/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4081012]

/lit/

I had one of those oddly compelling and disturbing thoughts today.

Why do you never hear about famous academics' college roommates and the latter's comments about them?

Did Jacques Derrida have a roommate? What about Avital Ronell? Or Zizek (lul)? Or Judith Butler?

Were their roommates just paid by the Saas Fee college to keep their mouths shut?

[Anonymous No.4081017]

>>4081012
I heard that Byron's roommate was a real bear.

[Anonymous No.4081016]

Sorry, is there an index of college roommate opinions for every other well-known person?

[Anonymous No.4081024]

>>4081012
>sharing rooms with strangers

What's up with that anyway?

[Anonymous No.4081061]

can you imagine undergraduate lacan?

[Frater K !A1WA5.hV/U No.4081062]

>>4081024
Some universities don't even give you a choice if it's your first year and you're not a transfer student.

[Anonymous No.4081085]

>>4081012

only amerifags are forced to share rooms with other people at university.

[Anonymous No.4081087]

>>4081017
Oh you.

[Anonymous No.4081097]

>>4081061
No. That's what makes it terrifying.

[Anonymous No.4081116]

>>4081061
I don't think I could process undergraduate Zizek.

[Anonymous No.4081125]

>>4081116
Come to think of it are there any photos around of a young, college-aged Zizek?

[Anonymous No.4081130]

>>4081012
>Why do you never hear about famous academics' college roommates and the latter's comments about them?

Probably because they were quiet, unassuming nerds who spent their every waking moment behind huge, heavy, dusty philosophic grimoires.

[Anonymous No.4081134]

>>4081125
>infineter reflect
>wow
>so deep
>filosopher
>dark thoughts
>all your dialectics are belong to us
>wow

[Anonymous No.4081137]

>>4081134
Will someone please shop this onto that picture

[Anonymous No.4081145]

>>4081125
It seems he's always looked like a coke-addled homeless person.

[Anonymous No.4081151]

>>4081125

No, Zizek came out of the womb an oily old man

Is that weird? I always imagine Zizek has having a thin layer of rich sweat all over him -- like the sweat that appears under your armpits but spread all over his body all the time

[Anonymous No.4081149]

nietzsche and paul rene were roommates

[Anonymous No.4081153]

>>4081149
Nietzsche sure was one handsome sun-ova-bitch. I'm surprised that he didn't get laid more often.

[Anonymous No.4081155]

[Anonymous No.4081159]

>>4081153
Might have something to do with his genitals rotting away.

[Anonymous No.4081161]

>>4081155
lelel zizek is 2based

[Anonymous No.4081162]

>>4081153
he did, that's why some people attribute his madness to syphilis.

>>4081061
When you're an undergrad you're a babbling idiot but when you've got a PhD you're a complex and obscure genius.

[Anonymous No.4081163]

>>4081155
>quiet applause

[Anonymous No.4081165]

>>4081162
It is now accepted in Academia that he died as result of a rare genetic neurological condition called 'CADASIL'.

Link: http:// www.actaneurologica.be/acta/article.asp?lang=en&navid=133&id=14389&mod=acta

[Anonymous No.4081175]

>>4081162
Nietzsche probably died a virgin.

[Anonymous No.4081188]

>>4081175

I don't think so. There is evidence that he was a frequent visitor of brothels. And he may have had syphilis, as is suggested in his notebooks. However, syphilis was definitely not the cause of his death or madness.

[Anonymous No.4081222]

>>4081137
done

[Anonymous No.4081227]

>>4081222
FUCK

[Anonymous No.4081232]

Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson were roommates in college.

[Anonymous No.4081242]

>>4081145
you mean like a Siberian-Husky-Slav mix who has drank himself sad

[Anonymous No.4082971]

ezra pound was a mediocre student and his roommates recalled him trying to read poems to them when they were trying to sleep. also he got dumped in a pond as a prank and people called him "ezra lily pond".

not made up

>>4081061
...FUCK

[Anonymous No.4084041]

>>4081017
:^)

[Anonymous No.4084051]

>It was Russell who introduced Wittgenstein to David Pinsent (1891–1918) in the summer of 1912. A mathematics undergraduate and descendant of David Hume, Pinsent soon became Wittgenstein's closest friend.[77] The men worked together on experiments in the psychology laboratory about the role of rhythm in the appreciation of music, and Wittgenstein delivered a paper on the subject to the British Psychological Association in Cambridge in 1912. They also travelled together, including to Iceland in September 1912—the expenses paid by Wittgenstein, including first class travel, the hiring of a private train, and new clothes and spending money for Pinsent—and later to Norway. Pinsent's diaries provide valuable insights into Wittgenstein's personality - sensitive, nervous and attuned to the tiniest slight or change in mood from Pinsent.[78] In his diaries Pinsent wrote about shopping for furniture with Wittgenstein in Cambridge when the latter was given rooms in Trinity; most of what they found in the stores was not minimalist enough for Wittgenstein's aesthetics: "I went and helped him interview a lot of furniture at various shops ... It was rather amusing: he is terribly fastidious and we led the shopman a frightful dance, Vittgenstein [sic] ejaculating "No—Beastly!" to 90 percent of what he shewed [archaic spelling] us!"[79]

what a cakeboy

[Anonymous No.4084060]

>Sharing a room with someone in university

Did that my first year, never again

[Anonymous No.4084548]

>>4081153
or, maybe it had to do something with the fact that he was a compulsive masturbator and a misogynist


and he hated christianity


i bet he put on a fedora and took his pants off whenever he got intense in his writing

[Anonymous No.4084562]

A number of reasons. First (as has been said) many people simply aren't that remarkable and former flatmates likely would just say the person was hard working, thoughtful, fun to get a beer with, etc. Most people are like that. If one of the many, many flatmates I've had over the years became famous I can only think of maybe 1 or 2 who did anything remarkable, and out of respect to the others I'd never tell personal stories to a newspaper or anything.

Second, no one generally cares what some nobody has to say about a famous person, as it's still just hearsay and could just as well have been formulated out of spite or envy.

Third, it would be a lot more inappropriate within academic circles, since the people are famous for their works an thoughts, not their scandalous personal lives. They're not celebrities. I've heard rumours Foucault was into freaky shit and someone apparently said that Nietzsche was a compulsive masturbator, but frankly who cares? It's no one's business.

[Anonymous No.4084590]

What I want to get a hold of is their undergrad application essays. What did Young Delillo, Young Wallace, Young Lin come up with to advertise themselves to their dream schools? We have Pynchon's highschool short stories but where are his college apps?

[Anonymous No.4084698]

>>4084562
>rumours Foucault was into freaky shit
>who cares

in Foucault's case, he sort of imposed his personal urges onto society; he had a fixation with BDSM, and he reasoned that most others did, too.

Knowing the man behind the ideas is very important, imo. Look at Schopenhauer, for example: his pessimism comes from the fact that he taught at the same university as Hegel, and his lectures actually coincided with Hegel's; Hegel was more of a celebrity and therefore only five or so students showed up to Schopenhauer's lectures, prompting him to quit academia. He considered Hegel a charlatan probably for intellectual reasons - he disagreed with his rushed phenomenological claims and all, and was more practical - but this jealousy definitely plays its part in creating Schopenhauer's worldview: he rejects Hegelianism because it is the very thing that cost him a chance at a cozy job.

If you don't know the man behind the ideas, you miss out on a huge chunk of the reasoning behind their ideas.

[Anonymous No.4084720]

>>4084698
A text should be treated in its own right, considering the author is like making an ad hom argument.

>schooled

[Anonymous No.4084721]

Fun fact: David Foster Wallace and Dan Brown had the same writing workshop in Amherst College. Can you imagine the comments they left for each other?

[Anonymous No.4084722]

>>4082971
He also used to troll his Shakespeare prof by arguing that George Bernard Shaw was superior to the Bard in every way imaginable. He was a funny fucking kid

[Anonymous No.4084747]

>>4084720
>Muh ad hominems
Go away, considering the author is acceptable. Humanity does not work in a way which lets it take ideas from a vacuum, ignoring its origins.

[Anonymous No.4084761]

>>4084747
It does so :P

[Anonymous No.4084769]

>>4084721
care to sauce this very fun fact?

[Anonymous No.4084770]

>>4084698

But they told me the author was dead.

[Anonymous No.4084783]

>>4084721

Since they're both shit writers with idiot followings, I'm sure they were fairly constructive.

[Anonymous No.4084851]

>>4084769
http://www.thefastertimes.com/fiction/2009/10/01/dan-brown-and-david-foster-wallace-workshop-partners/

[Anonymous No.4084983]

>>4084761
>i disagree with you therefore sage

if you think that ideas can be considered in vacuo, you're wrong, man. you need to understand an author to contextualize the work. I never said to let the author's life detract from his body of work; you should consider the author to understand what in life led him to those claims.

once again: Schopenhauer's anti-Hegel stance and proto-existentialism and ideas of man being more important as an individual stem just as much from any genius inspiration as from his petty academic jealousy.

if we divorce ideas from their creators we make it difficult for people to attempt to create new ideas or try new thought experiments because they aren't _good enough_ or _smart enough_, because an Einstein or a Descartes would never do anything immoral or petty. Knowing that these intellectual titans are human is valuable in its own right.

[Anonymous No.4085007]

>>4084983
>you need to understand an author to contextualize the work.
But you don't need to contextualize the work, or contextualize it with a pretense of accuracy.

> you should consider the author to understand what in life led him to those claims.
It provides no benefit, besides whatever flawed motivational bullshit you're trying to get at in the last paragraph that is not at all important or relevant, and definitely not worth destroying the work to achieve.

>stem just as much from any genius inspiration as from his petty academic jealousy.
So? Why does that matter?

Schopenhauer's ideas of man and individuality are not Schopenhauer's, they belong to The World as Will and Representation and its audience. The only context that is relevant to how you consume the work is your own context. What you've done is confused the work for the author, arbitrarily.

[Anonymous No.4085088]

>>4085007
>But you don't need to contextualize the work, or contextualize it with a pretense of accuracy.
why not? you always need to understand the climate in which a work was released. Reading Heart of Darkness without understanding it was preceded by decades of hardcore imperialism/colonialism would make a large aspect of it meaningless. Reading Joyce without understanding Dublin (its customs, accent, geography, politics, people) would totally nullify the works. I could go on (inb4 >the list goes on). I think context is infinitely important.

>It provides no benefit, besides whatever flawed motivational bullshit you're trying to get at in the last paragraph that is not at all important or relevant, and definitely not worth destroying the work to achieve.
so you conflate considering the author with destroying the work? and there's a definite benefit: it humanizes intellectual titans, as i said before.

>confused the work for the author, arbitrarily
the work comes from the author, from his ideas. Your ideas are a large part of what makes you, and writing them down and publishing them does not change this. There's so arbitrary nature of what i'm doing; you just disagree with it.

Do you also believe the whole "The author is dead" and "authorial intent doesn't matter" notions?

[Anonymous No.4085094]

>>4081012
>Zizek (lul)
effe dimmen

[Anonymous No.4085107]

>>4081125
>>4081151
you gon get shocked

[Anonymous No.4085129]

>>4084747

That is correct, but it should not be this way. Ideally, we would be taking our ideas from mere ideas, and those ideas from mere ideas, and so on. That's what we should strive for, if you ask me.

[Anonymous No.4085141]

>>4085129
Nobody is asking you though.

[Anonymous No.4085187]

>>4085107
Is zizek an FtM? I don't get it.

[Anonymous No.4085376]

>>4085088
>Do you also believe the whole "The author is dead" and "authorial intent doesn't matter" notions?
Yes, to a point. I understand that context can help illuminate work, but you're placing too much value on the author's intent, to the point that you are destroying them.

>Reading Heart of Darkness without understanding... would make a large aspect of it meaningless.
>Reading Joyce without understanding ... would totally nullify the works
This isn't true, just because you don't know how accurately Joyce is depicting Dublin, or that he was trying to depict Dublin, or that Dublin is even a real place and not entirely his own creation, doesn't mean that you can't read Dubliners, appreciate, enjoy and understand the work, be inspired or invigorated or developed by it.
You perfectly can, just as much as you can read Satyricon despite the extreme fragmentation, cultural gap and dearth of contemporary critique.
Bringing in foreign material might push the text towards something you'd prefer, you might only be interested in Wittgenstein for his personality and image and bring that into a reading of his Tractatus, but don't pretend that is bringing the work closer to its "truth", what's presented is the only truth there is, introducing anything else into the reading is only a distortion. And so, you destroy them, what you have in your hands is no longer Dubliners, it is no longer Heart of Darkness, just as Heart of Darkness was no longer Heart of Darkness when people read it during a period of waning imperialism, just as Heart of Darkness is no longer Heart of Darkness when someone reads it today as de-humanizing Africans.

[Anonymous No.4085702]

>>4084983
Have you ever heard an author or poet explain his work, or read an philologists work putting a text in its "proper" context? Sometimes their intentions and aspirations go opposite or at least differently from your own experience of the work. That's because you read the work in your own individual context and this forms your own interpretation. Trying to understand a work "objectively" typically ruins my readings, because it gives the idea that my experience of the work is only pretense, if I had not come to the proper conclusion.

The interpretation of a work grounded in my own experience always feels more "touching" than the academically correct one even if I know both.

A work should be seen alone in a vacuum, and it's teachings should be seen from what the text discloses in itself. At least outside of academia.