/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4665199]

/lit/, isnt it weird in literature and art that the mundane is pushed to be something beautiful and worthwhile

yet we dread the sentimental?

[Anonymous No.4665203]

who dreads the sentimental apart from boring losers?

[Anonymous No.4665217]

>>4665203
Am I wrong? I thought most saw the sentimental as something negative, and something worth avoiding while trying to create something through the arts.

Isnt it called cheap, sappy, or whiny?

[Anonymous No.4665234]

>>4665217
just when overdone, no use being in denial about having emotions

[Anonymous No.4665242]

>>4665217
it's called cheap because it's been overused to the point where emotions don't appeal to us anymore. that's modernity for ya.

[Anonymous No.4665263]

>>4665234
>>4665242
So its always just trying to repackage the sentimental so that it is easier to digest? Getting rid of buzzwords and their similar situations so there isnt any knee-jerk disgust?

[Anonymous No.4665266]

>>4665217
it's a meaningless buzzword thrown around by idiots.

[Anonymous No.4665277]

>>4665263
>always trying to repack x so that it is easier to digest

>yfw when anything can go in x

[Anonymous No.4665288]

>>4665263
I feel like you haven't really read what I said and just molded your own argument, quoting my post to create the effect of a discussion. I also think that because you're using very similar yotsuba images and avatarfags are far too self-centered for actual conversations. By all means, type away with yourself on the internet.

[Anonymous No.4665293]

>>4665263
No, it's just trying to be "truer" to emotions, to get down to what it really means to feel something.
Read some woolf or other modernists and you'll get the idea.

[Anonymous No.4665296]

>>4665263
People don't mind getting sentimental when the story is causing them to be sentimental.

What they don't want is to be reading and feel like the author is slapping them across the face and yelling, "You're supposed to be sad here!"

[Anonymous No.4665299]

>>4665199
Only in the last couple of years.

Monet is awful, as is Proust.

Civilzation went to shit around about the time of the French Revolution. The aristocrats had better taste than the bourgeois.

[Anonymous No.4665304]

>>4665299
last couple of centuries, not years

[Anonymous No.4665306]

>>4665299
Oh, and the Marxists have even worse taste than the bourgeois, so they are only making the problem worse.

[Anonymous No.4665310]

>>4665288
Well youre either the guy who said the sentimental is bad when overdone, or cheap when overused.

I then replied, is the way to get around this just to repackage the sentimental? Or do you have to get something else all together.

You really have said nothing.

>>4665293
Do you actually believe in what they are trying to do, getting closer to "true" emotions? How exactly do they go about doing that? I havent read Woolf yet, Ive been meaning to read her.

[Anonymous No.4665320]

>>4665310
Your idea that you need to repackage "the sentimental" implies that you have certain events in mind that you feel are sentimental and have to evoke emotions.

That's not necessarily true. That's a very juvenile way to look at things. Anything can be as sentimental as the author chooses.

So yes, it's about repackaging but it's really about repackaging whatever the author wants to become sentimental. Nothing is sentimental until the author presents it in that fashion.

[Anonymous No.4665334]

>>4665299
worst post itt

[Anonymous No.4665341]

>>4665299
And if you wonder why I paired Monet and Proust, it's because they have identical aesthetic ideas. They are both effeminates that appeal to the vanity of pretty young women. Oscar Wilde is the same.
Their works ought to be burnt because they are a threat to masculinity.
Think how much more manly our men would be if instead of garbage pop music that pushes effeminate womanizing, dissipating libertinism, wealth fetishiam and cloying sentimentality, they were exposed instead to marble statues of Achilles and Hector.

[Anonymous No.4665347]

>>4665341

[Anonymous No.4665352]

>>4665310
Woolf is worthless as an artist. Everything from the last 300 years is damn near worthless. Yes, I include the likes of Beethoven, whose music is ugly and grotesque.

[Anonymous No.4665359]

>>4665341
achilles bonked dudes

>muh manly culture
why is manliness better than femininity?

[Anonymous No.4665367]

>>4665352
>>4665341
>>4665299
the most boring, fedora-tipping shit ever

>muh greeks
i bet you are a NEET who is a total fucking loser and that you display NONE of the "manly" values you say society should be about. i bet that an achilles-like figure would fucking laugh in your face if he saw you.

[Anonymous No.4665375]

>>4665341
You could not be more wrong about Proust, but you seem like an incredulous cunt.

[Anonymous No.4665374]

>>4665359
Masculinity is, in men, superior to femininity. Femininity is, in women, superior to masculinity.

[Anonymous No.4665381]

>>4665374
>q: why is this better than that
>a: this is better than that
lol you're an idiot

[Anonymous No.4665382]

>>4665347
>>4665367
See, this is the effect of too much pop culture. These men are acting like emotional spoilt girls.

[Anonymous No.4665390]

>>4665375
Proust is exemplary of bourgeois sentimentality.

[Anonymous No.4665394]

>>4665382
>i bet you are a NEET who is a total fucking loser and that you display NONE of the "manly" values you say society should be about. i bet that an achilles-like figure would fucking laugh in your face if he saw you.
well, are you?

[Anonymous No.4665399]

>>4665352
for fucks sake, where do all those people suddenly come from?
it's like we're beeng raided by 101 introduction to logic phil undergrads whose conceptions of art stem from the knowledge of their basement

[Anonymous No.4665404]

>>4665394
Of course I am, but I don't see how that is relevant.

[Anonymous No.4665405]

>>4665390
Nope. There is no sentimentality in Proust, have you ever read a single word he wrote? His idea of love is only anguish, irony, and dillusion.
Go fuck yourself.

[Anonymous No.4665409]

im black yall blakc black bliggit yblack

[Anonymous No.4665418]

>>4665405
"Non j'ai braqué personne, planté personne, buté personne
Mais j'suis un voyou c'est comme ça qu'on dit tout simplement
J'ai fait des choses que j'regrette suffisamment
Suffisamment pour y penser tout l'temps
J'pourrais te donner un million de bonnes raisons
Pour qu'on m'attrape, qu'on m'casse les genoux et qu'on m'cloue au pilori
Et si un jour on vient m'chercher, j'résisterai pas
J'sortirai les mains sur la tête sans faire d'ennui" - Proust

[Anonymous No.4665426]

>>4665199
Your generalisation is pretty... well, relative. This switches from literary epoch to epoch. The two extremes of arts: the classicistic approach, full of rules and rationality; and the romanticistic approach, which is all about emotionality and the idea of the individualistic genius.

(This, of course, is yet another generalisation, and there are more epochs that kinda mix the two aspects into each other, but these two examples are the best to make my point clear. If you don't like today's mindset, look into the past. Or create a future.)

[Anonymous No.4665434]

>>4665404
what is the psychological profile of you people? what attracts you to this image of the noble greek and causes you to shit on the people in the world who are better than you? and you don't even try to better yourself and become a better person! what you seem to want is for achilles to descend out of the sky so you can be his worthless sex slave and have him cum all over your fucking face. you don't have the ability to be heroic, you probably guiltily engage in (what you'd probably call) "degenerate" behavior all the time (i bet you jack off to traps or something), and you're just a fucking disgusting leech of a person in real life. i bet your whole spiel against society is just an attempt to remove the problem from yourself... of course you wouldn't be a little bitch if you were born in ancient greece, it's the pop culture that's made you worthless. but in reality, you would be nothing there too. you don't even have the fucking motivation to go out and get a goddamn job, which a person with downs can do pretty easily. you are the lowest of the low in society, and yet you claim you are capable of judging that society.

what is it with you people?

[Anonymous No.4665435]

>>4665418
You obviously don't know what sentimentalism is.

[Anonymous No.4665463]

>>4665382
No it's the product of experience and the knowledge that no perfect humans exists and naive people like you are always projecting values you don't posses as virtues.

[Anonymous No.4665468]

>>4665418
That's not Proust, but Fauve. Are you retarded?
sigh

[Anonymous No.4665476]

>>4665435
the joke is that it's a quote from a french band for depressed teen girls falsely attributed to proust

[Anonymous No.4665484]

>>4665476
it's almost as if it's not funny, m8.

[Anonymous No.4665490]

The bench French writers are Oxmo Puccino and the Muslim guy from Lunatic. The one who isn't Booba I mean.

[Anonymous No.4665493]

>>4665199
>we dread the sentimental
speak for yourself.

[Anonymous No.4665517]

>>4665434
This. So much

[Anonymous No.4665594]

Back from shower.
>>4665434
I admit that my tone is more abrasive than it ought to be, but please do not think that I am "shitting on" these artists that I have condemned. I have no enmity with their personages, I just reject their artistic accomplishments as inferior in style and judgement. I know that Monet, Proust, Beethoven, and to a lesser extent Woolf, possessed genius, but I am not a sychophant for geniuses and I believe that praising intelligence for the sake of intelligence, or talent for the sake of talent, and above all art for the mere sake of art, is depraved. In my opinion it is absolute folly to want to be an artist today, it is vanity. There does not exist an audience capable of appreciating good art, as society has bowed down and worshipped "the people", I.e. the vulgar plebs (and I do not except myself), since the French Revolution. The only reason why you would want to become a great artist is if you are ignorant and are not aware that great art is an impossibility today, or that you are vain and want to be inducted into the Cult of Art, become a 'classic'.
As for being a better person; that is something I am working on.
As for your attacking my character; I fully deserve it in the circumstances, but please do not consider me a hypocrite when I point out that your character could benefit from much improvement, as could mine.

[Anonymous No.4665609]

>>4665594
you have psychological issues. please leave /lit/. it is not worth someone's time to debate with a lunatic.

[Anonymous No.4665626]

>>4665594
Foremost examples of notable men who certainly did write out of a vain desire to be inducted into the literary canon, are James Joyce & David Foster Wallace, both of whom's outputs are, if you don't mind me saying it, very awful.
It is shameful that critics pay attention to these artists, but the critics write for the same vain reasons of wanting to be lauded as "great critics".

[Anonymous No.4665630]

>>4665609
Wantonly accusing others of having psychological issues, ought itself to be deemed a psychological issue.

[Anonymous No.4665633]

>>4665299

Proust is so fucking bad. Genet is the real french talent.

[Anonymous No.4665638]

>>4665375

Anon is right about Proust.

[Anonymous No.4665641]

>>4665390

He is loved by the aristocracy of taste.

[Anonymous No.4665648]

>>4665630
you are unable to improve your life and unable to leave this board. please try harder. edit your host file or something, jesus christ. you're pathetic.

[Anonymous No.4665646]

>>4665630

just calling it as it is ;)

[Anonymous No.4665655]

>>4665641
Of course, but the critics are as corrupt as the artists. If all of the critics had perfect taste bad art would not prevail. Woe to the critics, becausr their responsibility is heavy.

[Anonymous No.4665656]

>>4665638
Nope. Not an iota of sentimentalism in À la recherche du temps perdu.

[Anonymous No.4665660]

>>4665648
There is no need to be distressed, friend; calm yourself.

[Anonymous No.4665663]

>>4665656
Except the first few pages are a sentimental reverie about sleeping and waking.

[Anonymous No.4665665]

>>4665660
i am completely calm. disgust does not make me angry. i feel bad for you, to be honest.

[Anonymous No.4665667]

>>4665665
It's strange that you interpret that as sentimentalism.

[Anonymous No.4665671]

>>4665656
Dude, the title itself is sentimental.

[Anonymous No.4665672]

>>4665667
Deep emotions felt for frivolous things = sentimentality.

[Anonymous No.4665674]

>>4665299
I get the argument here but it depends on a definition of art and 'good art' that you haven't defended, your virtue, strength and beauty, even piety and dedication, aren't a priori worth more than pure expressivity or romance.

[Anonymous No.4665677]

>>4665671
No it's not, you fool. In search of lost time does not allude to sentimentalism at all. Not even in Jean Santeuil is there sentimentalism.

[Anonymous No.4665685]

>>4665671
>>4665672
What constitutes the unity of In Search of Lost Time? We know, at least, what does not. It is not recollections, memory, even involuntary memory. What is essential to the Search is not in the madeleine or the cobblestones….What is involved is not an exposition of involuntary memory, but the narrative of an apprenticeship: more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Disappointment is a fundamental moment of the search or of apprenticeship: in each realm of signs, we are disappointed when the object does not give us the secret we were expecting. And disappointment itself is pluralist, variable according to each line. There are few things that are not disappointing the first time they are seen. For the first time is the time of inexperience; we are not yet capable of distinguishing the sign from the object, and the object interposes and confuses the signs. Disappointment on first hearing Vinteuil, on first meeting Bergotte, on first seeing the Balbec church…How is the disappointment, in each realm, to be remedied? On each line of apprenticeship, the hero undergoes an analogous experience, at various moments: for the disappointment of the object, he attempts to find a subjective compensation….The hero passionately longs to hear Berma, but when he does, he tries first of all to recognize her talent, to encircle this talent, to isolate it in order to be able to designate it. It is Berma, “at last I am seeing Berma.” … It is because the sign is doubtless more profound than the object emitting it, but it is still attached to that object, it is still half sheathed in it. And the sign’s meaning is doubtless more profound than the subject interpreting, but it is attached to this subject, half incarnated in a series of subjective associations. We proceed from one to the other; we leap from one to the other; we overcome the disappointment of the object by a compensation of the subject.

Disillusion is at the heart of Marcel's apprenticeship to signs. The apprenticeship depends, of course, on apprehending the signs. This happens in the work that Proust creates. So is the novel merely the description of personal growth - the familiar bildungsroman? Not quite. As Maurice Blanchot explains in an essay that seems to contradict Deleuze's analysis, Proust found the means of showing this growth in ornate situations - the familiar territory of the novel, thereby aligning Proust with masters like Balzac - while at the same time "eroding the edges of such tableaux till they merge with the flow of time and, gradually losing their fixity, stretch out in time, are absorbed and float along in the slow ceaseless motion […] not as pure moments but in the moving density of spherical time."

[Anonymous No.4665686]

>>4665672
>>4665671
>>4665685
The famous moments in the novel - the dunked biscuit, the ringing doorbell, the uneven cobblestone - are the revelations that enable Proust to write the events not as past but as simultaneous to the time of narration. Their intensity is not a result of nostalgia but the presence of the past. These are the encounters that guarantee authenticity.

[Anonymous No.4665690]

>>4665674
>your virtue, strength and beauty, even piety and dedication, aren't a priori worth more than pure expressivity or romance.

I think they emphatically are.

I do not want to explicate my view at length, so let me shortly say the following: art is didactic. I do not say that it ought to be didactic, I say that it IS didactic. All art instructs. Oscar Wilde repudiated didacticism totally, yet his art certainly did instruct and was not at all beauty for the sake of beauty. Hid art instructed people how to be glib, flamboyant, bourgeois fops; a poor lesson. Monet's art is didactic; it teaches you to sentimentalize over mundane scenes.
That said, art ALWAYS ought to instruct men in what is noble & true. If it does not do this it ought not to be esteemed with the title of art, and ought to be relegated to the category of "entertainment". If your art does not make people and cities more beautiful, it is not art.

[Anonymous No.4665698]

>>4665690
Like Baudelaire, Wilde advocated freedom from moral restraint and the limitations of society. This point of view contradicted Victorian convention in which the arts were supposed to be spiritually uplifting and instructive.

[Anonymous No.4665704]

>>4665690
>All art instructs.
All art portrays. It represents. Its object isn't always one of instruction, often it is a passive object, any instruction being on the part of the observer.

[Anonymous No.4665710]

>>4665698
To be honest, the Victorian era was not nearly as moral as people think. It was an era of concealed debauchery and moral decay. Alice in Wonderland reveals the true spiritual reality of the Victorian era: sickly surrealism.

[Anonymous No.4665720]

>>4665704
See, this is the view of art I abhorr. Art is NOT supposed to be a mirror. Art IS supposed to be beautiful. If your society is excrement and you hold up a mirror to excrement then what you see is excrement; and excrement can never be art.
Rwflecting society is NOT the object of art, but of mere journalism. Baudelaire, Wilde, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Eliot, Joyce - exalted journalists.

[Anonymous No.4665725]

>>4665720
why is your view of art better then?

[Anonymous No.4665733]

>>4665720
I accept your definition as being consistent, but you haven't defended its primacy. You seem to be adding a spirituality to art it doesn't require, why?

also: I'm not describing a mirror but rather an imitation. Art imitates being, rather than reflecting it.

[Anonymous No.4665734]

>>4665725
Because it is true.
Because truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.

[Anonymous No.4665745]

>>4665733
Yes, art does imitate; but it only imitates what is beautiful.

[Anonymous No.4665742]

>>4665734
>using quotes from the romantics even while making this argument
lol

[Anonymous No.4665743]

not at all

[Anonymous No.4665749]

>>4665742
Keats, who you can imagine I do not rate highly, was not the first to say that truth and beauty are one.

[Anonymous No.4665762]

>>4665749
you are literally using the phrasing of an artist you hate in order to show people that beauty is truth, but then saying that artist doesn't have the right idea of truth and beauty, even though you are using his formulation...

what?

[Anonymous No.4667734]

>>4665710
And this is why your fantasy is just that, a fantasy.