/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7160064]

HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled "Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!" These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that's supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters – any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other's voice, so one gets confused as to who is who.

IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.

HB: But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.
- http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005-10-07-bloom-en.html

Do you agree with him?

[Anonymous No.7160070]

>"I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing."
>mfw that phrase is only used once in the whole book

He's right about the cliches though.

[Anonymous No.7160080]

>>7160070

I have heard a defense in which someone claims it is rather that every action is followed by a cliche not just the stretching of the legs.

[Anonymous No.7160088]

>>7160064
>But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page.

Oh, please.

[Anonymous No.7160093]

>>7160088

In your head canon does Harry and Ron end up together?

[Anonymous No.7160095]

>>7160088

It's true. Nothing happens to them, nothing goes on in their minds other than passive escapism.
>B-but they learn about friendship and imagination and-
Oh, please.

[Anonymous No.7160103]

>>7160095
>Nothing happens to them, nothing goes on in their minds other than passive escapism.

What? How can you possibly make this claim? It's unbelievable to me that people get angry at children - CHILDREN - reading books that are "bad". What are they supposed to read, Ulysses? Who gives a flying fuck? Morons, that's who. Pretentious morons who get their heads stuck up their own asses.

[Anonymous No.7160108]

>>7160103
they're meant to read good kids books instead of shit kids books

[Anonymous No.7160120]

>>7160103
>What are they supposed to read, Ulysses?

He's talked about books that children should read here:
>http://www.mrbauld.com/bloomjr.html

[Anonymous No.7160122]

>>7160088
It's the same way Bloom reads 500 pages an hour lol

[Anonymous No.7160126]

>>7160108
Complete and utter snobbery. Children should be reading for pleasure. They're not going to be going to cocktail parties later and bragging to their peers about what great literature they have read like some faggot.

[Anonymous No.7160135]

>>7160103
I'm not angry at the children. I just think that parents with any taste would introduce their children to books that deal with real world and literary themes rather than "chosen boy harnesses magic and massive inheritance and rich people wizard school to save the day and have relatable experiences at the same time."

[Anonymous No.7160137]

Of course. The thing is, people think hes standing on a treestump screaming these things, trying to stop people from reading Harry Potter. No, reporters ask them their opinion and they give the obvious answer: Harry Potter isn't great literature. What do you want well-read people to say? I think McDonald's hamburgers taste great, but I would expect a food critic to be more discerning than I am.

The problem is that people think opinions are all equal, when really how much you know about a field gives your opinion more or less weight. If you've read only twelve books in your entire life, you may think your favorite one is extraordinarily powerful, innovative, thoughtful, until you read two hundred more and realize your old favorite is actually, in the grand scheme of things, mediocre. Bloom is an experts of literature. You don't have to agree with him, but make sure you're not giving you're not overestimating your own expertise when you disagree.

[Anonymous No.7160139]

So, it is iffy whether or not Bloom is being a snob regarding Harry Potter as shit for kids. BUT his critique should be much more scathing for the large "adult" fanbase for these books. It's disgusting how many people over the age of 20 brag about wasting the time to read the series multiple times instead of picking up something new.

[Anonymous No.7160141]

>>7160135
>introduce their children to books that deal with real world and literary themes

What, so they can write a philosophical treatise? To what end would bother forcing your child to read only "proper" books? How would that introduce a child to the joy of reading? You know, fun? So that later in life they will continue to read, and maybe they'll even read something good. Maybe not.

[Anonymous No.7160144]

>>7160137
A thoughtful, well explained post? On my /lit/? I feel like I should sage just because it feels wrong.

[Anonymous No.7160145]

>>7160141
Are you saying that good books can't be fun?

[Anonymous No.7160149]

>>7160145
No. I'm saying forcing your child to only read certain books is absolutely not fun.

All the kids are reading Harry Potter at school. Your son comes home, says he wants to read Harry Potter. You say no because it's not good enough, and offer him a better book. Do you think the kid is actually going to want to read the book? No.

Would I prefer my kid to read only good books? Of course. But I'm not going to be an idiot like Bloom and bitch when people read books that I don't approve as being "good." That's what idiots do.

[Anonymous No.7160155]

>>7160141
>proper books can't be fun
I can see your parents never introduced you to Kipling, just as an example of someone who writes beautiful adventure stories and poetry suitable to all ages but especially children.

Do you only read such books for the sake of writing philosophical treatises? What one gets out of literature besides enjoyment is the opportunity to examine the inside of someone else's head and see out through their eyes. Harry Potter and similar books don't allow you to do this because the world is formulaic, run by cliches and rules, not the perceptions of a well-written character.

[Anonymous No.7160158]

Wasn't his beef mainly that reading Harry Potter will lead kids into reading bad books as adults? And hasnt this been proven true with YA

[Anonymous No.7160159]

>>7160149
>That's what idiots do.
Actually it's what people who care about the intellectual health of their society do.

[Anonymous No.7160161]

what does harold bloom think about redwall?
those were some fucking boss childrens books imo

[Anonymous No.7160162]

>>7160144
rude

[Anonymous No.7160165]

>>7160155
>proper books can't be fun
I am clearly not saying this
>I can see your parents never introduced you to Kipling
they did
>Do you only read such books for the sake of writing philosophical treatises
no
>What one gets out of literature besides enjoyment is the opportunity to examine the inside of someone else's head
completely subjective
>Harry Potter and similar books don't allow you to do
bullshit
>because the world is formulaic, etc.
I'm not disagreeing with this

[Anonymous No.7160167]

>>7160149
My parents let me read HP but explained the difference between books that are just entertaining and books that enrich you in other ways. They were right.

[Anonymous No.7160175]

>>7160165
>completely subjective
Yes, if you're an idiot you'll fail to understand what certain books offer and inflate the importance of what you see in books that offer less. I read every HP book as soon as it came out and reached this position partly on the strength of that experience.

[Anonymous No.7160235]

Lest anyone should make the mistake of thinking his thoughts on Rowling are all applicable to Tolkien (as they always do in these threads), remember that there is a distinct difference in how he complains about Tolkien:

>For older children, I like J.R.R. Tolkien's original book about the hobbits. I think the blown-up trilogy may be a little overrated. It's so heavily based in gratuitous moralizing. It's top-heavy.

About Rowling he is right. About Tolkien he is also right, if you think moralizing so very tasteless.

[Anonymous No.7160365]

Bloom's take on Harry Potter as literature is accurate. His implied advice to parents and educators is sound. But I cannot agree that Harry Potter and video games are going to leave a child's mind stewing in idleness, passively accumulating into a rough lump predisposed to enjoying no better than Stephen King.

Indeed Potter does not help them any. But I'd not be so fatalistic, because I remember my own youth—sometimes-reader of dead-prose fantasy novels, enjoyer of so-so rock music, player of video games. Everything in my tastes and hobbies spelled that final intellectual death sometime before 30.

No one thing happened to me, forced me to change course. Only, I was occasionally beset by bouts of curiosity. Sometimes that just meant googling 'good headphones', but sometimes that meant reading about baroque music. Something—only God remembers what—urged me in some direction and I went. And one day I happened on a Saul Bellow novel which made me rethink literature and its role in my life thereafter.

Life is long and wide, and there's a lot going on there. Who can say what might set a kid down the right path? It helps to lay useful things in their way, and Harry Potter isn't one of the best things, sure. But more important than urging your boy to read Carroll is teaching him the right ethic that will impel him to do something productive when he spies, or thinks he spies, in the corner of his eye, that inconspicuous gleam of inspiration. He must be taught, over all else, to get up and do something. Bloom doesn't account for general curiosity. It is true that good literature cultivates those same good attitudes which encourage reading, but they also can and do oftentimes come from elsewhere.

So long as life is hard and long and trees are the same variegated colours of green, some people will not have it all dumbed down. I hope that's true, anyway.

[Anonymous No.7160381]

Ramona Koval: You say modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism, both Tolkien and Graham Greene, both Philip Pullman and VS Naipaul, out of respect for the world. Tell me what this horror entails. Why?

Gabriel Josipovici: Well, I think by respect to the world...I mean, the last part of that phrase is something that I touched upon when I was saying that this is not simply a clever modernist trick that springs from a desire to make the reader see that everything that can be said about the world is still going to leave a lot unsaid which is there in the world. So in a way they are trying to make you...just as much as the lyric poets are trying to make you see the world itself as it is out there, and what I was saying there was I think this proliferation of fantasies from Tolkien through to the Harry Potter books and Philip Pullman and so on, is a curious sort of indication of the way in which we would rather just turn away from the world and live in pseudo myths and mythologies, and they are pseudo, they're not the real thing as they were in cultures that really had myths and really believed in them.

[Anonymous No.7160421]

I don't think Harry Potter's great literature, but no, I don't agree with him. I think Potter readers are genuinely getting a lot of out of it. Rowling is no great stylist or philosopher, but she has a great imagination and is a clearly a wonderful storyteller (different from a great stylist). Of course Bloom is gonna think it's crap; he's a lot smarter and a lot better read than the vast majority of Potter fans. That's not a problem. He's dedicated his life to literature. Of course regular folk are going to find great pleasure in simpler, even hackneyed things. Let em. Who cares. Not everybody has to be a lit professor.

[Anonymous No.7160429]

>>7160381
Pullman is Bloom-approved, btw

[Anonymous No.7160891]

>>7160070
>As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times.
what was he thinking saying it that way?

I can't think of a better way to fuck up what might have been up a pretty good point

[Anonymous No.7160926]

>>7160103
>What are they supposed to read, Ulysses?
Finnegans Wake could be read as a children's book actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grJC1yu4KRw

[Anonymous No.7161680]

>>7160421
>but she has a great imagination and is a clearly a wonderful storyteller
lol

[Anonymous No.7162824]

Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.

Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

[Anonymous No.7162908]

>>7162824
>Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous

This is the impression I got as well.

[Anonymous No.7162923]

>Winnie-the-Pooh is a charming and beautiful book. Indeed, you see the stuffed animals on the couch facing me? This is a little duck-billed platypus whom I've named Oscar, in honor of my hero, Oscar Wilde. And this baby gorilla, whom my wife gave me for my last birthday, we've named Gorilla Gorilla. And I've named this wonderful donkey Eeyore. That, I'm sure, will give you an idea of how I feel about Winnie-the-Pooh.

Awwwwww so he isn't made of stone

[Anonymous No.7162960]

who would disagree with bloom other than the pseudo sensitive helicopter parent who cares more for their childs immediate emotion than for their education and development

cant wait for this next generation of soulless computer technicians with excellent dietary habits and fragile untrained bodies

[Anonymous No.7162985]

>>7162960
>who would disagree with bloom other than the pseudo sensitive helicopter parent

well, although I agree with Bloom's point, he gets to it by some intellectual dishonesty. It's hard to say much in response to the person who points out, for example, that "stretch his legs" only occurs once in the first Harry Potter book.

[Anonymous No.7163056]

>>7162960
>who would disagree with bloom other than the pseudo sensitive helicopter parent who cares more for their childs immediate emotion than for their education and development
/r/books

[Anonymous No.7163550]

My favorite part of Bloom interviews is when he starts getting emotional and can barely form a sentence

[Anonymous No.7163577]

>>7163550
He just has to pause from talking for a bit sometimes. He's very old

[Anonymous No.7163597]

>>7163577

No it isn't that.

https://youtu.be/5Th7MV6Odg8

Around 18 minutes, the middle, whenever he speaks of the school of resentment and even near the end he gets worked up and his exasperated gasps that come out of his affected style amuse me endlessly.

[Anonymous No.7163608]

>>7163597
You'd get emotional too if you lived to witness the utter destruction of the discipline you built your life around and love.

[Anonymous No.7164071]

>>7163608
Bloom was, at best, partly responsible for the decline

his lit crit is not great

[Anonymous No.7164194]

>>7160381
>and they are pseudo, they're not the real thing as they were in cultures that really had myths and really believed in them.
What's the big difference with the real thing, exactly? Because I'm pretty sure we're not more disconnected from Tolkien's mythology than, say, Germanic myth, and I know for a fact that we know more about Tolkien's than most mythologies out there. What makes "real" myth more legitimate when we actually have a less detailed vision of it in the vast majority of cases? Hell, how can mythology be called more legitimate when it's by definition a disorganized and often incongruent corpus?

[Anonymous No.7164253]

>>7164194
>Hell, how can mythology be called more legitimate when it's by definition a disorganized and often incongruent corpus?

Internal consistency does not determine legitimacy. If I were to guess what the other anon meant, it would be: that legitimacy is something like the value that myth holds by being a remnant of real human belief. Legitimate myth was genuinely believable, genuinely numinous to the men who believed it. It tells us something about the figuration of the world by ancient peoples. The legitimate myth also passed through many mouths—something of the universal human genius (or at least the genius of the myth-generating culture) has been created in it by that long refining process of repetition, reduction, expansion, error, embellishment, etc.

All of this is to say that a myth can be more "legitimately" a myth by containing all those characteristics for which we value the study of myth. A new set of myths contrived by one man in his study may emulate the feel of real myth, but it does so by conscious artifice, whereas the naturally-occurring myth has come into being organically and its myth qualities are less affected.

[Anonymous No.7164368]

Harold Bloom makes his living telling poseurs what they want to hear. If you genuinely get buttflustered seeing other people enjoy bad art you need perspective. Junk has, and has always had a place. If you take it away people aren't going to magically grow taste out of nowhere, liking Harry Potter is one of the stages along the path to liking good books, and the fact that most people stop there isn't evidence that HP stunted them, it just didn't lift them any higher.

[Anonymous No.7164405]

>>7163597
>>7163597

>the marxists tell me that the smallest human unit is two people...I think that's an idealism. In the end we are alone.

beautiful, really.

[Anonymous No.7164410]

>>7164368
I think though, there is a difference here, between Sontag's Notes on Camp, and 35 million people think HP is a good series or that it has great aesthetic on introductory value as art/literature.

[Anonymous No.7164443]

>>7160926
>oh my back my back my back
it does sound nice, but it is still drivel

[Anonymous No.7164461]

>>7160381
>curious sort of indication of the way in which we would rather just turn away from the world and live in pseudo myth
given the idiotic theories that the literati believe escapist fiction is far superior

[Anonymous No.7165369]

>>7160064
I only read one Harry Potter book but I'd say no, I don't agree with him.
He sounds awfully butthurt. Kind of like /lit/.

[Anonymous No.7166498]

>>7165369
see >>7160137

[Anonymous No.7167248]

>>7160137
What if the difference is like wine testing? Where the critics and experts have internalized metrics that are unrelated to intrinsic quality.

[Anonymous No.7167358]

>>7166498
Most of what Bloom says in op's post is self-evidently wrong to anyone who's read Harry Potter, or purely unsupported opinions.

[Anonymous No.7167512]

>>7164253
>Legitimate myth was genuinely believable, genuinely numinous to the men who believed it. It tells us something about the figuration of the world by ancient peoples.
This isn't absolutely true. Often myth is just explainatory in an allegorical way. There really isn't anything necessarily deep about a story about why the sun sets, it's just a story.

>The legitimate myth also passed through many mouths—something of the universal human genius (or at least the genius of the myth-generating culture) has been created in it by that long refining process of repetition, reduction, expansion, error, embellishment, etc.
The same could be said of our modern fiction, but when people see a work get adapted in some way they get their panties in a knot; don't even get me started on things like fan fiction.

>All of this is to say that a myth can be more "legitimately" a myth by containing all those characteristics for which we value the study of myth.
The problem is that there's no difference between a myth and a work of fiction here; the only diffference is in the reader and their perception of the work.

>A new set of myths contrived by one man in his study may emulate the feel of real myth, but it does so by conscious artifice, whereas the naturally-occurring myth has come into being organically and its myth qualities are less affected.
What tells you myths can't come about as conscious artifice? How many classical writers modified myths to their convenience? How many myths were originated simply by a grandparent telling their grandchildren a story he made on the fly? Myths don't just fall from the sky, they emerge from a very real, very human storyteller who consciously interpretes the world inside a cultural context. This isn't really different from a fiction writer outside the fact the latter's story will be put to scrutiny.

And it's this same idea of the author, as one person, who somehow comes up with everything in complete isolation that's the problem; it's that same idea of fiction being something disconnected from our vital context, and myth being something completely different to fiction, that paves the way to myth-fetishisation. It's that same apreciation of myth being an innocent, natural, almost noble-savage thing that leads to so many vacuous fantasies, because we think of myth as being worth something just for being myth, but in reality what we're looking for is an excuse to put down our critic lenses and just enjoy a story we can connect to. This is what makes fantasy (and myth) appealing; that people can't see the strings because it's a different world.

[Anonymous No.7167735]

>>7167512
>Often myth is just explainatory in an allegorical way
those were rarely the central myths.

>What tells you myths can't come about as conscious artifice?
intuition

>The same could be said of our modern fiction
Not about Tolkien.

>How many classical writers modified myths to their convenience
No classical writer invented a whole pantheon existing independently of existing myth. They would change particulars, or flesh out a story which didn't have much to it, or invent a minor myth. And where it looks as though a writer has invented a whole lot, we often just do not know their source because it is long lost. The picture we have, anyway, does not tell us that writers in antiquity invented myth on anything near the scale that Tolkien did.

They also wrote for an audience that, though they did not believe every myth, they did believe in the gods involved. There was a degree of seriousness which Tolkien's project does not share.

>This isn't really different from a fiction writer outside the fact the latter's story will be put to scrutiny.
It isn't different insofar as we imagine that Milton, for example, is a 'fiction writer'. Or Dante. But, again, we cannot extend this to Tolkien.

>And it's this same idea of the author, as one person, who somehow comes up with everything in complete isolation that's the problem
Nobody's saying that authors do this. What we are saying is that there is a difference in degree of freedom and artistic intent between the writer who adapts or invents a myth about gods which are actually thought to exist, and a writer who is telling a new story about new characters in a new world. Tolkien has no expectation that his story could come to be believed on the grounds of his authority; he also has very little of his own belief to profane in the telling. His story bears nothing on our God, our histories. We cannot say the same about Homer, for example. Homer told stories, maybe invented, maybe adapted, about real gods, stories which would eventually take on religious significance. The two could not and did not tell the same kind of story.

And of course we ought to remember that fantasy thought itself a successor not to myth but to romance.

>just enjoy a story we can connect to
vacuous idea, dead language

If you think you need to defend Tolkien, you're mistaken—I like Tolkien just fine. It is no insult to say his myths are not legitimate. He did not intend them to be legitimate. We only feels them as myths with a sense of irony, if we do at all. Instead, his achievement is an almost entirely novel kind of world-making literature. No small feat.

[Anonymous No.7167801]

>>7164368
But is Harry Potter really 'bad art' or 'junk'? I would have thought it was great children's/young teen literature.

[Anonymous No.7168119]

>>7167801
Bloom's whole point is that it's precisely not great children's literature. It's terrible children's literature. People only say it's great children's literature because a lot of children (and some adults) enjoy it, but children (and many adults) enjoy lots of stupid shit. If we define the ultimate goal of children's literature to be aiding a child's intellectual development, then Harry Potter is useless.

[Anonymous No.7168146]

>>7168119
But Bloom doesn't give a single credible reason to support why he thinks it's terrible children's lit.
Children's lit is not first and foremost designed to aid in a child's intellectual development. That's an incredibly narrow goal. I'd say the development of their imaginative abilities, reading skills, and emotional exposure are what children lit authors strive for more often, and I'm sure HP achieves all of these.

[Anonymous No.7168260]

>>7168146
I don't think a series of books as unimaginative, poorly-written and sentimental as Harry Potter is going to help children much in those respects

[Anonymous No.7168313]

>>7160429
>Pullman
I still hate him for basically killing every single likeable character

[Anonymous No.7168416]

>>7168260
>unimaginative, poorly-written
I don't see any evidence for the latter, and the complete opposite is true for the former.
>sentimental
Why is that a negative? Which Children's books aren't sentimental? How many great adult books are sentimental?

[Anonymous No.7168424]

kind of a weird argument. the text itself is separate from the people who read it. it would be dishonest of him to suggest people don't just scan the pages of 'advanced' novels but obviously it's not worthwhile to judge those novels on people who are accustomed to not engaging with texts

>look into themselves

what kind of meme is this

[Anonymous No.7168456]

>>7168416
>I don't see any evidence for the latter
Filled with dead metaphors and cliches as Bloom says.

>the complete opposite is true for the former
There's nothing imaginative about tacking a bunch of generic magical and mythical elements onto a school setting.

>Why is that a negative?
You're the one who claims it helps children with "emotional exposure", but I don't think crass sentimentality over poorly-drawn characters is going to do so.

[Anonymous No.7168471]

Harry Potter is simple, stupid entertainment for children, and nothing more. One could at least argue that video games help children learn basic motor skills (though they'd be better off riding bikes or playing sports), but Harry Potter helps with nothing.

[Anonymous No.7168600]

>>7168471
This is nothing more than a mindlessly parroted, reassuring fantasy. It really pushes /lit/'s buttons that these books are an accomplished imaginative work that appeals to a young reader's sense of wonder. So we convince ourselves that they 'help with nothing'. I think every single children's book is ultimately simple entertainment, even if it is beneficial to them. I don't see how harry potter can be described as *stupid* entertainment.

[Anonymous No.7168678]

>>7168456
I have no idea what dead metaphor is supposed to mean, and I'd have to see examples of cliches rather than take Bloom's word for it, since it sounds just like the thing he (and /lit/) would want to be true. Anyway, isolating some cliches in a children's book, removed from everything it does well, doesn't make it poorly written.

Even if the magical elements of hp were generic (which isn't even necessarily a bad thing), the entire package is still very much imaginative. I think there is a far more complex relationship of elements that appeal to the imagination of a reader of hp than merely the presence of 'magic things'.

As for crass sentimentality and poorly-driven characters, yet more unsupported assertions that sound like things you'd want to be true rather genuine faults to be found. Again, sentimentality is not automatically a bad thing, especially since it's so prevalent in both children and ('approved') adult fiction. Sentimentality is prime ground for literature; look at the sentimental novel genre.

[Anonymous No.7168694]

>>7168678
>dead metaphor
I meant I have no idea how it applies to those books

[Anonymous No.7168764]

>>7167735
Before you begin reading this longass post, I want to apologize for any further timewaste on the basis of my opinions. I also want to note that, while I’m mostly talking about fantasy, I believe this analysis can also be applied to other similar cases such a science fiction.

>If you think you need to defend Tolkien, you're mistaken—I like Tolkien just fine.
I'm not really trying to defend Tolkien. I'm just using him as an example because he's the biggest presence on this genre we most associate with mythology. What I'm saying is that there's no formal difference between a modern story and a myth, outside of the reader's perception, that can lead to one being called more legitimate than the other.

Imagine I, as an experiment, put out a myth collection of an uncontacted tribe. How would it be received? Would they be judged the same way as if they were presented as what they really were? Obviously not. The content of the work wouldn't be relevant here, only the context. The only reason a fiction story would be perceived as less legitimate than a myth would be due to its context; therefore, calling it more legitimate isn't a measure of anything formal about it being better as a story or work, it's not a valid critical paradigm. Like you said, Tolkien's deed was no small feat, so what's the point of calling it (or any other fantasy work) less legitimate? It's purely prejudice against something that is considered to be "imitative" of another thing that has a tradition and a cultural context where it is relevant to and originating in human life; and so, it is short sighted, because even if the intention of those works would be to be imitative, that same intention comes from a tradition, and what's it copying? Life, of course!

See, the fiction and the myth aren't doing anything differently, is what I'm saying. And before you say people believed in myth, I have to again point out, that a certain object could very well have two (or more) contradicting stories inside a given mythology; mythologies were not organized, well thought out belief systems which any given member of a community would need to know completely, let alone believe literally. So thinking that mythology is more legitimate because people believed them more fervently than we do our stories is wrong twofold; both because it isn’t necessarily true, and because that isn’t something that is part of the thing itself.

So where's the legitimacy then? Well, I can only assume we're talking about the relevance a story has with its current life; now THIS is a good critical paradigm. This is something we CAN judge our stories on. And we can say, again, that fiction has relevance to our life. No one can say a speculative cautionary tale like 1984 is (or was) not relevant to its cultural context; how is 1984 (as a cautionary tale) different from Little Red Riding Hood then? It isn't.

(1/5)

[Anonymous No.7168769]

>>7168764
What’s really making a difference is history. History, as a discipline, makes it impossible for anything else to be perceived as a legitimate telling of the past of a community, at least in a non-subjective way. Sure, you could write the most perfect picture of your own zeitgeist in a novel, but it would never go into the history books. But here’s an interesting thing: it would still (most likely) be written in past tense. Curious, right? It’s almost paradoxical that something everyone involved knows is not the Truth, has in EVERY VERB, a conjugation that tells us that this was indeed something that happened, even when what we’re hearing is something that could take place in a made up world, in the future or the present. And this is EXACTLY the reason why fantasy is so divisive! Because it, especially Tolkienian fantasy, is a simile of history and mythology, and often it’s the detail of the “imagined” history/mythology that it is judged by; it’s the most believable fantasy that can be criticized the least. But in the end it’s not talking about “us”, and it’s not something “they” said, so why should we take this seriously at all, is what the detractors think.

And indeed, most people don’t take it seriously. And therefore we end up with shitty fantasy books being so prolific. Because people don’t take it seriously. It’s the same detraction from fantasy as an illegitimate myth or history that paves the way to it being used wantonly; because it’s “just a story” and therefore it isn’t serious and whatever can happen in it… Again, short-sightedness. Not only is not just a story, given it has its specific context that it could not develop without, nor is it something where anything can happen. Not everything is acceptable in fantasy, not everything steams from the author; in fact, quite the contrary, there are tons of assumptions in most fantasy works, and all come from its cultural context. There are tons of things that are often criticized about a fantasy, and it isn’t a formal criticism I’m talking about. So this parameter by which fantasy is disregarded as illegitimate is also wrong.

(2/5)

[Anonymous No.7168776]

>>7168769
The real parameter by which it is illegitimate is existing outside history. Mythology, while subjective, is still a part of history. It can be wrong about the world, but we can’t fault the communities that it originates from for it, because, to us, they didn’t know any better. Say one finds that for a certain uncivilized people the earth revolved around the sun; we would find those people to have been ahead of their time, or at least, look at them proudly for thinking of something in the right way, the way we think of it now, almost by accident, not unlike one is proud of a child giving its first steps before others, even if they quickly fell after. Now in a fantasy, under scrutiny, this could very easily be taken as the fault of an author trying to make a snowflake people. See, our criticism of the fantasy shows exactly what our preconceived notions of history are! What is seen as an interesting peculiarity in one, is seen as err in the other. Differences are only acceptable in fantasy so long as they are properly explained and serve some purpose. Which is in itself ahistorical, because mythology by definition needn’t be congruent and we don’t have all the facts of history! If we assume that we are talking of fantasy as imitative, then we are purely judging it by our own prejudice! So calling mythology more legitimate in comparison to fantasy is absurd, because what we’re judging it by is our conception of history!

If take history (and science) as not different from mythology, in the sense of it explaining our reality, then it becomes obvious why one would regard fantasy as illegitimate. More to the point, the things about any fiction that bother us can show us exactly what our values and notions of the world are. Oh, it’s just a story, but… they explained electrons wrong! Dinosaurs don’t have feathers in it! They’re showing X group in a bad light while showing group Y as the good guys! People feel the need to point those kinds of things, why? Because they are “wrong”, and we’re not just talking about a story here. Art matters. The very concept of a story having its “facts” right, is part of our conception of the world. Now there are cases where people don’t care about. BUT, they do care about other things. If I can’t understand what the hell is going in a book, but its style is incredible, I’m going to disregard the plot. If a movie has groundbreaking effects but terrible everything else, people are going to watch it for the effects. If a pair of shoes deforms a woman’s feet, but they’re in vogue, you’re still going to see women wear them. These three examples show what we find valuable about things in our present, and the criticism those things might receive are also a thing of our present.

(3/5)

[Anonymous No.7168782]

>>7168776
So let’s go back to Harry Potter for a bit. I have some questions about it: Why do wizards go to school? Why was the magic world separate from the non-magic one? Why was there a chosen one? Why was there a great war? Why did the villain hate people of a different “race”? Why did the story focus so much on “race” purity? Why did it focus on “race” at all? The reason is, our world. Harry Potter is an expression of our world. Calling it illegitimate because it is culturally disassociated from us is incredibly ignorant, because it originates purely from our world.

>vacuous idea, dead language
Oh please, don't be obtuse. It is a fact that people derive pleasure and identify with these stories. The fact that people form fanbases, is a point that makes them all the more obviously similar to mythology.

>stories which would eventually take on religious significance. The two could not and did not tell the same kind of story.
See above. Sure, the authors do not intend it, but they do create fanatics.

>His story bears nothing on our God, our histories.
I disagree. It tells a lot about what we believe, and the fact that they have resonated with so many people tells a lot about us.

>The picture we have, anyway, does not tell us that writers in antiquity invented myth on anything near the scale that Tolkien did.
Those authors had no need or reason to create such stories. If Tolkien had been born a couple millennia ago, he would just have adapted things rather than “create” them. This is purely a formal difference: in Roman times it wasn’t prestigious to create your own “world”, in our time it’s not prestigious to show the world with the wrong facts.

>Not about Tolkien.
Why not? Why are you limiting yourself to names? Sure the stories aren’t exactly the same, but much of Tolkien is taken directly from myth. The underlying tropes permeate all our culture. Even if we’re talking about specific characters or stories, it’s still not a fact that they don’t get passed around. Superheroes are a great example of this, fanfiction is another, you have authors as disparate as Lovecraft and Robert E Howard sharing elements of their stories. The only reason this isn’t more obvious is due to authorship rights, but even then, like I said before, things get readapted all the goddamn time, by different authors, and you have knockoffs of the most popular stories all around. This isn’t very different from the “natural selection” an oral story would go through.

>intuition
Well my personal experience tells me otherwise.

>those were rarely the central myths.
How so? Most myths were explanatory in some way, weren’t they? And yes, religious beliefs, as a part of cosmology, counts as explanatory.

(4/4, woops)

[Anonymous No.7170574]

>>7168764
sorry bro I'm not going to respond to these posts. they are rife with misinterpretation and a lot of plain non sequitur. Your English is littered with dead (and sometimes meaningless) language, which I tried to point out before and you didn't understand me, so I'm not going to waste my time doing it again.

Also, if you need to break it into four posts, you really should have tried harder to be concise. What a mess.

[Anonymous No.7170651]

>They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.

This absolutely

[Anonymous No.7170668]

Completely honestly I believe reading hary potter since elementary school led directly to the victim and superiority complexes I had through middle and high school and am still dealing with.

[Anonymous No.7171307]

>>7170574
>Can't spell non-sequitor correctly.
>Complains about diction while using a term as unespecific and flowery as "dead language".
>Demands conciseness but says nothing at all in his post.
Here, let me chew it down for you:

The only measure by which a story could be called illegitimate in comparison to mythology, is if history (the discipline) is taken into account. There are no aspects that are exclusive of mythology in spite fiction, other than that the latter it is interpreted as "not the truth", because we have history as a separate category from storytelling; storytelling serves its function as a culture propagator and synthetizer just as well as it always was, so calling it illegitimate is baseless.

[Anonymous No.7171344]

>>7171307
>>Can't spell non-sequitor correctly.

[Anonymous No.7171694]

>>7171344
Aw, c'mon. Humour me a tad, will you?

[Anonymous No.7171737]

>>7160126
...go to any cocktail parties lately?

[Anonymous No.7171980]

>meet girl at club
>hit it off
>we grab drinks and find a quiet place to talk
>talk for hours
>she asks me if I like books, I tell her yeah
>she tells me what her favourite books are
>she seems pretty intelligent, and we're both at one of the best Universities in the world so I have high expectations
>"I love Harry Potter and the Hunger Gamees."
>I'm very drunk at this point
>Laugh openly in her face, call her a pleb
Things went south from there.

Sorry, Gen.