/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7200672]

Can we agree that allusion is the plebbest literary device? It's literally the literary equivalent of name dropping.

[Anonymous No.7200722]

>>7200672
no

[Anonymous No.7200883]

>>7200672
I think name dropping is the literary equivalent for name dropping.

[Anonymous No.7200919]

>>7200672
>literally the literary
Can we agree that alliteration is the plebbest literary vice? It's liddidaddidah of stuttering.

[Anonymous No.7200939]

>>7200672
Ha, no. And alliteration is, by far, plebbest.

[Anonymous No.7200960]

Can we agree that anacoenosis is the plebbest rhetorical device? It's literally the rhetorical equivalent having no arguement.

[Anonymous No.7200963]

>>7200672
no

[Anonymous No.7201003]

>>7200919
>>7200939
alliteration is the best. surprised /lit/ worships James Joyce but thinks alliteration is plebbest. wat?

[Anonymous No.7201017]

Allusion is bad when the author is intrusively doing it with his/her own voice. It can be great when it's about what sort of art the character likes or identifies with - to me the perfect example is Humbert's love of Annabel Lee.

[Anonymous No.7201039]

>>7201017
you're gonna have to explain what you mean by that

>Allusion is bad when the author is intrusively doing it with his/her own voice.
so like when someone says the fire was like the burning of troy that's a bad thing? Why? Because you don't understand it?
>It can be great when it's about what sort of art the character likes or identifies with
what?
don't understand this assertion at all, unless you are literally talking about comparing a painting to the past
>to me the perfect example (of allusion) is Humbert's love of Annabel Lee.
the love was very weakly alluded to in the first part only, it does set the tone for his early relationship with lo. Yeah I'd probably agree with you that it was well done there

[Anonymous No.7201061]

>>7201039
Just an opinion - it can be done well both ways but in my experience the vast majority of effective allusions come from a place of character instead of from the showiness of the author (the kind of allusion OP was criticizing).

"The fire was like the burning of Troy" (without context of course) seems like a perfect example of an allusion that I would usually hate. In what way is it like the burning of Troy? Just in that it's on fire? How is this specific fire similar to the Troy fire? It pats the reader on the back for recognizing the reference without using the comparison to get at anything deeper, or even to give you a clearer explanation of what kind of fire it was or what it looked like.

[Anonymous No.7201064]

>>7201017
It even can be good if it's the author's voice, it just has to be en pointe.

[Anonymous No.7201066]

>>7200672

Only when it's done for its own sake. As in, to make the author appear clever because they've read other books. When it's done for the sake of intertextuality (like, the author wants to build upon or rebut the ideas of another text) it can be worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.7201076]

>>7201064
Yes allusion is bad when it is gratuitous, the same with name-dropping. If you mention people or allude to things just to prove you know them or to give some reflected glory to your shabby work then they are bad. If you have good reason to allude, they help illuminate what you are saying, they draw interesting contrasts etc. then carry on. The writer though is probably not placed to decide if they are gratuitous or not.

[Anonymous No.7201085]

>>7201061
well yeah, they are just bad allusions though
allusions are only poor when poorly supported, as you said

what most allusions in works that have survived more than 20 years do is draw on some of the readers knowledge to help paint the picture of what is going on
we have an inherent association with the burning of troy as an enormous fire that sends everyone running, with pillaging and raping on the side, and the author can draw on that to make the scene more vivid
even if you know troy is an ancient city it's still useful to know the size

I think you might be seeing allusions and putting too much onto them - probably from a frustration with college professors who read way to far into a simple concept
authors aren't trying to impress you, they are trying to vivify a scene. Works that are complex and hard to read aren't that way because they think it makes them smarter, it's because the ideas are hard to put in simple terms, normally

[Anonymous No.7201093]

>>7201085
I think you might be seeing 4chan posts and putting too much onto them.

[Anonymous No.7201182]

Well, "allusion" is so broad that I'm not sure I can really pass judgement on it. It certainly seems pretty absurd to call it "literary namedropping": I was under the impression that namedropping was literary namedropping, and namedropping is a far less subtle device than an allusion with any thought put into it.

By the way, if the implication was that Finnegans Wake was an exemplar of allusion, I'd disagree with you vehemently there, because its primary device is pun, which does often times assist in making an allusion, admittedly. But Joyce proves to us that the pun is actually the highest of all literary devices, even if it doesn't immediately appear that way.

[Anonymous No.7201470]

>>7201076
>If you mention people or allude to things just to prove you know them or to give some reflected glory to your shabby work then they are bad.
so, Tao Lin.

[Anonymous No.7201609]

>>7200919
made me haha, thanks anon

[Anonymous No.7201645]

Literary allusions are nothing more than inside references between academics and authors so they can feel like they're part of some "secret club" where other people who wouldn't bother with such tedious texts aren't allowed.

>"His sexual urges were tantamount to the whirlpool oblivion within the jaws of Charybdis."
>sarcastic_golf_clap.jpg

[Anonymous No.7201688]

>>7201645
> gold club>book club

[Anonymous No.7201720]

>"Joyce is all about allusions to earlier works"
>implying linear history

[Anonymous No.7201917]

>>7201720
believers in linear history BTFO, I guess. I don't even understand what level of irony we're on anymore

[Anonymous No.7202651]

>>7201093
0/10

[Anonymous No.7202665]

>>7201003
People on /lit/ say a lot of things and hardly ever know why they even said them.

[Anonymous No.7204066]

Can we agree that device literary is the plebbest allusion? It's literary the literally equivalent name of dropping.

[Anonymous No.7204614]

>>7204066
Can we agree that citing literary devices is the plebbest way of analyzing a text? It's literary the literally equivalent name of dropping.

[Anonymous No.7204625]

>>7200672
I read this book last night and experienced ego death.

[Anonymous No.7204781]

>>7204614
this is kind of accurate tbqh

[Anonymous No.7206761]

>>7201645
>this is what butthurt plebs actually believe

[Anonymous No.7206796]

Christ made an allusion to the Psalm 22 with his dying breath, out of recognition of the profound service which rendered unto him.

[Anonymous No.7207034]

>>7201017
I think that allusion in Lolita was really overdone though. It's seriously so frequent it's like reading the book it's alluding to instead of the actual book. And if you didn't read the books he references you're fucked.

[Anonymous No.7207383]

>>7207034
But the repetition reflects Humbert's obsession and self-delusion - that's what I mean, it tells you more about the character.

[Anonymous No.7207924]

>tfw dreamed about adapting Finnegans Wake to a film

[Anonymous No.7207939]

>>7200919
almost woke my baby with laughter

[Anonymous No.7207952]

>>7202665
No I don't.

[Anonymous No.7208031]

What's funny and what so many people don't get about literary allusions is that it's an outdated device. It comes out of a time when cultures were insular and spoke only to themselves and there was a reasonable expectation of common literary knowledge. A time when everybody in a society read the same books.

These periods produced the most revered works in Western literature, and the result is that modern writers have mistaken the allusion to be something that makes their work "literary." In an effort to achieve the immortality of Western literature's greatest hits, writers of the past few centuries have deployed the literary allusion in imitation of the great works of the past.

But it's pathetic because literary allusions, they make any sense anymore. The world's population has exploded, societies are interconnected, there's so much to read, and everybody today varies so much in what they read, that literary allusions are mostly failures. Today, pop-culture allusions are the old literary allusions. Pop culture is what unites us, not The Bible or Paradise Lost. And that's why The Simpsons is more intelligently and effectively allusive than any novel ever published.

Finnegans Wake is a the ultimate expression of a tiny insular literary culture talking to itself amid wider world events. It means something to about 13 people, and that's what Joyce wanted. It's what modernism wanted, it was the whole point, as a response to mass culture. And ever after we've seen ambitious young men trying to earn their way into the club, falling prey to the oldest psychological trick in the book: they mistake exclusivity for value. If you withhold something from people, suddenly it becomes very interesting. It's why everybody is dying to see Pynchon's face in high resolution even though he's just some old ugly guy. So Joyce spends the last years of life writing goobledygook as a final reading-comprehension test for people who've read everything. I'd call it self-parody, and a parody of a whole bankrupt literary movement, but that'd be giving the guy too much credit. Finnegans Wake is the worst book of all time, and it's a testament to the literary world's dishonesty and spinelessness that a soul on this Earth takes it seriously.

[Anonymous No.7208044]

What's funny and what so many people don't get about literary allusions is that it's an outdated device. It comes out of a time when cultures were insular and spoke only to themselves and there was a reasonable expectation of common literary knowledge. A time when everybody in a society read the same books.

These periods produced the most revered works in Western literature, and the result is that modern writers have mistaken the allusion to be something that makes their work "literary." In an effort to achieve the immortality of Western literature's greatest hits, writers of the past few centuries have deployed the literary allusion in imitation of the great works of the past.

But it's pathetic because literary allusions, they don't make any sense anymore. The world's population has exploded, societies are interconnected, there's so much to read, and everybody today varies so much in what they read, that literary allusions are mostly failures. Today, pop-culture allusions are the old literary allusions. Pop culture is what unites us, not The Bible or Paradise Lost. And that's why The Simpsons is more intelligently and effectively allusive than any novel ever published.

Finnegans Wake is the ultimate expression of a tiny insular literary culture talking to itself amid wider world events. It means something to about 13 people, and that's what Joyce wanted. It's what modernism wanted, it was the whole point, as a response to mass culture. And ever after we've seen ambitious young men trying to earn their way into the club, falling prey to the oldest psychological trick in the book: they mistake exclusivity for value. If you withhold something from people, suddenly it becomes very interesting. It's why everybody is dying to see Pynchon's face in high resolution even though he's just some old ugly guy. So Joyce spends the last years of life writing goobledygook as a final reading-comprehension test for people who've read everything. I'd call it self-parody, and a parody of a whole bankrupt literary movement, but that'd be giving the guy too much credit. Finnegans Wake is the worst book of all time, and it's a testament to the literary world's dishonesty and spinelessness that a soul on this Earth takes it seriously.

[Anonymous No.7208167]

>>7208044
I don't think I agree with everything in this post but I do think it's a damn good post and I'm glad you wrote it

[Anonymous No.7208392]

>>7208044
Read Nietzsche.

Rest of /lit/: read his post.

[Anonymous No.7208417]

>>7208044
I think you missed the point. It's dada, and very good dada at that. I would assume from this you're not a Dali fan.

[Anonymous No.7208502]

>>7208044
I don't agree with you at all, you are taking a very insular look at literature
have you even read anything post-ww2? You act like the literary world just fell apart and tried to mimic the earlier movements but they evolved and changed and added humor

literature doesn't get better or worse over time, the good novels always adress some part of the human condition and discovering oneself
you are looking at everything far to simply and cynically, wishing for a past that wasn't even that good. don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of romantacism and modernism but literature changes over time and there's nothing wrong with that

nobody tries to make their work "literary", they try to examing what makes us human and how we function, you deciding game of thrones represents the past 50 years of writing notwithstanding

you just need to read better works, really

[Anonymous No.7208543]

>>7208502
>literature doesn't get better or worse over time
>the human condition
>discovering oneself
You severely need an antidote for all that romanticism.

[Anonymous No.7208652]

>>7207924
>tfw have The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly stuck in my head for a week

[Anonymous No.7208665]

>To anyone who knew and loved the Christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous.
>tfw HCE is supposed to be Bill Cosby

[Anonymous No.7209344]

>>7208665

Well now, Joyce did believe his great work to have certain vaticinatory powers. There's also a passage in there about the Nike sportswear company, for example

[Anonymous No.7209623]

>>7208044
Pretty narrow view of the use of the device. It wasn't just some membership card to the kool kids klub, it was also a way to open a dialogue between other important works and their ideas, or a reinterpretation of those ideas in a fictional format.

The entirety of Paradise Lost for examples, is dialogue between Miltion, the Bible, and the rest of the human race. It's his attempt to justify God to himself, and us, by examining the Fall of Man and the Fall of Satan through the poetic lens. He gives us intimate insight into the Bible, and uses other works of fiction to help build his case.

I've often heard allusion described as a giant intertextual conversation, wherein authors can speak to one another across time and space through their work, and it's something I generally agree with.

While you're correct in saying that many people use it as a device to gain legitimacy, I'd say that just because many novelists just aren't very good, and imitate without proper analysis of what they're copying.

I also take issue with your assertion that "pop culture" unites anything. Considering that the phrase covers so many different topics and different things, especially taking into account the massive number of niches that exist within it that operate independently of each other, often without knowledge of the other.