/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1503684]

So they told me that author is dead /lit/. But why new books keeps being released? Please explain.

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1503690]

It's po-mo, you're not supposed to understand it.

[Anonymous No.1503698]

>>1503690

[Anonymous No.1503710]

because good roland is now writing in the form of a spirit.

[Anonymous No.1503715]

Author is already dead.
Deal with it.

[Anonymous No.1503743]

/lit/ cannot explain and they pretend they know shot about books.

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1503748]

The author is dead is a metaphor for the perceived uselessness of the author's intentions when writing.

It's a denial of the importance of invoked or inherent meaning within the text.

This is called new criticism and is a fundamental part of the post-modernist theory regarding literature.

The author is not actually dead.

[Anonymous No.1503767]

>>1503748
But If we know what Barthes had on his mind when writing this, isn't it against his statement?

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1503842]

>>1503767

No, because what he wrote wasn't fiction.

[Anonymous No.1503896]

It has a lot to do with the Intentional Fallacy. I'll approach this from the realm of art to make it easy.

So Nazi statues? You know they big masculine ones, like that one to the left? To a Nazi, and most likely to the artist, they symbolize all that is good and great about Nazism. To most people in the 21st century these statues represent racism, dangerous masculinism and are unrealistically ideal. So a Nazi sees not Nazi art positively and someone like me see's it in a tragic, horrific manner.

The intentional fallacy is that an author's intentions, or intended meaning of the work, are not the only meaning of the work. Meanings are subjective, which makes total sense, because meanings exist only in your brain.

The statue has no meaning inside of it, or around it. It is sculpted stone. In a mind, it takes on context and meaning.

[Anonymous No.1503956]

The Death of the Author leaves some interesting problems for those of us who are creative. How does /lit/ address the fact that anything they make will be reinterpreted?

The two main strategies I see are A) making things open ended as to allow and promote interpretation (This is what liberal Christian's say about the bible) or B) keep eternal vigilance, be dedicated to making your work as clear as possible and when in the event of its meaning escaping your intentions, you create something new to reject that new meaning put upon your work.

Georgia O'Keefe is a good example of option B. As a female painter during the initial whispers of the feminist movement, many intellectuals (read men) were quick to consider her work feminist. They meant this in a positive manner, and thought that her work's importance was in giving a voice to feminism in the art world. Georgia O'Keefe wasn't comfortable with this and created a series of paintings that were overtly masculine and phallic, so to contrast her more "feminine and organic" work. Oddly, many feminists now look to these paintings as a critique of the masculinity inherent in the futurist movement.

[Anonymous No.1504056]

>>1503956
C'mon /lit/ no one has opinions on this kind of thing?

It seems to me 4chan is largely based on recontextualizing things. As I right this, above the board name is a .gif of one of the little katamari guys rolling the head of that weird smiling guy (SORRY FORGOT MEME NAME). 4chan is a shining example of how authorship is truly dead. Fuck we're all anonymous as well.

In my own work, which oscilates between sculpture, fiction writing and non-fiction writing (A practice I call collage), I think one of the most dramatic ways of discussing the world is appropriating conent for new means. Picture related, its a collage sculpture I made.

But there must be other responses aside from collage.

Maybe my captcha is a clue: including licke

[Anonymous No.1504100]

>>1503767
Ah, a clever idea. But no, its not against what he said. Work can still have meaning, but more importantly it has meanings and new meanings will be generated about it in the future, and possibly old ones forgotten.

So the person who commented earlier saying "it's po-mo, you're not supposed to understand it." has supplied us with a new meaning. After Barthes and many others explored ideas we now call post-modern, there was a backlash against those ideas, calling them nonsense.

The Death of the Author is recognition that how an idea moves through culture will inevitable change its meaning.

[Anonymous No.1504102]

>>1504056
>>1503956
Yeah 4chan is pretty po-mo. It seems whole communication is relieved from logocentrism and stable reference center cause of disinformation and anonymity. We don't have some stable context, we must recreate it every time new contact is achieved. Even when someone shit blog posts we must decide if we believe or It's just cool story bro. You can't prove every statement by posting pics (despite the rule) sometimes it's just your own judgment and rhetorical and persuasive force of message. Truth/lie doesn;t exist here like in literature.
Every time we post about ourselves or post our opinions, judgments It's all performative, we as post readers are conflicted between fiction and reality.
In majority it's all just trolling.

[Anonymous No.1504109]

Barthes is light. Try to understand this faggot. He will deconstruct your shit. Literally.

[Anonymous No.1504120]

>>1504102

That seems pretty spot on. It reminds me of something I saw on /b/ yesterday. It was an image with text in Arabic and English that was meant to instruct protesters in Egypt as to how best riot and resist the police. Some of it was legit, like riot at night and wear a mask to avoid being identified. Some of the other ideas were total trolls, like wrapping your feat in plastic bags to avoid electrocution or bathing in coca-cola to resist the effects of tear gas. I was left in a state of uncertainty, wondering if the poster was trolling or if the poster had been trolled by another

captcha: means namne

[Anonymous No.1504121]

OP just pwnd all of /lit/

[Anonymous No.1504124]

>>1504109
Can anyone explain deconstruction? Is it just all about that we read stuff and find metaphysical, ideological and phallocentric references + the binary oppositions and then prove them wrong?

[Anonymous No.1504126]

>>1504109
I haven't read anything more than excerpts and explanations of derrida, any suggestions where to start?

[Anonymous No.1504127]

Pirate Latitudes.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504139]

>>1504126
Jonathan Culler's Deconstruction: Theory and Practice
Derrida and Deconstruction, Routledge

As for primary texts; you'll want to understand saussurean linguistics, then tackle Derrida's seminal speech 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'

[Anonymous No.1504144]

>>1504124
Deconstruction can mean a few different things here are a general and historical meaning.

Generally, deconstruction is the analysis of any kind of structure and showing its inherent contradictions, myths and lies. So you could deconstruct Christianity, painting, 4chan or anything else.

In the historical sense, deconstruction usually refers to the deconstruction of Modernism. Beginning in the 60's many theorists began to disprove many of the basic tenets of Modernist thought, like Progress or Manifest Destiny or Freedom. In Modernist thought all fields are related and progressing, this a great and fantastic thing, and through rational formal thinking all things can be made right.

These attitudes led to a general state of utopianism that excused things like colonialism, genocide, racism, sexism, homophobia, the arms race and xenophobia. Post-modernism and deconstruction are a rethinking of all the really fucked up thinking that happened starting with the enlightenment through world war ii.

A good example of modernist historical thought would be someone like Hegel. A good deconstructionist approach to history would be Foucault.

[Anonymous No.1504150]

>>1504120
I like to see 4chan as representative of carnival aspect of culture, same that Bachtin was talking about. The unofficial anti-theological and anti-metaphysical aspect of it as opposition to all official, oppressive, law-making. We When mixing truth and lie, humor and macabre, seriousness with grotesque (or we just negate all those oppositions) we are all participate in this carnival of information flow.

I think I overdone it, but liked this concept when I first thought about it.

About contextuality. Isn't all memes about slight change of context using stale motive. Like this sleeping guy used in different shoops lately. Contextual change is bringing the humorist effect in this case.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504154]

>>1504124
Here are some key points in a nutshell;

The history of western philosophy has been a series of positing a foundational center or 'transcendental signified'; for plato it was the Ideal, Descartes the cogito, God for religion and so on.

The difference between phil and lit becomes undermined because of the profusion of metaphor in language,preventing there being a 'pure' language, this line of thought can be traced back to Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral sense

and so on, I have to read over my notes again, other people have sketched it out. best bet is to understand structuralism first

[Anonymous No.1504161]

>mfw you all just fear the influence

[Anonymous No.1504171]

>>1504150
I'm tempted to agree with you, but I want to make a distinction about this kind of thinking. Is 4chan a reversal of good and bad? Or the refutation of a distinction between the two?

This is a topic I've been having a lot of trouble with lately. It seems that many of my tastes are a result of reveling in bad taste. I've been jamming out to 80's pop like Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler. I've been watching boot stomping videos on youtube, reading Conan the barbarian stories and haning out on 4chan way too much.

Essentially, I prefer things that are either so emotional that absolutely no one can take them seriously (like Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart), or things that are absurd and grotesque (like boot stomping or conan the barbarian). Essentially, a normative personw would say I have a problem with sincerity, but that person would probably be lame as fuck.

TL; DR: HOW DOES /LIT/ THINK BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

[Anonymous No.1504177]

>>1504144
This is a really good post

Like, really, really, really good

[Anonymous No.1504180]

>>1504144
I would like to see deconstruction of 4chan. Imo it deconstructs itself constantly.There are no stable convictions within it, and if some are getting stated, we can be sure that suddenly counter-argument will appear even in purpose of trolling.

[Anonymous No.1504186]

>>1504144
>>1504177
Agreed. Thanks man!

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504193]

>>1504154
>mfw teleology and foundationless grand narrative

[Anonymous No.1504194]

>>1504177
>>1504186
Awwww... sheesh guys your making me blush and think that my art school education wasn't entirely useless.

[Anonymous No.1504210]

>>1504194
Your art school education is as useless as any other education. Don't worry about it.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504212]

>>1504193
they are more on the anti-teleology and opposing grand narrative side onionring

also, 2deep4u even though a blinkered fellow such as yourself would benefit greatly from a single line of deconstructive thought

[Anonymous No.1504229]

>>1504171
>Is 4chan a reversal of good and bad? Or the refutation of a distinction between the two?
I think no one of those. This distinction need some center
like said her
>>1504154
fiction, literature, (imageboards?) are institutions creating their own laws and every perspective is possible, despite it will be still peformative and fictional. We can pretend we are beyond contradictions, we can say and state that we are on one of sides, we can imagine that there just is no such thing like those contradictions. its all matter of self-interpretation.
no I will put intertextual reference to your post
TL;DR IT'S JUST WORDS MAN

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504226]

>>1504212
well duh which makes my post work because of irony

you can say i've moved past this stuff.

[Anonymous No.1504233]

>>1504229
sorry for typing like drunk
I'm just sleepy

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504236]

>>1504226
>you can say i've moved past this stuff
oh ok so you put those blinkers on of your own free will

[Anonymous No.1504240]

>>1504210
This. All knowledge is some degree of fallacy.

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504244]

>>1504236
>implying pragmatism is blinkered.
ive gone out of my way to read as widely as i can. don't be mad that i don't find the stuff you love to be the best approach

[Anonymous No.1504245]

>>1504210
Your sarcasm detector failed. Or maybe my sarcasm initiator needs to be re-calibrated.

But honestly, my biggest fear about a lot of what I have learned in an institutional setting is whether it will translate out of that setting easily.

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504246]

>>1504240
thanks asshole!

[Anonymous No.1504259]

>>1504246
Have some pragmatist approach. Interpret it for your own use. Fish would say It's all matter of recognizing situation.

[Anonymous No.1504262]

This thread is one of best I've seen on /lit/ so far.

[Anonymous No.1504266]

>>1504171
>>1504171

I can relate to this, but I can't answer it. I'm really interested to hear a reply.

Just a lurker here btw, too ignorant to add anything, but you guys are doing great. This is an excellent thread and I'm really enjoying it so far.

[Anonymous No.1504267]

>>1504245
I got the sarcasm. And it doesn't really translate out of that setting so well. Even in the practical degrees like Engineering, or even Medicine outside of the practical, hands on experience. So again, don't worry about it.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504269]

>>1504244
>ive gone out of my way to read as widely as i can
and how very much it shows, onionwrong

>"Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid. For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts. Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it."

- Schopeydope

[Anonymous No.1504275]

>>1504150
>mfw

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504283]

>>1504269
you need some stronger material if you want to troll me bro

[Anonymous No.1504294]

>>1504283
>>1504269
>dat quote again
Maybe material that he knows outside of one quote he likes to spam.

[Anonymous No.1504306]

Ok If we are speaking of Barthes.
Whay so much fuss about interpretation, deconstruction etc.
Where is "Le plaisir du texte"?
When I read books for myself I don't give a shit. I just want to enjoy them and what I get form them It's my own problem and business. Why so much talking and thinking when you can just read and let your BODY EROTICALLY PLEASURE ITSELF WITH LECTURE OH YEAH
My body is ready.

[Anonymous No.1504308]

>>1504266
Well, I posed the question, but I'll give an answer. Like I said, its something I'm struggling with. Sorry if this lacks the coherence of my explanation of deconstruction.

I think that my inversion of values (and the general inversion of values on 4chan be that a reversal or an annhilation of distinction) is a result of a lack of identification to mainstream culture. TV blows, mainstream fiction blows, mainstream movies blow, mainstream music blows.

It sells us cheap images, better yet it's the selling of cheap identities or cheap facades. I am not Metallica, I am not Taylor Swift, I am not Avatar and I am not Twilight.

Instead I've found a body of material that revolves on the inversion of values. Things like 4chan and post-modernism (in its theoretical, literary and artistic aspects). Unlike classical forms of satire, something like Candide or even something more contemporary things like The Daily Show, my inversion of values is not based on a revolutionary stance. I'm not criticizing something in order to replace it. Instead I participate in a kind of reveling against meaning and against solutions.
Its this reason I love the new Jay-Z song Forever Young. It takes one of my favorite shitty 80's pop songs, with a naive Utopian narrative, and combines it with something equally as stupid; Jay-Z. Its like Jay-Z is saying, "Yes, I am quite stupid and out of play". On top of that, the song is distasteful to Jay-Z fans as it simply fails to deliver the usual quality of dance music and fast paced rapping he normally provides. To like this song is be more bad than bad, more lame than lame. It is such an accumulation of bullshit, I can't help but feel giddy and hysterical about it.

captcha JoyDeren Art

[None !WvWWh.l.CE No.1504319]

>>1504283

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504323]

>>1504319
look ty those anons were being very silly and i educated them.

[Anonymous No.1504354]

I like how many pseudointellectual fuckwits OP pwned.

[Anonymous No.1504364]

>>1504354
That doesn't change the fact that OP is dead.

[Anonymous No.1504361]

>>1504354
I fail to see how actually discussing Roland Barthes, Post-Modernism and Deconstruction is getting pwnd.
I mean, I want to talk about these things.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504374]

oh yeah everyone remember that time I totally took bunionsting to task on the nature/nurture divide

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504381]

>>1504374
you seem mad

[Anonymous No.1504391]

>>1504306
Well, you tell me why we're not talking about it? Does it warrant being talked about? Tell me about it.

Most of the time I hear people discussing the pleasure of the text its to avoid actually talking about the text. I think its a fairly easy idea to realize that reading can be pleasurable. So can discussion and debate. This hardly tells us much about the activities.

In general, I'm very suspicious of the kind of attitude you're displaying. Granted, many philosophical inquiries into the creation of art tend to down play pleasure or even attack hedonistic arguments for art. In the school I went to, there were two kinds of thought that dominated. That art should be expirential, if you expierence it and you like it, thats good. This kind of view leads to lots of art making, but little self criticism. It can get very annoying ("well,.I wanted it like this so it doesn't matter if you think it should be another way"). The second method was heavily self critical and reflective, and asked questions like "what does/can the art mean?" or "If we think about piece A in relation to piece B how do they support differing views?".

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504394]

>>1504381
Here is a lil tip that especially applies across the board for u chandlerbing:

seeming != being

[Anonymous No.1504396]

You know. Missreading Isn't something bad. It's actually something very creative. Post-modern concept of lecture states that reader is writer at same time just creating new level of text. Your interpreatation may be fallacy but you may get inspired by it and write book on your own or just take part in cultural discourse making the meaning of book more various and interesting.
It's not like in old ages when Bible was the word of Gos and you had to read it correctly. Missreading is more creative and productive because it eliminates repetition and brings something original form every single reader.
Discuss.

[None !WvWWh.l.CE No.1504403]

why hemingway was he closet-fag like you?

[♥onionring♥ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1504411]

>>1504394
you seem mad

[Anonymous No.1504428]

>>1504391
Well when we are thinking about the essence of art and such stuff pleasure and subjectivity is being killed by theory and scientific approach. Academic education won't teach you about the pleasurable reading, it's always scientific/critic approach. In discourse of body instead of communication through literature we got play of play of seduction.
Sender=seducer
recipient=seduced one
Text projects seducer and seduced one within itself, like it projects model author and model reader. Author must use all rhetorical and artistic grips to seduce reader successfully.
Don't you feel seduced by some book and other art forms, when other feel repulsive ( when the seduction wasn't fortunate)?

[Anonymous No.1504433]

>>1504428
>we got play of play of seduction
sorry for that

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1504440]

>>1504411

[Anonymous No.1504443]

>>1504396
I think what your describing, if I understand it, shouldn't be called misreading. To misread is to read it incorrectly, and you're arguing that there is no such thing as an incorrect read.

That said, I agree 100%. Many of my favorite writers and artists do exactly what you describe. They give a new meaning to something old.

Take Peter Halley here on the left. He is a painter from the 80s, but still makes work today. His main thesis builds from Foucault's ideas on geometry. Foucault argued (extreme short version) that geometry is not order but a means of oppression. He looked to various institutions to prove this (hospitals, schools, prisons and factories). Halley took this arguement into the realm of art to critique the history of abstract painting.

From the early 20th century to about the 70s, geometry and abstraction stood for a number of things. An early abstract painter like Mondrian saw a religious and spiritual purity in geometry. Abstract Expressionists like Rothko saw abstraction as personal freedom and expression. Minimalists like Donald Judd saw geometry as a pure and mathematical way to make art, devoid of meaning.

Peter Halley, building on Foucault, on the other hand says that geometric abstraction is a method for spiritualizing the most oppressive and inhuman things our society has made, like prisons, factories and city grids. So Halley takes the language of minimalist painting and subverts it with the language of Pop Art to try and show its true face.

Pictured to the left is Halley's painting Nirvana. The title puns on the idea of a spiritual Nirvana that is often the subject of abstract art, by using colors more associated with something that resists cleanliness and efficiency, the grunge band Nirvana.

also: peterhalley.com to see more work and his writings (which are awesome)

[Anonymous No.1504450]

Roland Barthes is the Tupac of literature. Simple.

[Anonymous No.1504451]

>>1504428
Absolutely, but I want to know why I like things. Also, I have enjoyed something and then learned something about it that made me not like it. I've also not enjoyed things and learned something that made me enjoy it.

I guess I don't want to be seduced as much as I want to dominate things. Also, I am a sadist.

[None !WvWWh.l.CE No.1504465]

>>1504450
so he's pretty average and only name-dropped for an effect?

[Anonymous No.1504471]

>>1504443
>there is no such thing as an incorrect read.
Or every one is misreading to some degree. Whatever, like it were any difference...
I took this term for Derek Atridge, he was using it much. Every creator is misreading culture codes, reality, literature and due to fallacy brings something new. But it's inspired by the concept of natural evolution through error I suppose which is probably fallacy statement when used to literature and art...

[Anonymous No.1504475]

>>1504443
neat! thanks for the heads up

[Anonymous No.1504493]

>>1504451
Sadist is masochist at the same time. It's same type of personality, depends on seducer if he's stronger or not. Asking about enjoying lecture, It's same as enjoying being seduced (author is enjoying being seducer to projected reader), there are even metaphors of rape that author commits on reader. The child would be effect of misreading.

[Anonymous No.1504507]

>>1504471
I see what you did there.

[Anonymous No.1504532]

Does 4chan have immanent structure? Or such thing as stable structure does not exist?

[Anonymous No.1504578]

When I get back here tomorrow, this thread better be here.

[Anonymous No.1504594]

>>1504578
Sounds good.

>>1504532
your gonna have to explain a little more. Also, Rauschenburg is the shit, and I bet you didn't even know he made those. More Rauschenburg.

[Anonymous No.1505799]

I think this thread just gave me an orgasm

[Anonymous No.1505962]

>>1504154
"The difference between phil and lit becomes undermined because of the profusion of metaphor in language,preventing there being a 'pure' language, this line of thought can be traced back to Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral sense"

It was there with the sophists. Plato was a reaction to this attitude.

[Anonymous No.1506106]

bump

[Anonymous No.1506109]

>>1505962
Good point.

inb4 no this is wrong because I think so and you don't understand

[SPELLJAMMERBRO No.1507025]

>>1505962
Modernism is characterized by "grand narratives" like Manifest Destiny and History as Progress. These ideas blur the line between fiction and history.

Manifest Destiny: "It is our destiny to spread across North America and make it free under one flag, this is good and it is morally our responsibility to do so."

That idea could justify anything that is nationalized; art, politics,lit whatever.

That is exactly the kind of idea post modern thought is against. Pomo is best described as the break down of grand narratives. Manifest Destiny wasn't so much a good thing as a way to kill and subjugate Native Americans. We spanned the continent, from sea to shining sea, and now have a very disparate country. Manifest Destiny has not resulted in the promised utopia.

Other narratives like Democracy and Communism are also crumbling. When the Berlin wall and the USSR fell, many historians proclaimed that it was "The End of History',that one side had triumphed and the promised peaceful democratic world was immanent. Well, that obviously hasn't happened. Here's an excerpt from Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism:

"The first two World Wars were classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions." ... "It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of war through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists domination."

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1507030]

[Anonymous No.1507289]

Bump

[Anonymous No.1507722]

bump