/lit/ - Literature

Um, I guess. That's a relative statement, though. For some people, a certain author may need no explanation, but for others that author may.

beautiful prose is optional, it doesn't add much to the text

Is it just me or is literature dying?

>>852487
Faggot

>>852490

Well, I was thinking about this and the likes of Turgenev, who tends to get overlooked in many circles because, no matter how well he wrote, his stories are pretty straight forward.

Dostoevsky gets a lot of love, especially here, but I think he's pretty bad if you consider him as a novelist. He should have just written treatises.

That's sort of why I wanted to get opinions on this.

Agreed, however you should have added 'pic unrelated' at the end of your post.

>>852487
Definitely:

>>852487
Not always.
Frankenstein is full of beautiful prose that gets in the way of the pacing of the story.
Lovecraft's prose is borderline purple, but the language somewhat captivates you and gives his work a personal feel.

Pretty words should mean something, or else it's just fluff.

You'd basically be Foer.

>>852504

If you can gain nothing out of a book aside from pretty images and nice turns of literary phrase, then it was not entirely worth it. There doesn't have to be a great personal revelation after every book you read, but it should be more than "just a pretty face". I guess it comes down to what you think constitues beautiful prose.

Also, I don't understand the vogue with Russian writers nowadays. Everyone's all "Tolstoy" this and "Dostoevsky" just so they can say they were intelligent and adventurous enough to read something so difficult and exotic.

A good author is one who writes about shit and death.

Beautiful prose and academic explanation are two separate things, totally independent of each other. I work may have good prose and be non-academic. It may have terrible (low class?) prose and be wildly academic. It's all about whether or not the content requires further investigation.

The comparison is inane, moronic, and a sign of an immature and inexperienced reader. This is not surprising coming from a tripfaggot, of course. Not only is it impossible to compare prose quality with the ideas presented in literature, but even if it were possible it would be a stupid thing to do.

There are pure wordsmiths (e.g. Joyce), and pure writers of ideas such as philosophers. There are also writers all over that spectrum. To say that one end is inherently better or more worthy than the other is ridiculous. The only judgment that can be made here is to say that the reader who is unable to appreciate one of these aspects of literature will surely have an impoverished literary experience.

But how much more poorly equipped would we be to recognise and analyse 'beautiful prose' without the armoury that academics have gathered!

>>852552

Yeah that's why I read, to brag about it on the internet to other nerds.