/lit/ - Literature

that book taught me to feel
10/10

hell yeah, and they're making a movie out of it now

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235124/
bumping for interest

I absolutely loved the concept, really liked the ideas he presented, liked the characters and how the story progressed and have mixed feelings about the way it was written.

>>804492
could you expand on that please?
i might know what you mean

>>804489
You know there are like 9 Dorian Gray movies already?

>>804489
>>804489
I pray to Odin that it doesn't end up like the Dorian Gray in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Holy shit...

Also, it was magnificent aside from the overly descriptive parts of flowers, music, and other things I've never heard of.

>>804498
only one of them is good. The old one with Hurd Hatfield.

>>804495
Just the writing style pissed me off sometimes. Like there were times when it was written really well with great colourful prose and lots of wit, but there were alot of times when I just found it over the top, like Wilde was just way too impressed with his general knowledge. The chapter where Dorian ages 18 years and it tells of all the various interests/vices/whatever he develops is a good example (i think chapter 7?). It was just sometimes I thought all that shit got in the way of the novel.

>>804516
yeah, come to think of it there were times when he was just trying too hard

I enjoyed the preface more than the rest of the book. Wilde should have stopped with "All art is quite useless."

I really hated it.

I like the hatred of women and just the suave quips of a bunch of sorta homosexual men. Also, yet another book where a female character exists merely to be an object of a man's affections.

It's Wilde being Wilde I guess.

Yes, it was good, but my favourite element was the condensed foppishness on every page

Yes.

I got a 8/5 on the AP test essay by using that book

>>804537
THE artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality

field too long

>>804537

of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.


OSCAR WILDE

>>804516
It's chapter 11, and I think you didn't get it. It's written sort of like À Rebours from J-K Huysmans, which is the yellow book Lord Henry gives to Dorian and changes his life.

bumping for awesome preface

The time has certainly come when this extraordinary man, Oscar Wilde, may be considered merely as a man of letters. He sometimes pretended that art was more important than morality, but that was mere play-acting. Morality or immorality was more important than art to him and everyone else. But the very cloud of tragedy that rested on

his career makes it easier to treat him as a mere artist now. His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which your life and mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense one might call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation; it cancels out. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment. We have it all the more because both sin and punishment were highly civilized; that is, nameless and secret. Some have said that Wilde was sacrificed; let it be enough for us to insist on the literal meaning of the word. Any ox that is really sacrificed is made sacred.

But the very fact that monstrous wrong and monstrous revenge cancel each other, actually does leave this individual artist in that very airy detachment which he professed to desire. We can really consider him solely as a man of letters.

>>804620
nice pro tip, i'm interested
is the book worth reading?

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a war of words, some calling him a great artist and others a mere charlatan. But this controversy misses the really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing that appears rather in the plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs. A vulgar demagogue is not a charlatan; he is as coarse as his crowd. He may be lying in every word, but he is sincere in his style. Style (as Wilde might have said) is only another name for spirit. Again, a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw is not a charlatan. I can understand people thinking his remarks hurried or shallow or senselessly perverse, or blasphemous, or merely narrow. But I cannot understand anyone failing to feel that Mr. Shaw is being as suggestive as he can, is giving his brightest and boldest speculations to the rabble, is offering something which he honestly thinks valuable. Now Wilde often uttered remarks which he must have known to be literally valueless. Shaw may be high or low, but he never talks down to the audience. Wilde did talk down, sometimes very far down.

>>804629
Well, considering the fact that you didn't like this part in Dorian Gray, I'd say it's not a book for you.

Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. He studied them with exquisite attention, and knew exactly how to shock and how to please them. Mr. Shaw often gets above them in seraphic indignation, and often below them in sterile and materialistic explanations. He disgusts them with new truths or he bores them with old truths; but they are always living truths to Bernard Shaw. Wilde knew how to say the precise thing which, whether true or false, is irresistible. As, for example, " I can resist everything but temptation."

But he sometimes sank lower. One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan - among other things. He descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate. He lowered himself to superiority; he stooped to conquer.

One might easily take examples of the phrase meant to lightly touch the truth and the phrase meant only to bluff the bourgeoisie. For instance, in " A Woman of No Importance," he makes his chief philosopher say that all thought is immoral, being essentially destructive; " Nothing survives being thought of." That is nonsense, but nonsense of the nobler sort; there is an idea in it. It is, like most professedly modern ideas, a death-dealing idea not a life-giving one; but it is an idea. There is truly a sense in which all definition is deletion. Turn a few pages of the same play and you will find

somebody asking, " What is an immoral woman ? " The philosopher answers, " The kind of woman a man never gets tired of." Now that is not nonsense, but rather rubbish. It is without value of any sort or kind. It is not symbolically true; it is not fantastically true; it is not true at all.

Anyone with the mildest knowledge of the world knows that nobody can be such a consuming bore as a certain kind of immoral woman. That vice never tires men, might be a tenable and entertaining lie; that the individual instrument of vice never tires them is not, even as a lie, tenable enough to be entertaining. Here the great wit was playing the cheap dandy to the incredibly innocent; as much as if he had put on paper cuffs and collars. He is simply shocking a tame curate; and he must be rather a specially tame curate even to be shocked. This irritating duplication of real brilliancy with snobbish bluff runs through all his three comedies. "Life is much too important to be taken seriously"; [And here I thought that GKC said this!] that is the true humorist. "A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life"; that is the charlatan. "Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable"; that is said by a fine philosopher. "Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless it be telling the truth"; that is said by a tired quack. "A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her"; that is wild truth. "Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical"; that is tame trash.

>>804628
deep, yours or copy pasta?

But while he had a strain of humbug in him, which there is not in the demagogues of wit like Bernard Shaw, he had, in his own strange way, a much deeper and more spiritual nature than they. Queerly enough, it was the very multitude of his falsities that prevented him from being entirely false. Like a many-coloured humming top, he was at once a bewilderment and a balance. He was so fond of being many-sided that among his sides he even admitted the right side. He loved so much to multiply his souls that he had among them one soul at least that was saved. He desired all beautiful things - even God.

His frightful fallacy was that he would not see that there is reason in everything, even in religion and morality. Universality is a contradiction in terms. You cannot be everything if you are anything. If you wish to be white all over, you must austerely resist the temptation to have green spots or yellow stripes. If you wish to be good all over, you must resist the spots of sin or the stripes of servitude. It may be great fun to be many-sided; but however many sides one has there cannot be one of them which is complete and rounded innocence. A polygon can have an infinite number of sides; but no one of its sides can be a circle.

>>804648
>>804648
copy pasta

>>804648
Copy pasta. GK Chesterton on Wilde. Great writer in his own right, especially as an essayist.

>>804620
Yeah I actually didn't know that, and although that's interesting I still feel that my point stands, because it's like "wow that was real clever it's a shame that it was tedious to read though". Obviously this was just how I felt about the whole thing. And I was just using that chapter as an example, but the issue I had appeared sporadically throughout the whole book.

>>804654
That's the whole point of dandysm and the Decadent movement

>>804637
the book is actually for me
different name :L

>>804664
Oh, I thought it was the same person.
I'm currently reading it in French (I'm more than half way through) and I love it. There's no real plot, it's similar to the 11th chapter of Dorian Gray but the writing is a lot better in my opinion.

>>804654
Yeah but that doesn't mean I have to have a positive opinion on it

Dir En Grey rox

I'm glad you all enjoy my work.
I got herpes while I was writing it.

>>804732
Probably could have done a better job, Wilde. Shit got way too purple 'round the middle.

>>804468

ＷWＷ._anoＮ_+_M_-_M_+_TaｌＫ_.ｓｅ rjaln d nxkeorq v hmpcbyq h m mb

I couldn't enjoy this book because there was too much homosex in the writing. I felt like Oscar Wilde was hitting on me at a gay bar and undressing me with his literary eyes.

>>804754

>>804754
Somehow I doubt you're pretty enough for him

You know, Wilde wasn't necessarily entirely gay. He was probably bisexual. He was married to a woman, and had children...

Incredible novel. The dialogue is superb and witty, and the novel probes romantic-era aesthetics and morality. A fun quick read

>>804858
>bisexual is a real thing

>>804886
He's hot. I'd fuck him.

>>804886
oh troll you so funny.

>>804909
he was definitely attractive. Those leggings he wore turn me on.

>>804912
Which leggings?

>>804922
He's talking about Wilde.

>>804719
AW FUCK

Never knew that was engrish for Dorian Gray

>>804936
Oh everyone would fuck Wilde, its necessary.

OP here, been gone for almost two hours and
i'm suprised it hasn't 404'd
bumping for invincibility!

>>805052
you must be new here..

>>805062
new to /lit/ but i'm familiar with /b/, that's why i'm new to /lit/

>>805076
>/b/

>>805076
yes...new to /lit/

It's very slow here.
Now you know.

>>805085
again, that's why i'm here and not /b/
it's turned into a shit storm of nonsence and cancer

>>805090
noted

>>805095
>Implying it hasn't been like that forever

>>804470

Yeah, I had to write a lit. analysis on it...

>>805108
>Implying you never lurked there

>>805122
>Stating that I was implying that

>>805128
>your bibble talk

>>805152

>>805159
>>805128
>>805108
samefag