/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13370174]

What are the most important works of literature ever (excluding holy books)?

[Anonymous No.13370351]

>>13370174
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by iassac newton

[Anonymous No.13371772]

Assuming we're excluding nonfiction and religion, this would be my uber-compressed list:

The Iliad&Odyssey
The Divine Comedy
Shakespeare's better plays
Milton - Paradise Lost
possibly Keats - Odes
Mallarme - Un Coup de Des and a couple of minor poems
Rimbaud - Bateau Ivre/Saison Enfer/Illuminations
TS Eliot - The Waste Land and some of his other poems
JL Borges - stories

If our apocalypse vault has room for more, I'd throw in more, but then you just get the list of names you know.

Novels are left out not intentionally but because I don't think many people have made ones that are as compressed and entertaining as poetry: if I did include novels it would be the cool kind, like Calvino's. As for Joyce, I think he's trivial, chatty and boring, and his interpretation in Ulysses of stream of consciousness as simply skimming the top layer of conscious interior dialogue is much more shallow than the psychic explorations of other authors of this period, like Proust, Rimbaud or Kafka.

Then there's the category of books that represent a certain cultural period, like Y Goddodin, The Great Gatsby, or Cryptonomicon, a genre I by no means condemn but I'm just saying they're less universal.

But again, as it happens, we aren't in a situation where we can only bring ten books with us, and our lives are long enough to sample a wide variety, so this way of thinking creates unnecessary conflicts and criteria.

[Anonymous No.13371909]

>>13371772
>As for Joyce, I think he's trivial, chatty and boring, and his interpretation in Ulysses of stream of consciousness as simply skimming the top layer of conscious interior dialogue is much more shallow than the psychic explorations of other authors of this period, like Proust, Rimbaud or Kafka.

Damn anon, you were almost based

[Anonymous No.13372044]

>>13370174

[Anonymous No.13372060]

>>13370174
my diary desu