/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11359732]

'...I consider myself a slattern of a reader. I have started (in many cases, more than once) "Moby-Dick," "The Man Without Qualities," "Mason & Dixon," "Don Quixote," "Remembrance of Things Past," "Doctor Faustus," "Naked Lunch," "The Golden Bowl," and "The Golden Notebook" without coming anywhere near finishing them.'

and people take this dork seriously?

[Anonymous No.11359748]

>>11359732
I really don't understand why Franzen is seen as some midwit dolt while DFW is hailed as a genius, considering most of their works sound the same, deal with the same questions and present the same solutions.
If anything, Franzen is better than DFW because he realizes how dumb it is to just become a white fence suburbanite, but he also realizes why a lot of people choose that, something DFW clearly didn't but hoped to.

Both are kinda hacks though, Franzen at least doesn't try to compensate for this.

[Anonymous No.11359750]

all bloat-core that people namedrop to sound smart. franzen has already made it as a writer and doesn't need to impress anyone, hence he can be forthright about his reading palate. people like yourself, who will never write anything worthy of attention, need books like mason & dixon to legitimize you as an intellectual. reading itself (an act of consumption) becomes an art for the pseud since he can not create anything beautiful.

[Anonymous No.11359752]

>>11359748
real reason? Suicide martyrs people
/lit/ reason? Franzen is genuinely the lesser writer, but that's compared to DFW. Franzen is decent in his own right.

[Anonymous No.11359757]

>>11359752
Once again, I can't see HOW DFW is better than Franzen. They both have the same crimes (delilean midwit disgressions that don't really have a point, thesaurus wanking, they're both low self esteem megalmoaniacs, etc. etc.) but most of the time Franzen manages to be more subtle.
Don't mean to come out as some "OBSESSED" guy but I often wonder how DFW, Franzen and Delilo would fare as authors in literally any other country on earth.

[Anonymous No.11359762]

>>11359748
because dfw worked so arduously to present himself as a genius. IJ intimidates young readers into submission with the phony math, meandering plot, the medical jargon, etc.

[Anonymous No.11359811]

>>11359732
>didn’t finish Moby Dick or Don Quixote
Cmon

[Anonymous No.11359832]

>>11359748
because wallace is a more ambitous and much better writer

[Anonymous No.11359888]

>>11359762
you say that like it's a bad thing. not everyone thinks that the pinnacle of the novel is just finding different ways to frame banal upper middle class family drama. dfw was always ambitious (and not just with IJ) whether or not you think he succeeded

[Anonymous No.11359900]

>>11359732
Moby Dick and Don Quixote are such fun reads that really boggles my mind how anyone who likes literature can't enjoy them. Is it because they are large?

[Anonymous No.11359939]

I couldn‘t finish Naked Lunch as well. After the fifth chapter of someone getting sodomized while on drugs, just got bored

[Anonymous No.11359953]

>>11359748
>how dumb it is to just become a white fence suburbanite

This jewish trope that gen xers like Franzen have made a living off of must go. It is and only ever was an attack on white normalcy, pretending there must be darkness lurking under white suburban life, and a projection of jewish fear.

[Anonymous No.11359962]

>>11359750

I was going to make a topic about this type of thing. The nervous sanctimonious pseud proselytising of consumercucks is pathetic, especially when contrasted with the unique, relaxed, fun loving yet highly intellectual tastes of a typical producerbull.

It's not just a pseud thing. Anyone can be pseudy. It's this entire shift in outlook and demeanour that is the result of becoming an overly snarky leftist failed academic "critiquer". It is painful to see

[Anonymous No.11359985]

>>11359888
youre conflating ambition with depth. dfw was probably the most ambitious writer in recent memory, but that was only because he was a depressive desperate for validation. so much of ij is ersatz trash. the math he shoehorns in is especially embarrassing since it's so often erroneous. you get the sense reading ij that this guy just strung together every random thought that crossed his mind in this bloated pastiche then justified its desultoriness after the fact because, dude, it's like an infinite jest lmao. the goal here was clearly to overwhelm innocent young readers and force them to surrender to the indomitable genius that was...dfw.

[Anonymous No.11359995]

>>11359985

Agree with this.

[Anonymous No.11360088]

>>11359985
>overwhelm innocent young readers and force them to surrender to the indomitable genius that was...dfw.
Yeah I got that impression. Didn't come across IJ until I was about 28 and was confident enough literature-wise to dismiss some of the nonsense. Do people really think the giant hamster stuff is some great literary flight of fancy? I think he's better than Franzen, but they are cut from the same MFA-bro cloth

[Anonymous No.11360111]

>>11359748
nah, fagzen is legitimately inferior to wallace

[Anonymous No.11360116]

>>11359757
wallace wrote better stories

[Anonymous No.11360120]

>>11359985
the calculus bits seem cringy and tryhard, but there's a novel in there.

[Anonymous No.11360129]

>>11359985
i'm not conflating anything. the question was about why franzen is considered a lesser writer than dfw. i personally enjoyed infinite jest, but even if you found it unbearably pretentious and tedious (which you clearly do), it was more experimental than most books that hit the market. that's why franzen is considered "midwit" and not wallace. no matter how turgid or trite you think dfw is, he wasn't trying to write the same stories as everyone else in an 80s MFA program, something franzen has been doing his entire career

[Anonymous No.11360151]

>>11360088
>Do people really think the giant hamster stuff is some great literary flight of fancy?
who do you think thinks this? this is such a goofy strawman

[Anonymous No.11360165]

My Grandma read my copies of Moby Dick and Don Quixote, and she usually just watches TV all day.

[Anonymous No.11360261]

You must be new here
http://sequart.org/magazine/63176/science-fiction-elements-of-infinite-jest-part-2-giant-feral-hamsters-and-infants/

[Anonymous No.11360268]

what does lit think of evelyn waugh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9IinGHntTs

[Anonymous No.11360284]

>>11360268
Waugh is great. Real master of prose
I wouldn't pay too much attention to his views on Joyce - he was the kind of guy who got butthurt when the mass stopped being said in Latin.

[Anonymous No.11360378]

>>11359900
Because people sometimes lump them together with huge brick postmodern novels and people like Franzen care more about fitting into a group. He shitted on EM Foster too for no good reason.

[Anonymous No.11360530]

Most of the books are overrated so I can understand why he dropped them. Moby-Dick is the only one that is amazing

[Anonymous No.11360564]

The only reason people deem Franzen as inferior to DFW is because Franzen is still alive.

[Anonymous No.11361981]

>>11359748
dfw is also a midwit dolt not to mention a ripoff

[Anonymous No.11362002]

>>11359750
delet this

[Anonymous No.11362015]

>>11359748
It's absolutely fucking amazing to me that you could compare DFW with Franzen after reading them. Their means of expression isn't similar at all. This is just mind-melting. Why do you people value all the wrong shit?

[Anonymous No.11362041]

>>11359732
I agree with Franzen. Most of those works are boring and pretentious, or outdated and difficult to get through with little pay off. Moby Dick is the most overrated novel I can think of. I read Swann's Way, and the next one in that series, but who actually can read remembrance of things past? Also, it was written by a gay Jew who paid to get it published.

[Anonymous No.11362046]

>>11359748
I agree to some extent. Though I do think DFW is better, because he is more intellectual and entertaining, I love Franzen. I never understood why Franzen was looked at as being lowbrow. "Purity" was pretty bad though.

[Anonymous No.11362048]

>>11359985
I got legitimate enjoyment from IJ..... so you lose this argument. Just go publish something if these guys suck so much.

[Anonymous No.11362054]

>>11362015
I agree. But realize most people on this board an teenagers or college students who understand shit about literature and believe everything their professors tell them.

[Anonymous No.11362061]

>>11362041
very nice

[Anonymous No.11362069]

>>11362015
Those are some fantastic arguments there lad, I didn't even said they have the same means of expression, just that they SOUND the same (which a lot of the time they do in their completely unrelated ramblings to show how intelligent both authors are) and that their themes are the same (waaaaaaah I studied a lot and read a lot of books and am really intelligent and with a wicked sense of humor why is that? Oh i know its because I'm not like my suburban mom and dad givin up rebellion is part of maturity brah xD)
I shoul say that I've only read IJ and the Corrections, but honestly, don't bother recommending me more DFW because I won't torture myself anymore.
>>11362046
I think DFW's "intellectuality" (not really though as a bunch of people have pointed out itt) gets in the way of his entertainment.

[Anonymous No.11362077]

I can understand people not getting through huge tome tbqh. I had a hard time with IJ and Mason & Dixon too.

[Anonymous No.11362739]

>>11359732
Bumping based Franzen thread

[Anonymous No.11363212]

Seriously, who can't he finish Don Quixote or even Naked Lunch? Is he retarded?

[Anonymous No.11363241]

who?

[Anonymous No.11363658]

>>11359752
>Franzen is decent in his own right.
lol

[Anonymous No.11363659]

https://www.ft.com/content/6a563a5a-6cde-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a

[Anonymous No.11363660]

>>11359732
If he actually said Remembrance of things past then he's a confirmed retard

[Anonymous No.11363668]

>>11359732
Based

Stuff like war and peace I keep on my phone and I just read at my own place and leisure.

No shitty lit pressures like reading d pages per day. And I find it’s a good exercise to recall all the names after coming back to it for a long time.

Reading like this is very comfy and allows the ideas , stories, characters, to marinate

[Anonymous No.11364855]

Has anyone read Strong Motion or the Twenty-Seventh City? Thought those were supposed to be pretty good and were written before he sold out to become a jewyawk intellectual.

[Anonymous No.11365312]

>>11363659
Franzen is great. The woman who wrote that is a massive cunt, look up her (((husband))).

[Anonymous No.11365326]

>>11365312
>Franzen is great.
>pol memes

yikes

[Anonymous No.11365373]

>>11365326
That's a TRS meme--the cohencidence detector--install it and take a look around, you might be surprised.

https://www.coincidencedetector.com/

[Anonymous No.11365385]

>>11365373
>that 12 year old boomer that doesn't know what he's talking about

[Anonymous No.11365404]

>>11359750
>franzen has already made it as a writer and doesn't need to impress anyone
no, he still needs to impress people, just with his lack of reference instead of his reference

[Anonymous No.11365411]

>>11359732

the only thing id recommend to another human that either of these guys produced is wallace's short fiction, but wallace could at least write well, franzen's whole corpus is unsalted slop

[Anonymous No.11365436]

>>11359750
>franzen has already made it as a writer

[Anonymous No.11365526]

>>11363659
> Franzen has strong feelings about certain words. He has written a whole essay on the evils of “then” as a conjunction, which strikes me as entirely baffling.

what a prescriptivist piece of shit. why was dave even friends with this clown

[Anonymous No.11367068]

>>11359732
Franzen is such a fucking nerd pseud faggot. Everything about him screams “LOOK AT ME IM A FUCKING PSEUD EFFEMINATE LIMPWRISTED BITCH PLEASE MAKE FUN OF ME AND KICK ME IN THE NUTS”. His writing, his interviews, his glasses, his hair, his stupid facial expressions as in this picture. I just want to give him a wedgie, a double wet willie, a nut-tap, pants him, and make him eat his own booger or something fucked up like that. I was never even a bully but something in this nerdy fuck makes me go, “Shit... if that’s what I was like as a kid, I kinda sympathize with my bullies now.”