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/lit/ - Literature

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[ERROR] No.2163489 [Reply] [Original]

When I was in high school, Poe was the go to author for people who wanted to look smart and different.
What did lit read (or pretend to read) in high school to look smart?

>> No.2163500

>>2163489
>look smart

My high school was shit. Reading anything at all would make you look smart.

>> No.2163526

Anything. Even a manual from one of those old strategy games that are so thick they had to be bound. I miss them so...

>> No.2163528

So it is considered trendy to not read books in mainstream society. This was never a problem for me, but the constant barrage of douchey ignorant comments was annoying.

Beneath that, within the literary world, there is an alarming sense of elitism that is remarkably similar to the reaction you get for reading anything other than Harry Potter among normal people. Again, I don't care, but it does get fantastically annoying.

There are certain circles that I would never admit to having even looked at a DFW book, or that I liked House of Leaves, and I hate that I have to avoid that.

In conclusion, anything slightly more obscure than Harry Potter will get you brownie points with high school intellectuals.

>> No.2163534

The things I read in early high school to look smart included, but were not limited to, The Communist Manifesto (we had to read part of it, but I read all of it), The Federalist Papers, Moby Dick (I made it to the second chapter), and the poetry of Byron.

>> No.2163539

>>2163534
>Made it to the second chapter of Moby Dick

Oh, the benefits of being anonymous. I struggled through it, but found it on par with Dickens in terms of boredom inducement. Then we had to analyse it, and the teacher said the white whale was everything EXCEPT a fucking white whale. Why can high school not see that symbolism is okay, but when the material literally says there was a literal white whale, extra symbolism or no, that you must accept there was a white whale?

I died a little that day.

>> No.2163547

>>2163539
I thought Moby Dick implied the White Whale was a hallucination.

>> No.2163549

>>2163539
I like Dickens. And I've learned that I like Melville. I just had to read Bartleby first. We didn't read Moby Dick for class though. I just decided to read it. I love what E.M. Forster said about Moby Dick. He said that he was sure the white whale represented something, but he wasn't sure what it was, so just reading it as regular story was good enough. I'm paraphrasing, of course.

>> No.2163587

with other people? lol never

teachers to score free points and get better grading? first two years dropped authors like tolstoy, nabokov, cervantes, joyce, pynchon, etc etc

with more advanced classes i namedropped theorists: richards, pater, wilson, bloom, derrida, etc.

>> No.2163588

I'm in highschool and I like to read alot of Frank O'hara and sylvia plath. Fucking tropic of cancer was great and I just started on the road by jack keruoac which is a gigantic piece of shit. oh and lolita