/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6423303]

Askreddit discusses:
What literary "classic" actually sucks?

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/332wyo/what_literary_classic_actually_sucks/

[Anonymous No.6423312]

It's literally no different to here.

People throwing around baseless opinions and trying to present them as objective facts.

[Anonymous No.6423317]

>>6423303
>all these people hating great 19th century english novels
>one guy really glad poe isn't mentioned
>"yeah poe is amazing!"
fucking people lol

[Anonymous No.6423327]

tbh i didn't really like Ethan Frome either.

[Anonymous No.6423341]

"The Scarlet Letter singlehandedly ruined recreational reading for me. It took years until I discovered Ender's Game on my own to realize books don't suck, it's just Hawthorne."

"The works of Charles Dickens are incredibly irritating to actually read. "

"Fuck Ulysses and fuck James Joyce."

[Anonymous No.6423342]

>Joyce single-handedly birthed the entire modernist literature movement and everything that follows has him to thank.

[Anonymous No.6423347]

This is just people complaining about their high school reading lists. Not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous No.6423354]

Just a bunch of plebs complaining about books they read last week for 9th grade English.

[Anonymous No.6423360]

>>6423354
so, like /lit/ then?

[Anonymous No.6423363]

>"I wonder if the absence of War & Peace in the comments is because it is genuinely good, or just that no one's ever finished the damn thing without getting Stockholm Syndrome. Seriously, have that book, am a voracious reader, and I still can't get past the second chapter. "

[Anonymous No.6423366]

>>6423341
>"The Scarlet Letter singlehandedly ruined recreational reading for me. It took years until I discovered Ender's Game on my own to realize books don't suck, it's just Hawthorne."
>Ender's Game

Holy hell...

[Anonymous No.6423371]

>>6423366
>The Critique of Pure Reason singlehandedly ruined recreational reading for me. It took years until I discovered The Martian on my own to realize books don't suck, it's just Kant.

[Anonymous No.6423388]

>>6423303
>So, Texas Instrument calculators are overpriced, but they cater to schools, they basically center their whole business around selling calculators to schools, helping teach schools how they work, and because TI has made it convenient for schools to use TI calcs, they do, and people keep buy more TI calcs, which are ludicrously overpraised, as a result.
I'm convinced school books work in much the same way. Works like The Great Gatsby or Great Expectations aren't outstanding works, I think, but because there's so much material supporting them, they're an easy target for teachers. Much like the TI-84 or TI-89, Great Gatsby or Great Expectations becomes a default literary source

The amount of stupidity. Not understanding how supply/demand works. Lumping literature and technology together.

[Anonymous No.6423390]

>>6423366
>>6423371
>I singlehandedly ruined recreational reading for me. It took years until I discovered The Martian on my own to realize books don't suck, it's just me.

[Anonymous No.6423416]

ITT: people thinking their shitposts are any better

I hate the reddit system, don't get me wrong, but it's hilarious when you posers pretend to be on a higher pedestal.

You all share one commonality, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

[Anonymous No.6423427]

>>6423416
>contrarian sprints to the defense of contrarians

Oh, no, truly you are enlightening!

[Anonymous No.6423439]

>>6423427
>contrarian sprints to the defense of a contrarian attacking other contrarians

[Anonymous No.6423449]

That fucking guy going on about The Great Gatsby... It is possible to be more pretentious? It is on lit

[Anonymous No.6423460]

>>6423388
Literature is a form of emotional technology. Texts are signifying machines.

[Anonymous No.6423473]

>>6423460
that may be true but that doesn't change the fact that there are serious economic differences between the desiring machines of F. Scott Fitzgerald and TI

[Anonymous No.6423499]

> [Ulysses] shouldn't be taken as a novel. That's really problematic...

[Anonymous No.6423506]

>submitted 6 hours ago by AmeriCossack
Never change reddit.

I really hope someone shits on Wordsworth and Milton.

[Anonymous No.6423513]

>>6423416
>>6423427
>>6423439
turtles all the way down

[Anonymous No.6423518]

>>6423303

[Anonymous No.6423534]

>>6423518
Is he really that bad though? I read Slaughter-house five, and is was not good, but not great. Isn't the rest of his works just the same?

[Anonymous No.6423536]

>>6423341

[Anonymous No.6423537]

>>6423518
>>6423534

His books are genuinely amusing. And he has some literary merit, whether you like him or not it is obvious.

He's perfect for reddit because he's a mixture of sci-fi and metaphysics, written in a humorous way.

[Anonymous No.6423538]

I'm not liking all these responses about how they dislike the book because they hate the characters.

[Anonymous No.6423541]

>>6423537
So what would you recommend to read of his? Other than Slaughterhouse

[Anonymous No.6423542]

>I think the author of the Bible left a lot of questions with no follow up answers. Caused a lot of people to interpret things in their own way and caused mass confusion. He could have written it better. It's a pain to read.

[Anonymous No.6423554]

>>6423542

[Anonymous No.6423555]

>>6423541
Try Cat's Cradle or Mother Night

[Anonymous No.6423558]

>>6423541
Sirens of Titan is good. If you really like Slaughterhouse you should read Mother Night as well. His short stories are better than most of his novels though.

[Anonymous No.6423559]

Is Wuthering Heights really like Twilight or is Reddit just being pleb as fuck?

[Anonymous No.6423570]

>>6423559
Pleb as fuck.
Although I'm surprised that a bunch of pseudo-scientists can't figure out psychological novels. Maybe it's because it isn't an exact science like chemistry or atheism.

[Anonymous No.6423571]

>>6423559
It's Twilight in the sense that Twilight copied the kind of characters Wuthering Heights, and Emily Brontë created.

Heathcliff mainly, who has become the prototype for very moody, angsty, dark character in a love story.

I know a lot of people don't seem to like Wuthering Heights, but I think it is an amazing work of fiction, it's one of my favorites.

I read it straight after reading Pride and Prejudice, and it's just so different - so much more bleak, violent and emotive. The emotions are so raw sometimes.

I finished the novel feeling like there was a void in me.

pic related is Tom Hardy playing Heathcliff in a miniseries on Wuthering Heights.

The book describes him as much darker in skin, almost like he was African.

[Anonymous No.6423573]

>>6423571
>and Emily Brontë created

that*

[Anonymous No.6423579]

>>6423303
What's with all the seething hatred for Great Expectations on reddit? It's not Dickens' greatest novel, but it's not absolute trash either.

[Anonymous No.6423582]

>>6423579
Those kind of threads always get hate on books those people had to read in school.

[Anonymous No.6423585]

all those plebs hating on Great Expectations

my god these fucking noobs

[Anonymous No.6423591]

>>6423579
>>6423585
On the topic of Dickens, I tried reading a Tale Of Two Cities a while back and I found it boring. Is the book really dated or am I just reading it wrong?

[Anonymous No.6423592]

>>6423591
read great expectations instead, a tale of two cities is not a standard dickens novel because it's not that funny and great expectations is hilarious

[Anonymous No.6423593]

>>6423591
It's okay to find a work boring, m8. Our experiences are all subjective. You don't have to like everything that is considered great.

[Anonymous No.6423612]

>>6423388
Both of my literature teachers in High School admitted that they made us read the basic high school canon books rather than something exotic because its more convinient to have a book list that the teachers knows all the nooks and crannies of and recycling material from year to year is made easier.

I don't think the argument is one of economics, but of convinience.

[Anonymous No.6423629]

>>6423582
Those lucky motherfuckers got to read Dickens in school while got shafted with "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Anne of Green Gables, and they don't even appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.6423641]

>>6423591
It's possible that you're reading it wrong, although Dickens was a surprisingly diverse writer. If you're looking for comedy, try A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, or Nicolas Nickleby. If you're looking for a more tragic story, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield will suit you fine. I've never met anybody who hasn't thoroughly enjoyed Bleak House.

[Anonymous No.6423660]

Pisses me off that half the posts are:

[widely loved book]..just kidding lel, that book's great, almost had you guys ;)

[Anonymous No.6423668]

how come we're different

how come we're not plebs

what was different in our lives

[Anonymous No.6423673]

>>6423542
i'm not ok with this

[Anonymous No.6423681]

>>6423668
pain

[Anonymous No.6423680]

>mfw The Catcher In The Rye is once again mentioned

[Anonymous No.6423699]

>>6423416
oh good

i thought my holier-than-thou-dar was off

[Anonymous No.6423721]

>>6423668
Because reading is a skill and reddit is a democracy

[Anonymous No.6423724]

>>6423668
/lit/erates have recieved a strong and steady dose of elitism in the superiority-complex echo-chamber. In mild-to-moderate doses, pompous assholery can be healthy, leading former plebs to read few classic novels and develop a taste for more academic literature.

reddit, meanwhile, is a larger community focused on mass consumption and entertainment value. When they say a book is good, they aren't saying that it was well-written or that it gave them some epiphany or enlightenment or that it enriched their life, they are saying that it made them laugh or cry. Great Expectations, Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlett Letter, and Ulysses all make the pleb's avoid-list because these books intentionally made them hate a character or challenged them in some way. Your typical redditor (and I'm not just saying this to be rude to the poor shits) becomes enraged the moment they have to work for their entertainment. They'll put up with a difficult passage or two if the book has enough action or comedy (hence why they tend to circlejerk over The Brothers Karamazov and The Count of Montecristo), but if their need to giggle or shed a tear isn't met every ten pages or so, they close the book.

[Anonymous No.6423752]

Okay I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the doxa here. Hear me out.

What these redditors are trying to say is that the books that we make children read in middle and high school is simply not appropriate with regards to their age and general experience in life. Now YOU, you browse /lit/ so you're probably a genius or a Nabokov of some sort, and thus you are more sensible to literary stuff than most people, so maybe you enjoyed Great Gatsby or Ulysses at age 9. But school shouldn't be about you, shouldn't be about Bloom's Canon, it should be about instilling the pleasure of reading in young people. And that, well, that is not what classics are supposed to do.

I'll give you my example. I come from France, so although I can't relate to some references here, have mine: I had to read Madame Bovary at 15. It was at the time the most boring book I had ever laid my hands on. I mean really horrible. Now ex post facto, I realize that I had neither the life experience nor the maturity to enjoy a book of such depth. Few at 15 can relate to anything else than fucking John Green and Agatha Christie, and that is OK. Because once you'ok get older, you'll look in deeper stuff, *at the age for which they were written*. Which obviously isn't what happens right now because people get disgusted of classics right away. If you told Joyce, Fitz, or the French classical tragedist Jean Racine that their books would be required at 14, they would have kekked pretty hard.

School should not feed you classics before you go out in the world, it should encourage you to read further once you get out in the world. You do that by giving students things that are enjoyable to read and adequate for their age.

[Anonymous No.6423756]

>>6423752
>you browse /lit/ so you're probably a genius or a Nabokov of some sort
you think your pathetic appeal to egotism can work on a self-hateful monster like me? entire post disregarded, pitiful nigger

[Anonymous No.6423770]

>>6423752
i think dickens is totally appropriate but people still hate him. he has so much children's appeal (everyone LOVES his stories when adapted to some other medium or otherwise retold) but people just haven't learned to read that sort of prose. teach them to read that earlier and they should love dickens

[Anonymous No.6423779]

>>6423542
>author of the bible

[Anonymous No.6423789]

>>6423668
Usernames and upboats. When people see this kind of thread on reddit they often don't ask themselves 'what do I think about this issue' but 'what can I say about this that people are likely to agree with'. The system is designed to encourage giant circlejerks.

Discussion on 4chan is different because anonymity helps people to honestly express their opinions, because they don't have to worry about the consequences of saying something 'bad', and there are no benefits to sucking up to eachother. At worst it encourages shitposting for the sake of messing with people.

[Anonymous No.6423818]

>>6423752
>the books that we make children read in middle and high school is simply not appropriate with regards to their age and general experience in life
Shit argument. When children/teenagers read 'deep' books they don't understand them, but they eventually grow into them when they read them again. If you remove that basis and make them read 'simple' books that they can fully understand they don't take anything away from them, and later in life, when they are confronted with a difficult text they will run into a barrier of comprehension that they have never learned to overcome. I'd also say that for those who do enjoy reading as kids, the things they're going to look back on later as meaningful won't be trashy YA fiction, but books with depth.

[Anonymous No.6423835]

>>6423818
Again, that is the exception of literary people. The vast majority of students won't give 2 shits about whatever they read in school once they get out.

[Anonymous No.6423846]

>>6423668
4chan is more self-aware and relentlessly negative. common opinions are not accepted at face value even if it's just some contrarian shitposting against it.

[Anonymous No.6423855]

>>6423341
>"Fuck Ulysses and fuck James Joyce."

[Anonymous No.6423863]

>>6423416
>pissing in your own mouth

[Anonymous No.6423865]

>>6423835
I think you're being too cynical there. Most of my normalfag friends liked one or two books they read during their time in school, and they thought about it and learned something from it, whether they're aware of it or not. Anyway, that's not the point I'm making. I'm saying that a lot of parents don't encourage their cihildren to read classic literature, and some of those kids do have literary talent. Those kids only chance of reckognizing that talent is being exposed to it by some other means, and I think the educational system has an obligation to provide that.

[Anonymous No.6423871]

>>6423752
Not really. The reason why you're forced to read in high school is not to instil a love of reading. In all honesty, if you haven't had "reading = fun" shoved into your brain by the time you learn long division, you're a lost cause anyway. We teach literature in high school so children will be able to read dry albeit necessary material later in life. How are you going to understand an employment contract or a newspaper article regarding changes to the tax code if you couldn't make it through Of Mice and Men? How can you write a decent resume if you couldn't write a two-hundred word essay on Romeo and Juliet? Substandard English courses have given rise to buzzfeed and twitter because the poor sods need information in small doses or it overwhelms them. It's not because they're stupid, but because they weren't trained to handle difficult material.

I wouldn't expect any fifteen year old kid to be able to read Joyce or Arno Schmidt or Proust and soak in every word, but I've never seen anything that difficult forced on anyone outside of university. The Great Gatsby and Hamlet are great for teaching seventeen year old kids because the teacher can tell them what a metaphor is, give one lesson on the excess of the 1920's, and two weeks later every kid writes something about the green light. Not every kid is going to enjoy reading Shakespeare or Fitzgerald, but not every kid is going to enjoy John Green or J.K. Rowling.

A lot of the classical works that kids read in high school would get labelled as Y.A. these days, because it actually was written for teenagers. The Catcher in the Rye, the Lord of the Flies, and To Kill a Mockingbird were all intended for a younger audience, and I was forced to read all of them. I enjoyed some of them. Others required a more nuanced appreciation because they weren't my cup of tea.

It's unfair and pigheaded to hand kids shit literature because you think their too stupid to understand a fucking metaphor or too lazy and closed-minded to appreciate anything that isn't about a slightly hotter version of themselves with magical powers or cancer.

[Anonymous No.6423877]

>>6423871
you've never read proust

am i right pls answer i like to play this game

[Anonymous No.6423908]

>>6423591
>>6423592
I read Great Expectations first and was pretty disappointed, eventually gave Dickens another shot with A Tale of Two Cities and loved it. I think I just prefer his more serious stuff.

>>6423641
A Christmas Carol is only a comedy if you're using the Greek drama comedy/tragedy dichotomy. The guy shouldn't go into it thinking it's a barrel of laughs. It's actually one of the few books to make me cry.

>>6423835
If they aren't literary and don't give a shit about classics read in high school what makes you think they'd ever give a shit about classics even as an adult? They're just going to keep reading genre pulp, or even fucking YA fiction. "Fun" books.

In the end you can lead a horse to water, etc. I really doubt that people who don't read literature would read it if they hadn't been forced to read classics in high school.

[Anonymous No.6423912]

Watching these morons stupidly insult my favourite books is really depressing. Someone actually burnt a copy of Great Expectations, thats just horrible.

[Anonymous No.6424256]

>ulysses
>you need to read it sentence by sentence until you completely understand what's going on

that'll be one of them "books" then m8

[Anonymous No.6424274]

>>6423752

[Anonymous No.6424468]

>EDIT: Thanks for all the gold!!!

what is this

Some kind of mutual jo system no doubt, but they already have their upboats... so what is this 'gold' for...?

[Anonymous No.6424487]

>>6423724
the count of monte cristo is dope as fuck and worth circlejerking

[Anonymous No.6424513]

>>6423835

>Again, that is the exception of literary people

There is no such thing as 'literary people'.

[Anonymous No.6424536]

>>6423506
I'm curious as to whenever this image is a hoax or a legitimate scam.

[Anonymous No.6424541]

>>6424468
>so what is this 'gold' for...?
A scam reddit devs implemented to gather even more money.

[Anonymous No.6424591]

I'm tempted to go on there and start talking about Updike. SJWs hate Updike.

[Anonymous No.6424637]

>>6424591
Reddit isn't really full of SJWs, its more like teenage libertarians and college liberals who feel like their incredibly common views make them special.

[Anonymous No.6424652]

Some of the comments on Great Expectations are actually making my head hurt.

>It was LOST in book form. Strong beginning, seems to be going somewhere, released in episodic format, mysteries compound each episode to maintain the interest of the audience, everyone wonders what epic conclusion the author has planned, eventually it gets to the end and reveals the author had no idea where he was going all along.

>I think the funniest part was Sparknotes told the story better than fucking Dickens. Wasn't reading the entire thing for school so I used Sparknotes instead.

>Nothing happens in the book, it's just Dickens masturbating over a typewriter. I'm an avid reader, and I flat out refused to read that thing. This graphic novel version was worth every penny.

[Anonymous No.6424670]

>>6424652
>graphic novel

[Anonymous No.6424679]

>>6424652
>people still think he was paid per word

[Anonymous No.6424687]

>The first William Faulkner novel I was ever assigned was The Sound and the Fury. For reference, this is a novel that was repeatedly rejected for publication because of how dense it is. The novel begins in a section narrated by a mentally retarded man with no concept of the difference between sensation and memory; every sentence ends with a period (regardless of whether it should be a question or exclamation), and the narrative meanders through 30 years of time as things happening now make him remember things long past. The second section is told by a college student who is rapidly becoming unglued and dives into stream of consciousness, going pages at a time without punctuation.

>I thought that Faulkner was a hack until I was assinged Light in August in college. Light in August is a good example of Faulkner's work, portraying most of his trademark style while *actually being a decent story with a meaningful narrative*.

ugh

[Anonymous No.6424691]

>>6424679
That myth literally gets brought up like a dozen times in the comments I looked at.

[Anonymous No.6424692]

>>6424652
>Dickens could have written that story in half the amount of pages.
REEEEEEEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.6424761]

>>6423342
this is the equivalent of people struggling on youtube comments to determine what the first metal song ever was

[Anonymous No.6424786]

>>6423570
>I'm surprised that a bunch of pseudo-scientists can't figure out psychological novels.
you are?

[Anonymous No.6424808]

>>6424652
>Dickens too wordy

FUCK

YOU

CAN YOU WRITE THREE PAGES BEFORE LUNCH? DIDN'T THINK SO FAGGET

[Anonymous No.6424814]

Not sure if Im happy they didn't mention the classics we talk about or upset that they probably don't even know them.

[Anonymous No.6424815]

>>6423312
That's just your own baseless opinion presented as fact. Prove me wrong faggot.

[Anonymous No.6424817]

So much hate on hemingway for some odd reason.

[Anonymous No.6424845]

>>6424256
>letters
>you actually need to look at them to understand
WTF IS THIS SHIT

[Anonymous No.6424865]

>>6424817
i'll go out on a limb and say it's because of the macho schtick

[Anonymous No.6424920]

>>6423416
lel @ all the other shitkids ITT who think they understand. I think you and me might be the only educated motherfuckers on this whole board.

Would you wanna meet up sometime and discuss 120 Days of Sodom together, maybe have a glass of merlot and listen to Wagner by the fireplace. I'll tell stupid jokes about my time in cambridge, the professors I seduced, and you'll laugh heartily and pour some more wine, pretending you're not a little jealous. Then as it begins to rain outside I'll take you into the Boudoir and fuck every fart out of that sweet little ass

[Anonymous No.6424989]

>>6423855

[Anonymous No.6425019]

>>6423855
> unironically liking 800-page books about cuckoldry

[Anonymous No.6425036]

>>6424652
>book was written in the late 1850s
>typewriter was invented in the 1860s, didn't become popular until about 1900
>it's well known that dickens' quill pen is used by new members of the royal society of literature


>it's just Dickens masturbating over a typewriter