/lit/ - Literature

>>2027308
>lassize faire

Nope.

Also (and I'm saying this as someone who loves writing and wants to write, and as someone who thinks that the treatment of humans in the USSR was unconscionable) Ayn Rand didn't know shit about hard work. She was a writer, and her writing was little more than masturbatory ranting. It was not the product of hard work, or an enduring spirit, or any other such noble trait, but simply one woman's self-centered ideas sold to the public at a fortuitous moment in human history.

>NO LOGAN, YOU ARE THE CHAOS GODS
>AND THEN LOGAN WAS A NURGLING

>>1993324
The last book is depressing, but it's also incredibly wonderful in its own right.

OP, this guy is right in saying that the last book retroactively affects the previous 4. Once you've read Mostly Harmless, the rest of the series changes, but it's still very much worth reading.

I'd recommend taking a break after book 4, savoring it, letting it settle in. After a week or two, go ahead and leap into Mostly Harmless.

>>1957592
I figured he couldn't have witnessed their deaths, else Harry would have seen the creepy ponies.

Think about this, though: Harry's in his crib, his mother runs in crying, says she loves him dearly, all that jazz. Voldy comes in, and in her last act as a mother, Lily turns him away so he won't see his own mother cut down.

That's how I picture it, at least.

>>1957585
Harry didn't necessarily witness their deaths, his infant eyes only saw some of the aftermath, and then Voldemort firing the spell.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I was hoping I would. It's a solid story in and of itself, and the tech stuff was a good balance between extant tech and near future material. However, the writing could be very frustrating, particularly anything involving the protagonists oh-so-cool-but-oh-so-quirky girlfriend with her granny glasses and her hot sauce obsession. She's so obviously a wish-fulfillment character, which is especially problematic in a story that's already about a kind of awkward young kid falling into the role of super-freedom-fighter #1.

Further, the way Doctorow frames the debate over freedom of speech is childishly absolute. He pokes fun at the notion of "illegal numbers" in programming, but fails to note that malware and illegal pornography, as programs and files, are representable as numbers. I was particularly frustrated when, late in the book, the hero is debating the free speech issue with the rest of his class, including their cheerfully artificial govt-sanctioned teacher and the fish-faced bully who doesn't know shit, and the bully actually brings up the fact that child pornography is speech that isn't protected, and the hero just runs right by it without a proper response. I got frustrated with Doctorow throughout the novel because I basically agreed with a lot of what he was saying in terms of protecting people from bureaucratic abuse, and I liked that his characters were making realistic use of more secure, non-corporate technology, but his portrayal of the debate, and really, the government as a whole was laughably simplistic

Really disappointing read, and I lost a little respect for the guys who threw out those little, ecstatic blurbs.

>>1947578
>Moore doesn't write fiction

Er, yeah, he does.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Fun Home by Allison Bechdel
Asterious Polyp by David Mazzuchelli
Aloft by Chang Rae-Lee
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

>>1947568
There's also this board, though, where we can more easily discuss the multitude of literary merits exhibited by comic books as a medium.

>>1947571
It's because he's trolling you.

>>1947529
...

Eh.

Then by your own definition, the written elements of comic books would be literature. If you think they don't count because the writing is incomplete without the art, then you would be saying that any unfinished novel is not literature.

Furthermore, since the definition you've put forward stipulates nothing about the "completeness" of individual works, comics would still be literature.

Unless you've changed the definition to suit your purposes...

>>1947488
Why is it non-negotiable?

>>1947473
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/literature

Not the only definition, though, bro.

>>1947468
Respectfully disagreed. I think I've a pretty reasonable opinion, and that I've given it a fair amount of personal thought.

Also, why you gotta talk down to folks?

>>1947466
I can see what you mean, then, even if I can't wholly agree.

>>1947462
I think I don't much care for your definition of literature, to be quite frank.

>>1947448
Definitions are subjective, though, especially when it comes to classifying the arts. I feel like "literature" as a word is malleable enough for us to use a more nuanced definition.

>>1947438
I prefer to connote "literature" with a focus on that "esp." I only consider works of exceptional quality and/or lasting cultural significance to be literature.

That dictionary definition is a little too broad for my tastes.

>>1947430
I'd disagree on that point, but really, we'd probably just end up arguing from different definitions of the word "literature". So hard feelings, though, right?

>>1947416
It's all of that. It's also literary. Maybe most importantly, it's also literature.

>>1947354
Honestly, it includes a lot of the material you list there. Reading through DKR and Year One, I can see bits and pieces that work well in and of themselves, I can see stylistic touches that are very cool, and i can see why they were so important and revolutionary within the context of their publishing, but I really just don't enjoy them very much. I think Miller, throughout his career, has been obsessed with himself and his own ideas, and that he has never been particularly or seriously interested in the world outside his own ideas.

All that being said, I won't claim to be an expert on the guy, because I never liked him enough to want to dedicate a lot of my time to reading his work.

Well, the Socratic Dialogues are both accessible (assuming you either read ancient Greek or can find a good translation) and a major, considerable work of their own. I liked them because they're conversation by nature, which is generally the type of philosophic debate I prefer.

It's a nebulous, subjective definition that will usually amount to "I know it when I see it."

I generally think of it as a sense of interaction between the work in question and the greater body of literature that makes up the author's cultural understanding.

So yeah, genre work can be literary, and non-genre work can be self-absorbed or just unaware enough to be non-literary.

Really, the tricky part is defining literature in the first place.

>>1947310
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant to say. Miller in his prime did some really interesting work that I respect on a technical level, even though I don't think he had the talent to write more than one or two really good stories.

I really don't care for his body of work as a whole, though, so I have a biased opinion on the matter.

>>1947207
Yeah, kinda this. Miller isn't the worst thing to happen to comics ever, but he's certainly not a guy whose body of work illustrates anything exceptionally literary (or literate) about comics as a medium. He had a good understanding of the visual/textual relationship, but his significance is more in making comics "adult", which had positive and negative consequences, than in making comics literature.

Alan Moore, though, is a different story. His books are philosophically complex, and carry on a dialogue with western art as a whole (both high art and low art, mind you), a dialogue that demonstrates someone who is at the very least AWARE of what "literary" means. On top of that, though, the quality of his own writing reveals someone with a mastery over the elements of writing, classical and modern, that place Moore firmly in the pantheon of truly literate comic-book writers.

Not saying his body of work is perfect, though. I don't even know what's up with Neonomicon.