/lit/ - Literature

The most we can demand of any system is internal consistency. Science paints a picture of the universe that is necessarily and always lacking in consistency. Thus science is always incomplete. Dawkins, Dennet et al. posit a religion of reason, founded in science. If reason is allowed to contemplate the abstract universe of the scientist though, it finds incompleteness and meaninglessness, and its conclusion can only be suicide. The new atheists are Nietzsche's passive nihilists. They will an end to everything, but wouldn't dare bring it about. Interesting that they perfectly mirror the active nihilists of our time, religious fundamentalists in their rhetoric and methodology.

>>640783
What did you have in mind specifically? I just finished a collection of all his short stories and none of the work in there matches your description.

Y'all will enjoy this. I just know it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5LkDNu8bVU&feature=related

It will be useful,in doing this, to introduce the notion of the right action for an agent in given circumstances.

Consequentialism and its Critics

So boring. Shoot me now.

The tragic hero tends to bring about his own demise. Focus on that I think. Also read TS Eliot on Hamlet.

>>569303
/lit/ needs a report option for uninformed ignoramus.

>>569255
Slavoj Zizek's earnest return to modernism is something that I endorse whole-heartedly. It is time to stop equivocating and masking our intentions and feelings with irony and cynicism, it is time to act.

"I want to sound smart, but don't want to read books."

>>568380
My blood boils with modernist rage at such an ignorant comment.

>>568355
Ugh. This.

>>558518
The gospel of Mark and the Q source existed as written documents likely within 20 years of Jesus' death.
>>558415
I know it's kinda weird and like, a terrible justification for lots of atrocities and wrong-headed thinking, but I think its worth reading so you can understand 19th-c German thinking. Israel has a covenant with God. Israel breaks covenant. God sends prophet. Prophet tells Israel God is not pleased. Israel kills prophet. God smites away.
The Christian contribution to this dialectic is in conceiving of Jesus as the last prophet. His coming will bring about the 'kingdom of God' on Earth, and end Jewish salvation history once and for all.

You can see echoes of this pattern in Hegel and Marx in particular. Thesis (covenant), Antithesis (breaking of covenant), Synthesis (renewed covenant) and so on and so on. Absolute Spirit in that sense could be understood as the kingdom of God. Marx as well sees communism as the end of history, of God's tumultuous relationship with the world.

It's important to realize that bible scholarship originated in 18th-c Germany and that all the philosophers from Germany in the 19th-c were brought up in schools in which this kind of redaction criticism was popular, so they all had it deeply instilled in them.

So, read the bible.

My favourite Deleuze essay is "What can a Body Do?" is it in that collection?

>>506383
Actually slavery wasn't truly abolished until late in the 1960s

No Goethe!!!!!!!!?????

Pity is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the sufferer.
Terror is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause.

Isn't paradise lost written in blank verse? oh yeah it totally is.

and of course I misquote eliot once again.

Is it the scent from a lady's dress
That makes me so digress?

Any sentence in which the word "eldritch" appears.

>>499527
His next book is out this summer, "Living in End Times" but I have to finish sublime object first ahhhhhfbehung

Also man, don't go looking for help revising your work in a place like this. Find someone you respect, and ask their perspective on your story, bearing in mind that the more specific they get, the less valid their criticism will be. Ultimately, you know whether you have written a good story, you are just looking for a little push to finish it up and that's fine, but don't be all "I'm looking for literary criticism u guise!" because you are just going to get assholes telling you to make it "spicier". You don't need other people to believe in you when you believe in yourself.

>>499475
Deliver dude.

>>499501
I have a book edited by Walter Kaufman with a number of different existentialist readings in it. He includes Kafka and Sartre but only Camus' Myth of Sisyphus (which is a stupid essay imo)

Fantastic story man. I loved every word.