No.4691
You think I've read any of that?
No.4720
Catcher in the Rye is good
No.4732
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>genre fiction is the only fiction from the 20th century worth reading
That alone would make lots of fags seethe.
No.4737
>>4732It's funny, I've been reading up on where this attitude came from lately. My view of things is still incomplete, but I think what happened was, after the industrial revolution, a lot of families began sending their kids to work in factories to make some extra money. But when the people saw how bad the conditions in factories were in those days, and especially how children were treated, it provoked a public outcry against the very notion of child labor. Many intellectuals began to argue that childhood should be a time of innocence where children are shielded from at least some of the horrors of the world, and one of the ways they did this was by creating literature specifically for children. These stories always had strong moral lessons, but wrapped them in things children enjoy reading about, like magic, adventure, and exciting events, kept them free of sex and the uglier parts of life, and usually had them end on a happy note. They even began to take some older stories of valiant heroes and repackaging them for kids.
A consequence of this, however, is that those elements (magic, adventure, exciting plots, valiant heroes, lack of sex or real-world problems, happy endings) came to be associated with children's literature and childishness in general. This was also around the time of the realist movement that tried to push back against romanticism (itself a reaction against the Enlightenment) by highlighting the mundane and depressing aspects of life, with special emphasis given to socio-political issues since the public was now mostly literate. The pseudo-intellectuals of the day, insecure trend-chasers as those types always are, decided they needed to show the world how mature and with the times they were by writing stories which were the complete opposite of children's literature; dour tales of horrible people, full of sex, social issues, and psychological angst, that always end in tragedy. They then began to dismiss anything that failed to live up to those standards as childish escapism. Not only that, but they went back and did the same thing to older works which also didn't meet those standards. Robinson Crusoe, Waverley, all the old chivalric poems from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, works that had been celebrated as monuments of Western literature by the greatest minds of their times, were now labeled as children's literature (although Greek mythology seemed to escape this treatment for some reason).
The problem was that most people still enjoyed all of those so-called escapist elements and continued to read the authors still willing to write escapist books, much to the chagrin of the pseuds. This led to the literary world being divided into to two streams: the lowbrow stream of penny dreadfuls, dime store novels, and pulp fiction, and the highbrow stream of "serious literature". There was some pushback against he latter from within the intelligentsia itself, such as from Chesterton and the Inklings, but it was never able to heal the divide. The lowbrow stream evolved into what is now called genre fiction, while the highbrow stream evolved into the psychological modernist novel, and finally into post-modernist self-wankery. And that's where we are today.
As I said, my understanding is still incomplete, but I think this is what happened.
No.4739
>>4737The more I get into "real art", the more I realize there's probably less of a separation between it and the stuff I was enjoying before anyway.
People don't tell you that classics are often actually funny. There's such an air of pretention to how all of this stuff is presented culturally.
No.4743
>>4690So you dislike humanist literature and 18th century novels, but like Walter Scott? Weird, but I suppose I can see where you're coming from. Here're some of mine:
>the Bronte sisters are boring, just read Dickens instead>Gide, Cocteau, Beaumont and contemporaries are all shit>courtly love poems have literary merit>Italian comedy is the best theater to grace Europe>Guénon is a decent writer>Lovecraft is the gateway to a lifetime of trash taste>the Upanishads surpass Aristotelian metaphysics No.4755
Edgar Allen Poe is boring, poetry has no value, and theater is a cultural std.
No.4799
Boomer writers were the ones who had the greatest impact on literature, for better or for worse
>>4755I agree about the peotry take, but I disagree about the other two.
No.4866
>>4847what did you mean by that?
No.4873
All genre fiction written after WWII is garbage for babies. We get it, your dark lord is an allegory for le nazis, nobody cares.
No.4884
>>4873Only among shitty writers.
No.4887
>>4873The Wheel of Time books are comfy. Not great, but comfy.
No.4893
>>4885>jewzach is the one with a shit takeimagine my shock
No.4896
>>4893>emojitroon is the one who can't handle the truthimagine my shock
No.4899
>>4893What did you expected from a jewich mexican?
No.4977
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
Are these bad takes or just contrarian ones in your opinion?
No.5258
Ernest Hemingway is without any doubt the better author from XXth century and the only people who disagree are either chuds assblasted by him or never read his works.
No.5290
>>5258Hemingway has tricked generations of writers into think that consciously unpretentious minimalism, devoid of any poetic quality, is not an acceptable way to write, but the best way of writing prose.
No.5292
>>5258>>5290He's meh at best and "shilled" at lot for being a "save" belt to force kids and teenagers to read, while also being in the Marxist side of the things.
No.5302
Cormac McCarthy isn't a "genius" and his works are really overrated. Blood Meridian is 3/5 at best.
No.5303
>>4755Poetry is indeed pure trash, any guy who likes it is a massive red flag.
No.5305
Becky Chambers is the best sci-fi author in decades and the chuds are afraid of her talent.
No.5345
>>4766Creepy ass looking bitch
No.5404
>>4690There is no more horrifying Lovecraftian creature than niggers, who right now are pushing to abolish the basic rights of self defense. Tolkien unintentionally popularized racebaiting:
>Goblins are jews>Orcs are nignogs>Elves are also a minority you shouldn't trustForcing the D&D manchildren to be more fragile, excluding basically anyone with a sense of humor from their circlejerks.
No.5407
>>5404You probably never read any Lovecraft or Tolkien work, let's be honest here.
No.5430
>Lovecraft's best works weren't novels
>The Law before The Trial is a metaphor for inaction in life leading to failure rather than a criticism of the legal system
>Flowers of Buffoonery should have been titled The Sea
>Mishima's greatest work is Life for Sale
>Houellebecq ran out of things to say in the 2000s and has been rehashing things since
>Nabokov was a hack
>Celine only wrote two good books, and everything else was self-indulgent drivel
>Dune as a series should have ended with the exile of Paul to the desert
>Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman is better than its namesake
>the only good French literature of the mid-20th Century was written by collaborationists
>Dubliners isn't difficult to understand
>The Art of War is garbage
>Industrial Society and Its Future was written with the logic of a research paper because it was never intended for a general audience
>Lupin as a series is better than all of Sherlock Holmes
>The Idiot is Dostoyevsky's best work
>anything written by a woman isn't worth reading
No.5431
>>5430>Industrial Society and Its Future was written with the logic of a research paper because it was never intended for a general audienceI think it was intended for a general but a)Ted was an asperger who, as a professor, was only used to writing academic papers and b)he had to cut a lot because of the limitations of newspapers. He admitted that it lacked a lot of critical information and said that the Anti-Tech Revolution, which he wrote in prison, was a more complete version of what Industrial Society and Its future was supposed to be. Although I think the Anti-Tech Revolution has the opposite problem where Ted just rambles too much about barely relevant topics.
No.5433
>>5431I don't think IS&IF was intended for a general audience for a few reasons. It constantly references other parts of the manifesto without referring to the relevant paragraphs as progresses and expects the reader to understand the connections between them intuitively. It references Republican Chinese literature and philosophy, something the layman has never read, just like his bombs. (Ironically, he references many figures who would become authoritarian as time went on due to their exposure to the Chinese masses. This is particularly true of Sun Yat-sen, a cornerstone of the Republican movement who shifted from an ideology of completely direct democracy to democratic republicanism to transitionary dictatorship and eventually gripped with how the average Chinaman is unable to understand the concepts of personal and political freedom at the end of his life.) He intentionally uses dated and caustic language to refer to minorities and other groups. While he abandons any notions of reform in the work and sidesteps religion, he always entertains the idea that dictatorship is better than democracy.
We're in agreement that this his chosen structure is due to his history of writing research papers, but I think that, despite him saying he committed his bombings so people outside of a niche of intellectuals would read it, his target audience was those who would otherwise have dismissed it or been unable to read it normally but able to understand it if it was given to them, students and intellectuals and well-read dissidents. Alternatively, he may have been naïve about the nature of the public despite being able to accurately recognize and state social trends. He expected the public or government to understand his message through his bombings, but neither did. (At least, not the men on the ground. His attacks were part of a string of civil unrest that may have been coordinated by government agencies as a competing plan to government coordinated foreign terrorism.)
As for Anti-Tech Revolution, I believe what you recognize as rambling is particular to what we've recognized in his writing of IS&IF, the necessity of context for structure. ATR requires an understanding of the development of his ideology after the publication of IS&IF and his arrest, something that is fulfilled by reading a majority of his works to this point. Contextually, it's a post-doctoral thesis compared to the doctoral dissertation of TS and the master's thesis of IS&IF. Personally, I think IS&IF is his magnum opus because of the context and mindset of its author at the time of its writing. Despite serving over two decades in a supermax by the time of ATR's release, he had gone soft from factors such as his return to academic work in physics, consistent lifestyle, advanced age, and knowledge of outside support.
No.5437
>>5430>>Lovecraft's best works weren't novelsYeah no shit out of all the thousands of works he wrote only one of them was a novel.
No.5445
>>5437Sorry that I didn't use the term "novella" and conflated Dunwich and Innsmouth with Charles Dexter Ward. Here's an even more contrarian opinion based on what I stated. Lovecraft's best works aren't part of his mythos.
No.5462
Cormac McCarthy is far from a genius and an extremely overrated writer.
No.5463
>>5462I really liked No Country and Blood Meridian. The Road wasn't great.
No.5481
>Charles Dickens is the most overrated "classic" author and is basically a poor man's Zola at best.
>British literature is mostly just puerile garbage. Brits had to colonize foreign lands to make their food edible AND their literature readable.
>Russian literature is just dull, bland, glorified coping and seething over how superior Western Europe was (and still is, even at its current worst).
>Pushkin is the only Russian author worth reading.
>Moby Dick is not only the Great(est) American Novel, but Herman Melville himself is America's greatest author.
>Nabokov was a self-absorbed hack, and Lolita is basically him jacking off at the mouth. Biggest case of wasted potential in literature.
>Thackeray is the best British author - Vanity Fair alone puts everything else to shame.
>Millennial writing in ANY form is ABSOLUTE SHIT. Even the most TikTok'd Zoomer fanfic writer on Archive of Our Own can write better than any millennial "writer."
>Millennials killed literature before laying waste to every other medium with forced idpol/wingcuck bullshit.
>David Foster Wallace was a pompous asshole who wrote a novel literally nobody outside of autists too autistic for other autists will ever actually read.
>James Joyce was the original "I was just pretending to be retarded" sped. How this guy got any fans, I'll never know.
>Kurt Vonnegut was the original doomer and modernity's last worthwhile author.
>Alice Sebold singlehandedly killed modern literature.
>Kierkegaard was the only worthwhile philosopher. Everyone else is just their time's equivalent of some sorta retard.
>The Good Soldier Švejk is what Don Quixote should've been.
>Nobody reads anymore because there's nothing today worth reading that wasn't done better fifty to a hundred years ago, if not more.
>If you're not a millennial woman (especially white, self-hating, "all I need is wine" mug wielding), then there's literally nothing for you. Everything panders to this niche, and there is nothing for anyone outside this niche unless you prefer reading a "classic" for the thousandth fucking time.
>Stephen King is only anti-Trump because deep down he knows the day is coming when he gets Rowling'd. He's to literature what Howard Stern is to radio: a total pussy. Plus, Dean Koontz was better anyways.
>Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight is better than Lemony Snicket.
No.5496
>Tolkien is the only good fantasy author.
No.5571
Octavia E. Butler is overrated. I literally had a soyboy trying to sucker punch me for saying it back at college and the entire class got mad at me, including our teacher.
No.5591
>>5481Dickens remains as the favorite of all time only because of Christmas Carol, lots of self-pity progs tend to cannibalize mediocre works as propaganda.
>QuixoteBecame popular during Spain conquering and forcing aborigines to regurgitate their shit, just another overrated work of literature of a schizo who never left his cave, but god forbid if you criticize it, its reputation is almost on par with the Bible (the main reason why you exist plebeians).