/lit/ - Literature

>>3007347

I would like to add that I think he will be seen as very influential in time because future thinkers will have to relate to the paradox he is so fascinated with.

I'd stay away as the others would.

In fact, I do think his influence is great, and with time will be even greater, but he is a sort of philosophical troll. His point is basically that meaning is unstable. You can make anything mean anything as long as you know where you want to go.

For instance, he would say (though in much less reader friendly language), that a gift is impossible because the giver will always feel good about themselves if they give something away to someone. His entire ouvre is him proving this concept over and over again, on different things. Everything from the definition of poetry, to marxism.

If you can live with the headache, it has a certain poetic quality, but there's really no use spending your time on this otherwise.

It's not that bad.

If you really get into what she's saying, and are not so unfortunate as to be bit by the bug, you'll probably find it disturbing. Among other things, she vouches for an objective world. How she as a subject can tell, is one of many things that puzzle me. Despite her politics also focusing on the individual, they are strangely collectivistic. I'm pretty sure the overall economy would flourish in such a society, but the unlucky ones would suffer madly.

But her prose is fine, and there's something very charming about her impossibly stout characters doing impossibly stout things. They hold 50 pages long speeches, and offer to fix torture machines when they break on them.

Atlas Shrugged is the epic, but I think most people would get all they need from The Fountainhead.

>>2243914

Because, 1Q84 is really about us. There aren't two moons, but you have no fucking idea where your breakfast comes from; and there are perhaps no private detectives that have to die for you to be allowed to love and make sense of your life, but your government is most likely helping kill people who are trying to make sense of their lives by destroying our way of making sense of our lives (like the privat detective was) down in Iraq.

So yeah, that's my take on 1Q84. Great novel. Probably my ... second- or third-most favorite of him. I like Norwegian Wood the best.

I think when people accuse 1Q84 of being to verbose, they misunderstood. It's very typical of its time, really. With those people protesting on Wall Street, all the 60s nostalgy everywhere from on TV shows to in fashion, that Karl Ove Knausgård guy in Norway redoing the Marcel Proust thing, Jonathan Franzen writing realistic literature and no one laughing at him -- Metamodernism, ladies and gentlemen.

As I understood 1Q84 it's not verbose, it's basically an attempt at doing one of those big Russian novels from the 18th century today. That's why it has that heavy, dragging structure with long chapters describing the characters lives in details; and when Murakami, almost as if he's like Dostoevsky being paid per page, in the third volume goes out of his way to tell the reader, if the reader doesn't know, that lettuce should never be frozen, as it loses its crispiness, and that's the whole point of lettuce -- there's nothing more to say.

But then, of course, between the 18th century and today there is postmodernism and even modernism. You can't do it completely like then. So he does try, like Tolstoy, to end on a note that tells you how to live your life, and what matters in life, but you. Can't. Just. Preach. In. Literature. In. 2010. No one will take you seriously. Hence the whole thing with the private detective to complicate the whole love-as-a-religion thing, since he had to die for them to be able to find a way to make our extremely complicated, post-industrial society make sense.

As for self-rightousness, I think Holden to a certain degree knows he's phony too. He's just playing tough for you. He doesn't resent the phonies. He's just scared, doesn't feel like he fits in, and he's trying to rationalize it away, mixing it up with what he would like the world to be like: Pure, simple; there are after all no identity problems when you are a child. In truth, he's oversensitive and loves everyone. The part in the train when he says nice things about someone he officially dislikes, and refuses to understand that he in truth loves everyone, but just doesn't fit in and feels something is wrong, is a key here.

(I think.)

>>1857271

I guess I can understand that many dislike Holden. You're put into the mind of someone. You don't see what he acts like to function with lots of different people, you see how he sees the world, the processes behind his acts. And to a larger degree than say your usual don't-mind-that-this-cheerleader-here-has-Franzen's-vocabulary, or Lolita, conciously not written for potentially real Humberts. If you thus see things completely differently, I guess I could see how you could experience Holden as whiny, worrying so much about things that don't matter to you; or even seeing him as offending, attacking things you think are right. Us who do feel like him, we see someone voicing the things no one ever voices just for that reason. To us, it's pure, lovely communication. It's life support, columning, at it's best, most intimate.

I mean, sometimes I feel down, right? What I'll do is open up a random page and just. Feel better.

The Catcher in the Rye, as I try to put words to my liking of it, is like if there was a band you really liked, literature, and the best parts were the flute solos, communication, whilst they for some reason kept doing lots of other things, not seeing what really mattered in their music. Then one day they suddenly finally realized it's them goddamn flutes, and made an album knowing that, centered around them flutes.

That's The Catcher in the Rye.

(I think.)

<3

>>1857270

I don't think The Catcher in the Rye is a parody of a teen or a smug social commentary. I think reading about Salinger makes it pretty clear that his sentiments, if further evolved, were very similar to Holden's. In any case, one of the first things Holden tells you is that the type of books he likes the most, is the ones where you feel like the main character is your friend after finishing it. Later, when sleeping over at his teacher's, his teacher comforts him, saying that he will one day be able to write down what he felt like so that other people will understand that someone felt just like them at some point, and feel better. Thus, like with any literature, The Catcher in the Rye is saying, It's gonna be okay but in contrast to most books doesn't bother disguising it.

The first time I read it I started crying several times. First when he meets the mother of a guy that he doesn't really seem to like, but still tells her lots of nice things about him. I know exactly how that feels. And then the whole ending segment. Also, the phony concept really hits me as well. I feel strange when I see people my age drinking and driving cars, and I can't stand that there's is never anything that seems completely right to do, like how saving playing children from falling off a cliff, being a catcher in the rye, would seemingly be. Supposedly world saving youth organizations are just social get-togethers with an excuse, and even in daily life, knowing what's right and not is impossible when you start picking things apart in a world that seems really complicated.

The Catcher in the Rye might be my favorite novel.

Jonathan Franzen, apparently with DFW's agreement, thinks that literature for the most part has lost it's social significance. Take The Corrections's seemingly realist prose, but then how it in the end just suddenly ebbs away like a song on the radio or something, drawing no conclusions. It's not its role to do anymore. News, papers and so on fulfull this role in a much flashier, better, relevant and faster way in today's society.

In his essay, which I don't remember the name of but which is in his collection How to Be Alone, he draws from a sociologist's research. Few-to-none suddenly become readers, say in a grown age. They start out as children and to a varying degree do it throughout their life. It's a kind of community they are never far from connecting to, where there is always some kind of purpose to be found, communication to be experienced. Much like a religion it works as a column, a supporting structure, in people's lives.

(Some people need this column more than other people. Eventually, as with any kind of communication, they feel a need to speak back to it. These people become writers. When Franz Kafka says he didn't write because he wanted to, but because he had to, I think that was what he meant.)

>>1731180
>>1731181

I think you're being condenscending. There are different ways of putting things. You could just as well say that The Lord of the Rings is about how some races are just evil, or that American Psycho is a pathetic, communist pipe dream. Of course, you might have intended to be, in which I case I guess I respect that.

The Catcher in the Rye means a lot to me.

At the start of the novel Holden talks about how the type of books he likes the most is the books that make him feel like he's friends with the people it's about, and who he afterwards almost feels like he could call up and ask to hang out with. Later the teacher he has the misunderstanding with when sleeping at his home, talks about how Caulfield will one day grow up, and maybe write books like that himself, share what it felt like to be living at a time, dealing with his problems, and resonate with someone else who in the future will feel like he once did. Help them.

Sure. There isn't really any direct, intended message in the novel; like, this is what the world should be like, or this is what the world shouldn't be like; or this is what the world might be like; it's just communication, an attempt at creating a feeling of personal connection in an impersonal world; and as for example David Foster Wallace and more and more contemporary writers say, that's what literature is all about. Especially when things like movies and the Internet can now tell stories and share information in much more effective and flashy ways than a book ever can. You might disagree. You might never have felt like Holden Caulfield, and probably never will; and you might thus not be able to identify with Holden Caulfield. But it's not far from the case of me not being able to identify with characters in true existentialist novels at all. I've tried everything from A Personal Matter to The Stranger, and though I understand what is attempted to be said rationally, it's a completely cerebral thing for me. So I don't like them.

>>1731163

The Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, had me teary-eyed several times. You might not get what's touching about someone lying to a mother on a train or a whiny kid arguing with his sister, but the same way I'm not familiar with Sartre's nausea, you're not with this. That's one of the things that make The Catcher in the Rye so good for those who, so to speak, it is for. Namely, it does not necessarily try to appeal to anyone. You know that pleasure when you say something, not expecting anyone to get something that's in what you're saying, and someone reacts to it, and you feel a connection? A lot of the novel is a lot like that.

As for why it's so popular, aside from it in truth being a really really good novel, there are the controversies which always help, and then of course the state of the times of its release. Closing in on the hippies of the 60s, Caulfield's feelings about our phony world probably resonated far more with most people than they do today. Another thing is the fact that it in a way started a new way of writing young adult fiction. Though it was in truth written for adults, its popularity among youth opened up for a type of fiction for those age groups that was not afraid to deal with how matters actually were, instead of writing it like parents thought it was. With stuff like Looking for Alaska and The Perks of Being a Wallflower being everywhere today, it's not unreasonable to say it's a very influential work.

No. I do not feel that way. Him being a Christian actually makes a lot of sense.

Together with his friend Jonathan Franzen, what he is first and foremostly concerned about, is writing something meaningful in a postmodern world. Postmodernity has pretty much put us in a position where nothing is true outside its context. Colloquially, everything is relative.

>For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then the time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs And things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house to, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house.

How can you write a socially important novel in such a world? How can you ever know you're doing the right thing in such a world? The first thing is what bothers Jonathan Franzen the most. Take The Corrections where he attempts to write one, with lots of important themes and stuff, but eventually, without reaching any conclusions, just ebbs out in a sad resignation to the world.

>>1435639

Still don't believe me? Hipsters. You can postmodernistically deconstruct them by saying they, in their attempt at being unique, all look alike; but again as with blogs and social networks, they are sincere in their attempt to be unique, their nearly romantic belief in the individual which would make Derrida turn in his grave. That we live in the time of new sincerity is as easy to see as it was for people, with the hippes everywhere, to know that the 60s was a time where boarders and limits were broken in the fashion of postmodernism.

Lastly, the final blow, James Bond movies. Remember the ones from the 90s and such? James Bond wasn't a human being. He was a movie character, and he knew it. It was about as postmodern as you get it. But look at the new ones with Daniel Craig: Realistic, "sincere" camera use, dirty fights, and a James Bond who doesn't care what he drinks when he's sad because he's a real human being and not a living icon.

Those are at least my thoughts.

>>1435624

Though this is disputed, I do not believe we are in postmodernism anymore. I think what we are in now is some kind of sincerism, "New Sincerity".

As a reaction to the irony, sarcasm and extreme scepticism to everything we're living in a world where people are reacting to this by trying to be sincere.

The result of this we see in for example blogs and on Facebook. The postmodern deconstruction of these phenomens would be that it's fake, that they are constructing their identities and so forth; but the act itself is pure sincerity. These people are trying to express themselves.

Meanwhile we have new sincerist writers such as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is trying to write a realistic, socially useful novel. After postmodernism has set everything a part. The end result is kind of sardonical, but he's still sincerely trying. So is David Foster Wallace though he, on the surface, might strike you as just another Thomas Pynchon who is kinda the embodyment of postmodernism: "Nothing makes sense, why not just worship it, and laugh ourselves to death while feeling intelligent."

Modernism was an artistical reaction to industrialization. Imagine England like Charles Dickens puts it and ask yourself, not knowing any other world, if you wouldn't rather maybe perhaps live another way? Maybe the result of the age of enlightenment, the trust in rationality isn't going to get us a better world.

What do we do then?

People tried to find new ways to understand and do things.

For example Picasso who thought that a photorealistic portrait was phony, prefering to draw people from several different angles at the same time; or Marcel Proust who tried to write down his entire life in an attempt at understanding it.

In the 1940s Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the king and queen of modernism, both met their end: Woolf filled up her pockets with stone and jumped into a river, whilst Joyce was universally panned for a work that took him 16 years to write, the infamously unreadable Finnegans Wake, before dying.

Then came the nuclear bomb, cold war, environmental dangers, and most other modernists shared similar faiths as Joyce and Woolf did; for example Hemingway shot himself, Ezra Pound and Knut Hamsun went fascist.

Their attempt at finding a new way to think that would lead humanity into a better world, in contrast to the even worse world we had come into, lead into what you could call a hysterical breakdown: Postmodernism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdDbktVKUI

As the grounding pillar of the whole movement is scepticism to any attempt at fully understanding anything it's difficult to define it. And that, in itself, is, in my opinion, one of the better ways of defining it. A postmodern philosopher might for example conclude that it's impossible to state any truths as the conclusions are all part of bigger processes, whilst a postmodern writer might write a book that bends every rule just for the sake of bending it.

The thing with most pre-1900 stuff that are still read today is that most of them are pretty pretty pretty long, and, if you can't get a fairly modern translation, pretty weird to read.

DON QUIJOTE is in any case a pretty light read, though it's very long, but people are often very surprised to find out that it's a lot of fun. It's also considered by many as the first novel ever written, so that's very interesting. It's about a guy who reads so many books about heroic knights that he thinks he is one, and thus rides around trying to fight windmills. It's not just about that. At one occasion they for example stop at an inn, find a short story in it inside a bookshelve or something, and then you have three chapters about something completely else. Pretty cool, fun and also a novel that in some way or another "carries" most things written after it.

If you're interested in getting a bit more cheaply away from it, you can get some prototype modernism shorties at the very edge of the 18th century; more specifically Knut Hamsun. Though it's a very emotionally draining read, at least I thought it was, HUNGER is roughly a hundred-and-fifty pages long. Its literary merit lies in Hamsun's dedication to a completely new way of looking at the individual. No longer is he seen from the outside like in realism; rather we get to be inside the character's head as he talks with himself, makes up silly words, falls in love, and HUNGERs for food : 3

Another option is MYSTERIES which is particularly cool if you like that stranger-coming-into-a-bizarre-town-trying-to-figure-out-what's-up-thing, and PAN if you like the type of romantic frustration The Sufferings of Young Werther and Romeo and Juliet evoke.

My last suggestion is Leo Tolstoy's THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH. It's Tolstoy, who most people think is fun, except that the whole thing is only a hundred pages or so. Awesomeawesome.

Good luck picking something!

Hope I helped : 3

>>1344732

I'm sorry. But I think it's my name. I think, if you weren't expecting me to be melancholic all the time, you'd appreciate the laughs more... It's just that I wouldn't feel good about suddenly using a different name.

I can at least take comfort in knowing I've given it my best. If it's not up to your prefered standards, I can do nothing but apologize again...

>>1344679

I'm here all the time, I just usually forget to input my name unless I put any effort into whatever I'm posting.

I don't understand that part about MS Word and being lazy, but I'm very sorry if my presense bothers you .__.

If there is every anything I can do for you to make up for the harm I've caused you, just tell me, and I'll do my best. I really don't want any fighting or anything like that.

>>1344691

Well I think that everything is a simplification. Even words at their most basic level are just metaphors for their real life counterparts. So simplifications are the only way to communicate. OP also asked about literary modernism, and not postmodernism, so I didn't aim to write that much about that, just attempting to show "the end" of modernism quickly, so it was kind of purposly simple.

You say "oversimplification" though, so maybe you're right. Maybe I did run out of steam, and if did I'm sorry, but I did try my best...

>>1344667

Most of the modernists went very far with their attempts at dislogding from what they deemed as an unsatisfying way of understanding the world. Some of them went nazi, and others killed themselves. After World War 2, a cold war, and an even more complex society this identity crisis led to what you can call hysteria: Postmodernism. Everything is permitted, and nothing is true nor false; we're just fucking around.

I don't think this will last forever though. Rather I think things have already started to change. My bet's on so-called New Sincerity.

It's a general mood in late 19th and 20th century literature where writers try to break away from the established frames of how the world is understood. To put it simply you could say it's experimental literature, typical for being distrusting of former ways deeming the results of it, industrialization and its alienation of people among other things, negative.

An example from modernist art is Picasso thinking that the photorealistic way of painting is phony, and instead attempting to for example draw human faces from several different angles at the same time giving us his famous fragmented portraits. Another one who does something similar is Edvard Munch who instead of trying to depict how an evening in Oslo actually looks, instead also puts in the dread he sees in people by smearing their faces out, painting few details and giving them skeleton-like looks.

Likewise lot of modernist poets broke away from the established forms of poetry, instead opting for a free form that allowed them to make things as they wanted; and writers tried to depict reality in new ways, deeming the realistic, what we would now call movie-like, way of attempting to catch reality misfunctioning. For example one could look at Kafka's The Metamorphosis as a self-biography. If he had just written out that he had a bad relationship to his family, and that he felt that he was a burden, that wouldn't really help us feel how that is; so instead he depicted himself as a giant bug. Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun on the other hand wrote things one usually doesn't write about trying to show people as they truly are; for example giving us insight to humorous conversations he has with himself in front of a mirror and by giving us direct access to his streaming, wild thoughts.

Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky is kind of... phony and unbelievable in terms of the main character doing things that in real life would have him completely socially freezed out while in the book he's still getting laid; but I mean it's about this oversensitive teen, and he's growing up, and stuff happen to him, and you get touched, and he's obsessed with this girl, and you identify, and you read his thoughts on pop-cultural stuff that was in during the 90s, and he says "if you want to know the truth" more times than Holden Caulfield did in The Catcher in the Rye which is a clear influence on it, but then again is there a single young adult novel that's not influenced by The Catcher in the Rye? I think there is, but at least this one very clearly is.

I think it fits what you're looking for in any case.

>>1341430

The next one, Xenocide, kind of went on forever and I didn't really like it that much. Though I guess it was okay. Somehow never even finished Children of the Mind, and the Shadow books I don't really know anything about. So yeah, I don't know, but you should at least check out Speaker for the Dead.

But though I dig these two books you should still know that the author has some pretty unpleasant views about several things. I won't tell you what to do, but you might want to know that he's a board member of the National Organization for Marriage which wants to stop the legalization of gay marriages, and he has claimed that people who become homosexual become so after being molested or abused. He has also said that every nation that accepts gay marriages is a mortal enemy of his, which means he's technically, at least if you want to look at it like that, in war with, among other countries, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Spain. He has also written this book about a new American civil war where it's left versus right, and I probably don't need to say who the good guys are.

In other words, if you think he's a meany, maybe getting it from your library or downloading a PDF would be a better option. Of course you might even agree with him and know this from before, I don't know, but there you have some more information, which if it doesn't bother you politically, at least gives you some background of him which I guess some people like to have of authors when they're trying to understand them.

The sequel is about as awesome as Ender's Game, but in a very different way. It's this science fiction crime thingy exploring moral issues on this religious colony with aliens on them, and the tone and everything is very different. You might want to skip the next paragraph as I'm going to say what it's about, though I don't think you care; there aren't many people who don't want to know *anything* about something they're going to read; but still, just in case, I'm telling.

It takes place several thousand years after Ender's Game because Ender's been travelling the galaxy, and because of faster-than-light travelling he's still just in his 30s or so. He's accompanied by the Internet, I think, which has somehow become a concious being, and he's trying to solve a murder case. Ender, you see, has become a Speaker which is something like a secular priest that travels the galaxy, researching the lives of dead people, and holding speeches about them, trying to summarize their lifes, at their funerals. To do this, for this murdered person on this one specific colony, he has to explore the society at this space colony, understand the people who live there and the aliens that shares the planet with these colonists, while still trying to deal with his past and feeling bad about it.

Just to let you know that it's very well thought out, and not just a forced sequel, the writer actually thought this novel out before he wrote Ender's Game which was just meant to set the background for the character in this one, yet somehow ended up becoming more successful.