802133
probably something about the war of 1812

The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Bonus points that I don't feel bad about agreeing with all the green-pill bits, and I sometimes profess ideas of left-anarchism to spook people away from trying to have political discussion with me. I also use the word "freedom" a lot.

“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”