/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8126480]

>Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.
Is he right?

[Anonymous No.8126493]

>>8126480
When are these John Green threads going to be a bannable offense?

They're fucking shit.

[Anonymous No.8126495]

>>8126480
Did someone really say something this stupid?

And what gives him the right to define the 'intellectual vocation'? He's like a YA pop fiction writer.

[Anonymous No.8126501]

>>8126495
>copy quote
>paste it into Google
>see who really wrote it

So difficult.

It's Chomsky, you fat fuck

[Anonymous No.8126503]

>>8126501
Whoever this Chomsky is, he sounds like a piece of shit.

[Anonymous No.8126511]

>>8126503
He is.

[Anonymous No.8126515]

>>8126503
Idiots, if you actually read the quote instead of just looked it up and stopped after seeing the name, you'd see Chomsky is using the quote to criticize and describe the mindset and manner of postmodernists, literary theorists, etc.

[Anonymous No.8126520]

>>8126501
"What does it matter who is speaking, someone said, what does it matter who is speaking?'"

And that's some Beckett for you. A dumb quote is a dumb quote, doesn't matter who said it.

[Anonymous No.8126538]

>>8126520
What gives you the right to say it is dumb? You're a shitposter on a vietnamese cartoon forum whereas he has decades of academic experience

[Anonymous No.8126541]

>I believe that our present generation would easily master this danger if they were rightly led. For this generation has gone through certain experiences, which must have strengthened the nerves of all those who did not become nervously broken by them. Certainly in days to come, the Jews will raise a tremendous cry throughout their newspapers, once the hand is laid on their favourite net. Once the move is made to put an end to this scandalous press and once this instrument which is public opinion is brought under state control and no longer left in the hands of aliens and enemies of the people. I am certain that this will be easier for us than it was for our fathers. The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing.

Will nobody stop this man?

[Anonymous No.8126609]

>>8126541
Is John Green /lit/'s Ben Garrison?

[Anonymous No.8126617]

>>8126480
>Shits on Aristotle whenever he can
>Nothing but praise for Thomas Aquinas

...?

[Anonymous No.8126618]

>>8126480
The definition of pseud

>>8126493
I think its important to collect information on, and constantly affirm, why he is bad. One of these a week prevent the whole "W-W-WHY YOU HATE JOHN GREEN SO MUCH LIT" threads

[Anonymous No.8126625]

>the writer is the engineer of the human soul

Profound JG.

[Anonymous No.8127556]

>Video game players essentially choose whether to win the game or die heroically. There's a certain glory in both.

Wise and relevant words...

[Anonymous No.8127566]

Put the quote in context:

"I'll tell you the honest truth: I'm kind of simple-minded when it comes to these things. Whenever I hear a four-syllable word I get skeptical, because I want to make sure you can't say it in monosyllables. Don't forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everyone can understand what you're talking about, you've sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don't understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.

So take what's called 'literary theory' - I mean, I don't think there's any such thing as literary 'theory', and more than there's cultural 'theory' or historical 'theory.' If you're just reading books and talking about them and getting people to understand them, okay, you can be terrific at that, like Edmund Wilson was terrific at it - but he didn't have a literary theory...if someone came along with a theory of history, it would be the same: either it would be truisms, or maybe some smart ideas, like someone could say, 'Why not look at economic factors lying behind the Constitution?' or something like that - but there'd be nothing there that couldn't be said in monosyllables.

In fact, it's extremely rare, outside of the natural sciences, to find things that can't be said in monosyllables: there are just interesting, simple ideas, which are often extremely difficult to come up with and hard to work out. Like, if you want to try to understand how the modern industrial economy developed, let's say, that can take a lot of work. But the 'theory' will be extremely thin, if by 'theory' we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles - you're not going to find anything like that in the social world.

...I mean, it's not that some of these people whose stuff is considered 'deep theory' and so on don't have some interesting things to say. But it's nothing that you couldn't say at the level of a high school student, or that a high school student couldn't figure out if they had the time and support and a little bit of training.

I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren't transparent - because the fact of the matter is that in most areas of life, we just don't understand anything very much. There are some areas, like say, quantum physics, where they're not faking. But most of the time it's just fakery, I think: anything that's at all understood can probably be described pretty simply."

[Anonymous No.8127567]

>>8126618
^ Moron detected.

[Anonymous No.8127574]

>>8126541
I would have never connected it before, but I can totally see John Green being an obsessive Mountain Goats fan.

[Anonymous No.8127619]

>>8126511

[Anonymous No.8127644]

>>8127566
>Criticizes Pseudo intellectualism
>Literally Criticizes the Use of Long Words
>Ends with the phrase "People should be extremely skeptical wen intellectual life constructs structures which aren't transparent." >If you criticized him for this he would say he needed to find a way to express himself exactly not understanding the irony of his entire life.

[Anonymous No.8127651]

>>8127644
Do you literally have autism?

[Anonymous No.8127652]

rhetoric like this serves as a control mechanism for an under-prvodied for global population, telling them their failures are a result of their own inadequacies rather than logistically sad equations sometimes made sadder with human intervention