/lit/ - Literature

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713629]

Which is it to be, /lit/?

Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka?

Realism or Modernism?

[Anonymous No.1713632]

Mann is realism? Do tell...

[Anonymous No.1713634]

obvious troll is obvious

[Anonymous No.1713641]

I expect better of you D&E

[Anonymous No.1713638]

Oh well. I was hoping for some discourse.

Why do idiots sit around here "trolling" each other anyway?

[Anonymous No.1713652]

>>halfoflitdoesntknowthesetwo.png

mfw

[Anonymous No.1713659]

>>1713652
>you don't know that neither Kafka nor Mann is featured in D&E's picture

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713660]

>>1713652

[Anonymous No.1713675]

That's Wittgenstein and Hitler as children

[Anonymous No.1713677]

[Anonymous No.1713684]

>>1713652

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713699]

i expect you all to know

[Anonymous No.1713708]

i think i read somewhere that kafka read some of hesse's works which is kind of interesting. if he read hesse than surely he read mann since he and hesse were friends whose readership usually said if you read one, you probably read the other.

d&e, have you bothered with the death in venice movie yet? i bet you haven't. i bet you haven't bothered with the sydow steppenwolf movie either.

we could turn this troll thread around into a serious thread about kafka and mann if anyone is interested.

[scout !!1wBNr3mLJL+ No.1713719]

I think of Kafka as a the literary counterpart to the Expressionist movement in visual arts..I suppose there is some overlap with modernism there, but I think in terms of style and content, Kafka exhibits a very ''expressionistic" aesthetic..specifically the spiritual fixation of his work, and the social/physical manifestation of emotional states (characters in the novels The Castle and The Trial being the embodiments of K's psyche) I haven't read any Mann. I think I have glanced over a few pages in his books and thought that they were boring.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713720]

>>1713719
surely that must not be your only thought on kafka

[Anonymous No.1713724]

>>halfoflitdoesntknowthesetwo.png
two marxist idiots...

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713728]

>>1713708
>d&e, have you bothered with the death in venice movie yet? i bet you haven't. i bet you haven't bothered with the sydow steppenwolf movie either.
I have not bothered with the death in venice movie yet because I have yet to read the story, although I've gotten through a considerable number of stories leading up to it. I tried watching the steppenwolf movie but there are no damn streaming links for an english version.

>troll thread
This isn't really a troll thread, people seem to have picked up on that a little too eagerly. This is more about the differences and conflict between modernism and realism.

[Anonymous No.1713731]

>>1713719
you should give death in venice and other stories a try. i liked the magic mountain a lot too but it is a bit slow.

i never considered kafka much of a proseman, and to be fair i've never read his works in their native tongue.

i like the trial and especially the castle. the trial showed the inaccessibility of the law to the protagonist while the castle felt like it showed that inaccessibility to understanding life in general. although the law in the trial could be taken for that it never hit me that way until i read the castle. plus, the castle is FUNNY. i liked it a lot even with the "unfinished" ending.

the trial by orson welles is my fave movie by him. everyone must see it. and it has one of my fave classical pieces of music as the theme (albinoni/adagio).

[scout !!1wBNr3mLJL+ No.1713736]

>>1713720
There was a time when I obsessively read Kafka's stories and Novels and had a lot of opinions about them, but I haven't been very captivated by fiction for nearly a year now, and I can hardly remember what I felt about Kafka at the time. Another thing that comes to mind with Kafka is something I drew from Michel de Certeau's book The Practice of everyday life, he talks about ''strategies'' and ''tactics''..''strategies'' being linked with institutions and power structures which define the environment and "tactics" being linked with individuals subject to these strategies, being the ways in which they move through the environments created by institutions. (one example would be the "strategy" of city planning, and the "tactic" of an individual moving through a city in a way that seems to counter the planning and layout of the streets) Kafka's books are generally about the horrific extreme of these interactions, and I think that if I hadn't read Kafka, I wouldn't have understood Certeau in the way that I do.

[Anonymous No.1713744]

>>1713728
wouldn't you say that modernism is in many ways an attempt at realism?

i would say the jumpstart of modern literature is when they tried to make it "more" real. if you look at twain and how accurate he tried to be with dialects. the raymond carver and flannery o'connor telling "around the house" stories was in many ways pushing for the more real. not saying all modern lit has to be realistic. but it FEELS like a huge branch of modern lit is in fact realism. so no conflict. so no either/or scenario.

[scout !!1wBNr3mLJL+ No.1713760]

I don't see Modernism as an attempt to achieve realism at all. Modernism was defined in many ways by its guiding ideologies and the "movements" that came out of those..realism is perhaps a subset of modernism, if you're talking about Realism as a movement.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713767]

>>1713744
>i would say the jumpstart of modern literature is when they tried to make it "more" real.
I would say we need to hammer out what we mean by the word 'real' before we trade words.
Another preliminary note we need to make clear is that of course the divide is hardly all that clear cut, as with the authors you point out. I don't really want to focus on borderline cases, although I recognise their importance. I want to focus on the paradigmatic examples of the respective modes.

>wouldn't you say that modernism is in many ways an attempt at realism?
I would say that perhaps it is, and a sincere effort at that, but this is a misguided attempt because its emphasis and its devices favour and focus on subjectivity, individual subjectivity. Now, to focus on it like that is to abstract oneself from one's social collective conditions. This is misguided because, to put the argument very primitively, the self is social, one exists as part of a code of signs, predominantly capitalist. And modernist writing downplays this with its emphasis on subjectivity and the individual, or at least that might be one way of looking at it.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713769]

stop sitting on your asses worshiping history and actually make it.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713773]

>>1713769
Marx put it a little more elegantly

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713783]

>>1713773
he forgot to add

the very act of describing history changes it

it = the present <=> reality <=> future and past

[Anonymous No.1713807]

>>1713767
>I would say we need to hammer out what we mean by the word 'real' before we trade words.

understandable. and that conversation could be longer the initial point i was trying to make. maybe i'll try to write something about how i define it in /lit/ along with my own ideas of modernism. i think i will.

>This is misguided because, to put the argument very primitively, the self is social, one exists as part of a code of signs, predominantly capitalist.

interesting idea. it seems like a lot of my favorite books have a close psychic distance in the narration, and it feels like it favors individualism. i wonder how strong the appeal is in that, so it curves the course of how popular /lit/ modernizes. i'll have to think about this too...hm.

[Anonymous No.1713812]

>>1713807
>could be longer ^than^ the initial point

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713830]

>>1713807
Another point I should make is that all I've done is point out some of the potential failings in Modernism, which is not nearly enough. Really, I would also have the ways in which Realism trumps Modernism in this area. I'm not too comfortable doing that right now because A)I've never thought all that much of literary realism, B) I think a lot of the force of arguments for realism come from ideological viewpoints that I don't really want to get into the nitty-gritty of right now.

One thing I do want to say is on a very basic, intuitive level. A lot of realist novels tend to draw our attention to social issues (by extension, ideological issues?). I mean a Dostoevsky novel is full of poor people bitching and moaning, for example, and although I'm not familiar enough to make a judgment on it, we might put forward the notion that the realist style isn't primarily innovative or experimental, it's conventional and thus wide-reaching. A modernist novel seems to me to be on the other end of this: we move to a focus on individual problems, abstracted conceptual issues that don't impact on practical ways of living, the style is experimental and thus abstract. These are the sorts of things that make me suspicious.

[Anonymous No.1713835]

sick false dichotomy brah

[Anonymous No.1713888]

>>1713830
that's an interesting idea about realism. maybe it's claim to realism *in literary fiction* is how accessible it is. but even in non-fiction maybe the issues that are so accessible/realistic are really base ...and thus the popularity of twilight. i feel like i know what you're getting at. but it is a nasty spiderweb to untangle...in regards to defining it exactly. i think i will work something out for my own ideas about it. someday.

>we move to a focus on individual problems, abstracted conceptual issues that don't impact on practical ways of living

when you mentioned this idea in your previous post i thought of dystopian novels like 1984, bnw, we etc. so there are some novels out there than show different. how old are these books though? but *generally speaking*...when i reflect on the majority of books i've read i think i know what you mean.

it seems like a balancing act. we're pushing to get the psychic distance closer and closer, because maybe there is something there that pulls in some readers. maybe it's a sense of isolation with the modern environment, and when they encounter a strong sense of individualism in that narrative style they identify with it. and the books we like best are always the ones we can indentify best with.

i wouldn't mind reading some fictional tale as wide as some lengthy war history novel. i'm sure there are books out there. there are so many. maybe you could help make it more popular with your own writing.

japanese call first-person narratives "i-novels." i can't help myself. even when i'm writing third-person it still feels like i'm trying to write an i-novel. it's always felt like the right kind of book for me to write. if i were to challange myself i would write a book with lots of minor characters working their way around one character, that character being the environment or political climate itself. that'd be kind of fun. it's what i think of when i think of the second half of your post.

[Anonymous No.1713890]

Existentialism

[Anonymous No.1713892]

>>1713888
>but even in non-fiction

i meant shit not considered literary fiction. but that definition is besides the point.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713894]

literary analysis needs to be burned alive.

like a phoenix

[Anonymous No.1713895]

>>1713888
>and when they encounter a strong sense of individualism in that narrative style they identify with it.

why? because we're ego-driven maniacs more often than not.

[Anonymous No.1713906]

>>1713894
you know what? it's all flaky, flimsy, whatever you want to call it and that is fine. i halfway agree with you. but in trying to talk about it, new ideas and inspirations can be found. and sometimes i can work myself rattling on, and stumble on an idea that hadn't occurred to me before. it's not such a bad thing. lol

you always have the option to avoid the thread. i won't think of you any different for it.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713912]

>>1713906
not avoiding it. apply all you've learned in lit analysis to life and you are on the right track.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713917]

>>1713912
and that includes reading actual books instead of idolatry of theory

[Anonymous No.1713926]

>>1713912
ha. let's hope for the response, "but literature is never as boring is real life."

>>1713917
>and that includes reading actual books instead of idolatry of theory

so someone has one conversation and it's automatically called idolatry? you don't know how many books anyone on this board has actually read. more than you think is just as plausible as less.

i'll agree that the best way for better writing is to read and write. but discussing it, even in vagaries is nothing bad. if your mind is above it then again, feel free to leave the thread. i promise not to stop you.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1713974]

>>1713894
>literary analysis needs to be burned alive.
burning literary analysis alive would be about as effective as burning someone as a witch for an epidemic. You are not clear about your terms.

By literary analysis you really mean literary criticism, but you ultimately do not mean criticism, you mean literary theory, which points out what the object of literary analysis is and what the evaluative criteria of such an object is. This is where the tangle is. Now, that's not the only place where there's a tangle, because critical theory, the 'prescriptive' to all this 'descriptive', has plenty of it's own tangles too.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713987]

>>1713974
perfectly clear you are being a hardass.

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1713992]

>>1713926
i'm not talking about this thread. but trying to figure out what "Realism" etc really means is just being limited by self created rigidity as a result of the analytical approach/structure.

more on this later

[☿ !Rrxa7zePwI No.1714003]

>>1713974
and no i'm not confused, you can write a theory laden wankjob criticism, you can genuflect before theory in the reading of any work, the smallest sentence even. im not talking about fields of study here.

[Anonymous No.1714007]

> Realism or Modernism?

really, thats how the two are being categorized?

curious and somehow another argument why studying literature is a waste of time compared to any other "soft" science. yes, even cultural studies.

Kafka is easier in every instance, tho. His whole ouvre is manageable in a month, its not overladen and can be understood without having visited a german humanist "Gymnasium".

Mann researched extensively and needs tons of "cultural capital" to be really understood. He also was an elitist dickwad with a shameful political stance on things: how can I keep getting published and be admired as the worlds most awesome living writer.

[Anonymous No.1714069]

>>1713992
when i think of realism i think of an attempt to write a story without it being romanticized or fantastical. that is all.

and when i think about it- a person writes and reads in a particular way to be able to critique better. because learning to critique lit better, is learning how to write better. i'm done, son. have a good day.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1715433]

bump

[Anonymous No.1715438]

bump from page 15?

[Anonymous No.1715441]

>>1715438
OP is a faggot with the lads, alright.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1715467]

>>1715438
it was more like 13 - 12

[Anonymous No.1715469]

>>1715467
Idiot.

[Deep&Edgy !pSkjEcB9sQ No.1715474]

I am the best