You will hate reading
You will hate writing
You will hate everything God created
You will hate your life
You will hate yourself
I wanna kms for having to read and study boring books all the time. I don't even have time to read what I like because of this shit.
Who the frick told literature professors that Oedipus Rex is something worth studying?
Why do they consider A Doll's House a masterpiece when it's just a soap opera for woke women in their late 30s?
Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
I could tolerate this shit if it was mixed with something fun and interesting, but it's not.
All professors think drama is the only literary genre worth studying and all of them love the most boring books.
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Huh? You major in English and literature for the woke actiivsm, not for any literature nobody gives a turd about, silly goose. You're terminally autistic if you didn't realize that. Many such cases!
There are no perfect choices, guys. You have to stop with the “don’t study x” and “do study y”. There are not even any good choices. There are only trade offs among choices which are all sub-optimal.
Literature is objectively bad. You won't have fun studying it (unless you have the same taste as your professors) and you won't have many good career opportunities after graduation.
Thatsaid, I made the thread to whine.
Good for you, but shouldn't they be teaching literature instead of a very tiny part of it? They're making it miserable for everyone interested in the major except for few students like you
>You won't have fun studying it (unless you have the same taste as your professors) and you won't have many good career opportunities after graduation
>won't have many good career opportunities after graduation
This is why we have a civilization full of morons and society is getting progressively worse at an accelerated rate. moron.
When did I say that's not the case you fricking moron?
You said it's a trade off and I pointed out that it has no positives for most literature enthusiast
You genuinely have down syndrome.
The Western Canon is the most important
> it’s not a trade off
> it’s objectively bad
> here are all these trade offs to prove it
If only the average citizen understood this when it comes to politics
Sounds like you’re in the wrong field because all that is interesting and fun to me. I loved my BasedSpeare class.
>You will hate reading
>You will hate writing
Only mentally weak pseudo-intellectuals say this after “studying” literature. Just genuine losers who never actually enjoyed reading. I have a BA/MA in comp lit and, in fact, read even more now than before.
Why’d you choose it then ? What was your plan ? Has it changed ? Can you change course ?
Instead of complaining and going with the flow, listen to your emotions telling you clearly that your path needs to change and figure out how to incorporate this threshold into the story of your life.
Eh ! See ?
I just did some litterature thingy ! Voila !
Oedipus Rex is great, sorry you have bad taste
I took American Literature I (before the Civil War) and that was great. Poe, Melville, Indian lore, Indian Kidnapping, Spanish soldier lost with Indians, racist Thomas Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle, the guy that wrote the Scarlet Letter but thank god it was only his comical short story Young Goodman Brown. Only like 20% was slave women getting beaten but that deserves to be in the course and seems an adequate percentage. They tried to make Jefferson look bad but that shit is funny.
I would read Shakespeare personally
Also the class was frick easy because I can do research papers all fricking day about esoteric ancient shit. I feel bad for the illiterate people taking literature. If you want to play xbox just work at walmart and play xbox
Don't study your hobbies. As simple as that. People who say "study what you like most!" are liers or women. You should study what gives you money and is easy for you. Then use said money on your hobbies.
The process of picking a discipline deserves a little more respect. If everyone hated their job you would see a huge decline in quality of entertainment, goods, and services...
>If everyone hated their job you would see a huge decline in quality of entertainment, goods, and services...
Haha...
>If everyone hated their job you would see a huge decline in quality of entertainment, goods, and services...
I think study what you like…within practical reason is generally good advice. I think what people should do is basically identify a profession and pursue the degree which is appropriate for that profession. Obviously, your inclination should be considered when choosing a profession and if you find no inclination for the educational material then that’s a good sign you won’t have any inclination for the profession and so you should choose something else. We treat baccalaureate degrees like professional degrees and therein really lies the issue. Either it’s a general liberal arts degree and confers a generalist education without consideration for professional outcomes or it’s a mainly professional certification. We bill it as both and so people get all confused. The truth is that nowadays it’s more of the latter than the former.
>Oedipus Rex
>A Doll's House
>Shakespeare
Damn nearly got baited by Op.
What did you think the professor was going to quiz you on your harry potter house
being under 50 and studying literature is a waste of time
This sounds more like a personal cope of yours than anything relevant to the thread.
>be me
>majored in literature
>happy
Go KYS loser
it's actually insane just how bad the literary "canon" is in English culture. first of all it's blatantly fricking obvious that the canon is nothing more than random books that businessman pushed as great to make money selling (often they were pushed because there was no author to give royalties to). so now a bunch of midwits worship nothing more than a random selection of books that managed to get memed into popularity with the intent to capitalize on them and actually great books languish in obscurity and even worse the great books are seen as bad because of their obscurity while mediocre meme books are seen as amazing because of their canonicity.
the amount of people that have told me my Goodreads favorites are lacking in "foundational works" despite being composed of nothing but books that were regarded as the greatest of their era by authors actually alive at the time is insane.
I thought I was done reading after dropping countless canon works because they were boring meme books but eventually I found out about all the books that actual good authors found interesting and suddenly reading got fun again. it's night and day
Hit us with the obscure picks, let's see 'em
The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwab
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
The Lime Twig by John Hawkes
The Sorcerers Apprentice by Francois Augieras
Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
Romaji Diary by Takuboku Ishikawa
The Beautiful and Damned by Fitzgerald
The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun
yea im thinking a based on this one
I try. it's just sad that when recommending any of these I have to overcome a wall of prejudice against anything that isn't famous. Most people really hate taking a chance on media unless a million other people have hyped it up. I personally seek out obscure media because of a lifetime of finding myself hating mainstream media, I just don't get how there aren't more people like me, 99% of people actually believe that anything good will be known and anything that's incredibly obscure must suck. IQfy is one of the few places that isn't plagued with this mindset.
>Most people really hate taking a chance on media unless a million other people have hyped it up. I just don't get how there aren't more people like me
I suggest "The Elephant in the Brain" by Hanson & Simler, it might answer this and some related questions.
looks interesting, thanks
You have never encountered any sort of prejudice related to these —
— very IQfy canon writers and books, you moronic homosexual. Imagine thinking Schwab, Hawkes, Lispector, Meyrink, Adler are fricking “obscure.” Did you just start browsing IQfy late last year?
way to prove the point perfectly. and acting like books that have probably been bought less than 5000 times in the last decade aren't obscure is just bizarre. And the books you're referring to as not obscure weren't when published they've only become obscure because they weren't canonized, that's partly the point. And it's funny that you
1 - think IQfy is an appropriate measure of a books relevancy, if that was the case Behead All Satans would be one of the most well known books of our time and
2 - the reason you think there is any kind of popularity to them on IQfy probably has a lot to do with me personally posting them countless times for many years. I guarantee 75% of the time you see Speedboat being mentioned it's me and 100% of the time you see Pitch Dark mentioned, fricking no one has read Pitch Dark you only think Adler is well known because of a single work being a best-seller for a few years in the 70s.
That boomer tier quote about time separating the wheat from the chaff could not have shown what we're talking about better. the only way to think canonical works are better than everything else is if you haven't read anything good outside the canon. Books in the canon from the 19th and 20th century are usually boring dramas that appeal to a certain kind of midwit. You can actually define exactly where a work becomes too challenging to be canonized, a literal level whereby the general reading public can no longer easily read a book which bars it from entry into the larger annals of history.
Again the only way you could miss this is if you only read canonical works or lesser, it's pretty fricking blatant and countless interviews with authors you probably admire say similar. it's a borderline meme at this point with how often literary greats go off about authors they love that haven't gotten enough attention.
It's just a somewhat complicated question because there's not an exact linear relationship between popularity and quality one way or the other, and it's further complicated by the fact that there are different canon lists with different inclusion criteria, some more exclusive, some less exclusive, some simply different. The question of period/era is also potentially important, because those two centuries are quite different from the 40 or so centuries of literature that preceded them. Questions of difficulty/intelligibility, intended audience and audience perception, internality vs. externality, social cohesion vs. alienation, these things changed a lot. I was mostly referring to the big-picture, long-term canon. For the modern period you may have more of a point, or maybe the canonization process just hasn't fully come into effect yet, I don't know. I view this time period as a bit of a sideshow anyway.
I doubt the canon will continue at this point. Literary critique is a zombie masquerading as it's former self. Where are the Moby Dick's of our time? works that were almost forgotten before a single person started talking about them decades after the author's death and memed them into the canon. The process that made Moby Dick canonical had stopped but the worship of the canon hasn't so now it's borderline religious in its importance to its adherents. The list that was once updated frequently has now ossified into a relic to be worshiped, never questioned.
I think the parochial simpletons on this board that get extremely huffy about "defending” the canon mainly cling to it not out of genuine appreciation for "Western culture" (just see how they conduct themselves; 90% are just culture war tourists) but out of complacency, because the work is already done for them. It's more like picking a readymade "fandom" than something that requires you to dig in multiple directions and develop your own taste.
I don't agree with your stance that the canon is midwit bestsellers, but other than that you're making some great points. Blind canon worship remains this board's biggest weakness, and a frankly laughable stance for an audience that prides itself on being "countercultural".
>b-but the leftoid ~~*academics*~~ are subverting my heckin--
They're doing more to preserve the canon than your shitposting ever will.
yes exactly. the issue of worshipping a canon that's already established and refusing to acknowledge anything outside of it is so systemic that it surely shows some kind of human fault. Like tribalism. People despise and ignore obscure media simply because it's obscure and, unlike what some posters here claim, people like me don't fetishize the obscure, if we did we would have literal thousands of books to list as great but in reality it's only a relative few and any mention of obscurity is done to bemoan the lack of appreciation for deserving works. I've been called every synonym of pretentious in the book for simply praising/recommending media that no one has ever heard of. I say media because it's happened with every kind from books to movies to music to art, if it's a name no one's ever heard of its common to get a response akin to what you'd hear if you asked a random stranger to help you with an annoying task. "ugh, you really want me to spend my time working on something I've never even heard of? how annoying and pretentious".
maybe it's because our thinking has been largely monopolized by various things in the modern age that makes people so unwilling to spend even a second contemplating a work they've never heard of but whatever it is has created an undeserved sense of superiority in those that praise the most well known. As if they should be welcomed among the literati for defending works that have been praised the world over. Recognizing and talking about great works that have been overlooked does more than doing the same for works that are world renowned. The former expands the public consciousness while the latter reinforces its rigidity.
You are such a pseud it’s painful.
Again, it’s a very complicated issue accompanied by various contradictions. Academia knows the canon better than the uninitiated, sure. But they also have ideas about it that are not really about artistic quality, I think that’s obvious enough at this point.
My whole point was about respect for the people who had dedicated years to reading and learning and developing judgment in order to sift through the raw material of literature and pick out for us the most perfectly formed specimens (in previous centuries these weren’t necessarily “academics” either, in fact they were often writer-critics). Are modern academics still sincerely trying to do that? Some of them, sure. But on the whole we need to take their revisions with several grains of salt.
Your conflating a book’s popularity in its own time with its canonicity centuries after the fact is an extremely flawed heuristic.
We can’t simply pretend like the actual production of new significant works has stayed the same though, can we?
>measure of canonicity
as it such a thing exists. the canonical works from the last 100-150 years are literally just random memes (in the scientific sense of a meme). What else could they be? there is no such thing as a measure of canonicity, the very concept of such a measure makes no sense
I'm not comparing the popularity of books to their place in the canon, I'm comparing their popularity among literary greats many of whom are considered canonical today. Borges for instance talked extensively about The Book of Monelle and so did dozens of other authors considered literary greats today, it was called the Bible of French Symbolism for a reason yet it's all but forgotten today (despite what the people claiming a book isn't obscure if IQfy talks about it may think)
I said "conflating", not "comparing". You are assuming that a book is popular 500 years after its publication for the same reasons a book is popular at the time of its publication - this is very much not the case.
Borges is an interesting example to choose. Yes, he was an eccentric, he liked many obscure books, he was a product of the countercultural weird-fiction milieu in which he worked. But he also had a near-religious respect for the core canonical authors, and praised them with sublime enthusiasm.
the simplest way to show the canon is random is by pointing out that it could be completely replaced without anything changing. for any given work that's been canonized there are numerous works from the same period that would serve the same purpose in the canon. nothing would change because it's all largely random, not purely random but random enough that each book has probably 3 - 5 contemporary works that work just as well for the purposes of the canon (what is, in your opinion, the purpose of the canon btw?). When it comes down to it if any book was replaced with one of the 3 - 5 contemporary works that are comparable what would change? nothing besides the titles on a syllabus.
and again, none of this applies to works before ~1800 because the relative rarity of books being published made each individual work much more important culturally
I don't see how I assumed a book is popular decades after it's released for the same reason it's popular upon release, that doesn't connect to anything I said from what I can tell. I'm simply pointing out the fallacious reasoning in claiming that canonical works are greater or more culturally important than non canonical works when in fact most of them were never considered important or greater than other works from the same period by the authors from that period in fact they were often quite inconsequential by authors from the period.
but no you say "canonical works are built up by academics over long periods!", which isn't really true. It only takes a single fad among academics to make a canonical work since the only real measure of them is how often they're discussed/taught in class. If the canon doesn't represent the most culturally important works as determined by the contemporary authors then what are they besides memes among academics??
again another proof of this is the fact that the canonical works changed constantly up till the 21st century. the canonical works of the late 18th century in the 19th are different than the canonical 18th century in the early 20th century, are different from the late 20th century and the 19th century canonical works are quite different in the late 19th compared to the early 20th compared to the late 20th.
it's literally just memes!
>AHHHHHH I ONLY READ OBSCURE BOOKS LIKE NYRB BESTSELLERS AND OBSCURE WRITERS LIKE LISPECTOR AHHHHH IS THAT DOSTOVESKY AHHHHH I AM GOING INSANE NOT OBSCURE ENOUGH
>the reason you think there is any kind of popularity to them on IQfy probably has a lot to do with me personally posting them countless times
Hahahahaha the absolute state of this moronic narcissist and his entry-level “obscure” taste. Yeah bro only you know of obscure NYRB books. Just you
it's funny that you keep posting about how my favorites aren't super obscure even though they are and just because people on IQfy know them doesn't mean they aren't obscure and two I wasn't even picking them for obscurity. I could list authors I've read that are actually insanely obscure like say Jean Ferry or Eric Basso or Brendan Connell or countless others but I was never trying to make a list of super obscure books. You sure got lost in the weeds here bud. Why are cannon-tards like this?
>Eric Basso
>obscure
Hahahahahahahahaha
lol, nice troll.
>recently discovered a FB page of a washed literary mag editor dedicated to “obscure” literature
>proceeds to come to IQfy and pretend their taste is organic
Kek
I'm not going to participate in the silly obscurity dick measuring. To be fair to you I think people who say "you think X is [obscure/good/difficult/etc.]? pathetic!!" without offering an alternative of their own are bad-faith in the extreme and should be ignored. I personally have not heard of those authors, they may or may not be well-known in their niche, idk.
My criticism would instead be this: your examples are subcultural or countercultural. This is part of what I meant when I referred to social cohesion and alienation. For most of history, subcultures and counterculture have not really been existent or relevant. So it may apply to the late 19th century or even to Romanticism to some extent, it certainly might apply to the present day, but in general it's just not a thing. The closest analogue would be "high" vs. "low" culture, which is what a lot of academics want to center their revisions around, but it seems like good low culture products and bad high culture products have for the most part been dealt with correctly by the traditional canonization process.
Point being, your criticisms, like your interests themselves, are confined to a particular niche.
>random memes
You can say that things are popular for the wrong reasons, and I might agree with you w/r/t this period in particular, but you absolutely cannot say that they are "random", this just seems like very lazy thinking.
>no such thing as a measure of canonicity
There is no such thing as a PERFECT measure of canonicity. There are countless ways we could try to measure it, but the best heuristic is common sense. If I tried to tell you that your picks are more canonical than Dostoevsky, you would disagree with me, ergo you are operating on some commonsensical heuristic for determining how canonical a given work/author is.
if the canon isn't random why did it take decades for Moby Dick to be recognized? how else would describe the discovery and canonization of Moby Dick besides random? It could have easily never have been discovered and it would have been designed to obscurity for all eternity if not for the random chance that someone with reach in the academic world began talking about, or in other words it was memed into the canon.
Again there is nothing special about canonical works compared to other works from their time, there is nothing that separates them or makes them more culturally relevant. the only thing that defines a canonical work is how often it's taught or discussed by academics, and considering that there are countless works that could be chosen by any given academic to teach (they can't teach everything) it stands to reason that canonical works are at least in part based on randomness. there is no trait which defines them, no measure of popularity outside of academia, no historical importance (otherwise Moby Dick wouldn't have wallowed in obscurity for decades). The only measure of canonicity is if a book happened to be memed in the academic world and get taught enough.
the only way to think canonical works are special is if you haven't read contemporary works outside of them. We could wake up tomorrow with every canonical work of the last 150 years being switched for a different book from the same period and nothing would change about the way the Western canon is viewed. Works from before ~1850 (arguably earlier but I don't want to be presumptuous) are different because there wasn't much being written back then so singular works held a lot more importance. You yourself said popularity when published means nothing to canonicity but completely ignore popularity among academics as a factor.
why is the Great Gatsby canonical today? it could easily be replaced by any other work of Fitzgerald's and hold the same meaning and importance, most of his work dealt with the American Dream so why is Gatsby the most important? Because it was perfectly simplistic and great to teach in class which lead to it being a foundational work for many academics who then went on to prescribe it to everyone else until it entered highschool classrooms around the world.
Canonicity is simply a measure of how memed a book was by academics. if you disagree please explain what else it could be, keeping in mind everything else I've touched on (it can't be cultural importance because Moby Dick wasn't important to anybody until it became a meme with academics)
Tbh it just seems like you are just suffering from the modern plague of neurotic perfectionism, reductionism and black-and-white thinking. Yes, it's possible there are a couple other works that are broadly similar to a given canonical work, such that the difference wouldn't be noticeable in its effect upon casual readers in later generations. That doesn't mean the whole process of canonization means nothing, it simply means the process isn't precisely perfect and there's a bit of a margin of error. The choice of canonical works is still heavily correlated with the inherent qualities of the works. The fact that there's an outside chance Moby Dick could have been lost forever is a marginal problem, not a central one. What's important is that, despite its lack of contemporary popularity, it was good enough and dealt with important enough themes that it could be recovered. If it was shit, it would have actually been forgotten along with all the shit books that have in fact actually been forgotten.
I agree that there are factors militating in favor of simpler, more easily teachable works, but that's a symptom of public education - before that became a thing, literature was acknowledged as being for elites, the general populace subsisted on oral culture.
And perhaps I should clarify my point about contemporary and lasting popularity - what I'm saying is that things are popular in their own time for the exact sort of memetic reasons you talk about, even sometimes among other authors, who are of course human and subject to occasional memetic lapses in judgment. But due to the dynamics I outline in the response to the other post below, it's hard for momentary memetic popularity to weather the changing of multiple generations, which is why the adage about time separating the wheat from the chaff tends to hold true. If something has remained an acknowledged classic across many changes in historical circumstance and intellectual fashion, it usually speaks to the presence of some fundamental germ of truth/beauty.
There's certainly some degree of memetic feedback loop mechanics going on, and for that reason you have to be skeptical of new trends in canon revision. But usually something won't maintain canonical status over generations purely on the strength of being a meme because it just makes an easy target for the next generation of scholars to tear down and prove their superior judgment.
As I said it's a complicated topic, takes some back and forth to sort it all out, nothing wrong with that.
I truly feel that the reason you and most other people think canonical works are greater is because you haven't read enough comparable works from the same period. Everyone thinks like you at first because that's what we're taught. It's only after reading a lot of canonical works AND finding them lacking AND going through the process of finding the forgotten works of old which are comparable to the canonical works are the same period do you finally realize it's incorrect which frankly many people don't do because they find the canon to be enough, they're not interested in else and they're giving a license to say what they're interested in is the greatest and they need no more.
Moby Dick not being seen for decades after the authors death isn't a one off, it's incredibly common amongst canonical works, or at least not being recognized when they were contemporary. If you think about any book becoming recognized after it goes out of print HAS to be selected somewhat at random. If it's not selected during its print run then there is no other reason than pure chance for it to ever be picked up by an academic yet that's how countless canonical works are selected!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, it is only when you look outside the canon to actually literary works of the same time, which IME are often not easy to find, that you begin to realize that the Canon is nothing more than a random selection. It's undeniable after the 5th or 6th book that's perfectly congruent with a canonical work yet is utterly forgotten. But most never reach that 5th book, because the books required are mostly forgotten!
Agreeing with you about the canon would mean denying my own experience with reading literature
Au contraire, the more I read the more I respect the canon, just with a few complications and caveats along the lines of what I said about the modern paradigm vs. the traditional one. I'm not extremely well-read but I've been around a while and for much of that time I've been borderline obsessive about seeking out new and different authors and works, my interests have been diverse to a near-pathological extent. And in the course of all that reading and exploration, what I've realized is that these things have been gone over at great length and in great detail by people who were, despite all the information I've gathered, orders of magnitude more well-informed than me, and certainly more developed in their actual judgment. Of course this doesn't mean I have to kowtow to them on a personal level and deny whatever enjoyment I get out of pursuing something that's more to my own tastes, but it should certainly give me pause before dismissing the canon because these people and their work are the material of canonical judgment, and anyone who cares about quality and probity in criticism must take them seriously and address their arguments.
The whole process is human and imperfect and of course as you say things can slip through the cracks, and of course the more recent the period you're looking at the less time the process has had to do its thing, but I will say again that these complaints smack of a neurotic perfectionism, especially when we are talking about false negatives, not false positives. If the canon tells you to read book A and so you read that instead of forgotten book B, C or D which are all roughly equivalent, what have you actually lost, given that we don't have time to read everything worth reading? This should be of concern to aspiring authors, I suppose, but not really to readers.
What you say about finding canonical works lacking is more fruitful as an actual avenue of criticism of the canon, but I think it's a separate issue and has more to do with politics, public school curricula and/or changes in taste and fashion across different periods. It may also have to do with the fact that you might simply be a bit eccentric (we are on IQfy after all) and your tastes might just be unusual, in which case your issues with the canon might hold true for you but not so much for others. I'd be interested to hear which canonical works specifically you base this judgment on.
I've got three+ shelves jam packed with canonical works collected from years of grabbing any paperback I recognized the author of. They're not bad per se, it's just that every time I try them I get disappointed they're not as good as any of the books I picked out myself in the same vein. After it happened a dozen times where I found a similar but better work to something in the cannon that I just stopped treating it like it held much value. It's not like every book in the cannon is bad but I don't think a book is good just because it's canonical anymore. I can't even think of a book from the canon I disliked it's just that I don't have time to read them when my backlog of more interesting works is so long.
I've got 500 books on my want to read and the vast majority of them are books I'd call hidden gems since that's what I've sought out for many years now.
And I won't lie - there is a sort of mystical quality to reading an amazing book that you know a very small handful of living people have read. It makes you want to share it but people are often reluctant to read an author they've never heard the name of which is the root of this whole issue with the canon.
I'll reiterate that this just sounds like you preferring particular, somewhat "countercultural" modes of expression to more traditional middle-of-the-road stuff. That's fine, I just think you shouldn't jump from there to saying "the whole canonization process is shit and good for nothing". My taste is also a bit unusual, though in different ways than yours, so I understand the frustration of trying to recommend something and not having people appreciate what it means to you.
Are you into poetry at all? If so our tastes might overlap on some of the French fin-de-siecle/symbolist/surrealist stuff, I personally don't prize it as highly as the major classics but it's a lot of fun and it played a big part in my getting more into poetry which is basically all I read now.
what poetry would you recommend, I mostly just enjoy prose poetry like Pessoa and I really really liked Cane by Jean Toomer, probably the best poetic prose I've ever read. And then I'm a big fan of Ashbery, something about his work seems much less schizo than the average surrealist work. I like surrealist stuff but only when it's done with intention and not automatic writing BS.
My Tired Father by Gellu Naum is another, it's an auto-biography by him, a Romanian surrealist, made by doing Burroughs style cut-ups of American magazines. starts out seemingly random but over time you start to see the outline of his life.
As I said here
I've just read the main decadent authors but I can't imagine you wouldn't like them based on what you're into, just try checking out some of the pieces from Flowers of Evil. Rene Char is the surrealist-ish author I was referring to, he's mostly known for his aphoristic writings about poetry and for his role in the French Resistance but I think his poetry itself is quite good too.
yea I need to get around to reading Flowers of Evil. I also have Aurelia and Sylvie from Nerval sitting on my shelf
Yeah Nerval is one I want to check out since he seems like sort of a bridge between the Romantics and the Decadents.
I was just pointing it out as a recommendation engine but it might be fun in itself too, he’s a pretty good writer and I think he did a lot of criticism so I assume his takes are well-developed.
I see where you’re coming from, it’s definitely a bit disillusioning to realize the extent to which these ideas are pre-made and repurposed. What I’ll say in defense of that phenomenon is simply that it can still serve to describe the world, because our society and our psychology are full of patterns and repetitions with small variations. If something like “fragmentation” is used a lot to describe literature, it might just be that fragmentation is actually common and significant. I think what’s lacking in your friend’s analysis is probably just the next level, the more detailed exploration of how these modern/postmodern modes of expression are instantiated in Bolaño specifically.
It’s kind of like looking at a derivative and saying, “oh, ok, you have to use the chain rule for this one” but then not actually going through the steps to solve it - merely categorizing something is just more cognitively efficient in terms of giving us the feeling that we have some understanding of it, it saves the time and labor of going through and applying principles to all the details, which can sometimes feel like diminishing returns if you mostly care about just being able to reassure yourself that you have *some* kind of understanding of the thing at hand.
Does that make sense or am I missing what you’re getting at? If you’re expecting books or analyses of books to just come up with totally new ideas out of the blue, that’s usually not really how things work, everything is grounded in something - but if you’re just deploring the laziness of people who want to put everything in a box without examining it in detail then yeah I agree with you although I’m certainly guilty of it myself at times.
I'll just ask this: isn't modernism supposed to be a reaction to the technological change that swept England in the second half of the 1800s, along with the long cherished views about realism and the undivided self and Truth ... that have their basis in enlightenment/ the age of reason?
If so, why would that be applicable to something a chilean novelist wrote? That's what I'm getting at. And the analysis my friend wrote made me think of the chicken and the egg: is a book modernist and therefore contains certain modernist aspects or is it labelled modernist and then those "modernist" aspects are put to the front?
Forgot to say: this was in response to "I see where you're coming from ...times."
You’re just moronic, bud.
I agree with this, but I think it's because when works become canon, the same ideas get recycled a lot (in other books, in movies, in academic articles...) and lose their initial punch. Anyway, you and
please drop the names of some of the books you enjoyed if you don't see an issue with that, because I am sick and tired of reading the same ideas.
I don't know that abstract philosophical ideas admit of too much in the way of novelty, it tends to come across to me as just shuffling around the various nodes of the hierarchy/dependency tree. Nor do I think novelty is the highest good, although I enjoy it as much as the next guy.
I don't have any real deep cuts for you though, I've only really read the big four decadents and one late surrealist-adjacent poet. I did read one piece by de Gourmont that I enjoyed, and more to the point he wrote a whole volume (perhaps more than one?) exhaustively listing and discussing his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Something like this is a great example of the very beginnings of canon formation, just a guy writing about other guys with whom he goes to cafes and smokes opium or whatever, but it is also the application of an expert's hand to the task of parsing a large and complex body of literary information, and it gives the next generation something to go on (while also potentially passing on various flaws or biases). If you're looking for more, pick an obscure author from the list and see what their wiki article (in English or in French) looks like, they'll usually include links to other authors associated with them - and of course each link leads to more links, the world is your oyster. Since I haven't actually looked into these forgotten fellows, so I can't recommend them, but if you're eager to put in your 2 cents to the great conversation of the canon, feel free to report back with your assessment.
It's not just the ideas that get recycled though, the ideas used in literary anaysis (and then you have to question whether the ideas exist in the exist or are they imposed on it). Here's an example (though, sorry I'm not a major in literature, so hopefully this won't sound dumb): a few months ago, I read a literary criticism or analysis, whatever you want to call it, of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (I will also admit that I have never read the book). The friend was not from an english speaking or even Western country, and Bolaño as a quick search would you if you didn't know beforehand was Chilean. I read this analysis, and my friend goes on and on about modernism and fragmentation and the stream of consciousness technique (in those exact words, for even though it was a different language, it was a latinate one) He even gives Woolf as an example of modernist writers ... Anyone who's went to school in an english speaking country would probably tell you this sounds familiar, because this is how analyses of literature sounded like in middle and high school (and if I'm wrong, please correct me). And maybe this was dumb, but that day, reading those words in an analysis of a book by a latin american writers, from my friend who struggles to even speak english and prefers not to because he's not comfortable... made me think academia is a self-perpetuating farce of sorts. Imagine realizing that even the language you use to talk about things is borrowed, this seemed to me like some dystopian novel bullshit. To me the realization that the ideas were so used that even an analysis of a novel in a different country that has a different historical and cutural background ... is now being distilled to the same ideas, to the same LANGUAGE as books in english ... seemed almost unreal.
Maybe I'm late to the party and everyone's already realized this or maybe there is a plausible explanation that isn't "we're now copy pasting analyses of books and superimposing them on books from different languages and cultures" idk To me it felt like I've been lied to that literary analysis was insightful and gave more depth to the text; turns out it was just the same tired bullshit, applied to any book deemed "modernist" or "post modern" or "realist" or whatever
Also, this might be another dumb observation, but how come stream of consciousness came to be a hallmark of modernist literature? It's not like it was invented by modernist english speaking writers... So why is it suddenly a feature of modernist literature? To me it just seems like it's drawing lines in the sand but then it was picked up and became the "official" way of analysing modernist or "modernist" literature and how it's taught in schools and what thousands of books on "modernist" literature analyse literature from that period. In other words, it's a forced perspective and the stream of consciousness technique might not be given attention while talking about other fiction that isn't "modernist".
*you have to question whether the ideas exist in the text
>academia is a self-perpetuating farce of sorts. Imagine realizing that even the language you use to talk about things is borrowed, this seemed to me like some dystopian novel bullshit. To me the realization that the ideas were so used that even an analysis of a novel in a different country that has a different historical and cutural background ... is now being distilled to the same ideas, to the same LANGUAGE as books in english ... seemed almost unreal.
I know it's not really a canonical or "serious" work, but this is kind of what Gene Wolfe was getting at in the last volume of BotNS with the Ascians, at least on a societal level.
The Book of Masks is the title of the book I’m talking about, sorry, just realized it might not be obvious from looking at his bibliography.
this one looks cool. I feel like Gourmant was mentioned as an inspiration by Barzun in The Use and Abuse of Art
An episode in the life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira (or anything by him)
Tennis Court Oath or Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery
Cane by Jean Toomer
Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis
The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Fernandez
My Tired Father by Gellu Naum
The Devil's Workshop by Jachym Topol
The Translation of Father Torturo by Brendan Connell
The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter
The City and the Mountains by Eca de Quieros
The Conductor and Other tales by Jean Ferry
Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
that's just a random selection from my list of books that seem more interesting than just about any canonical works I've tried, in addition to the list I already posted here, minus non-fiction
and also just go check Wakefield Press, Snuggly Books, Dedalus Books UK, Atlas Press UK for more interesting stuff. I could have posted 30% of Wakefield Press catalog too but that's too much
Some of these books are published by major publishers so I’d hardly say they are obscure
Anyway, caring about the obscurity of a book is a little strange. Not saying you shouldn’t go off the beaten path, but a lot of times you see this hipster like taste compensating to act like they’ve done a deeper dive than others. You see it in music circles especially.
every book on that list has probably sold less than a couple thousand copies in the last decade. for people that love to claim you don't care about how obscure books are you sure seem weirdly sensitive about what books are called obscure lol. the vast majority of books sells than a couple thousand copies over the course of years, including works from major publishers, when it comes to literature the vast majority of it is very obscure unless you think a couple thousand people reading it in a decade makes it well known. and to be clear I wasn't picking obscure books I was just picking literature outside the cannon
>every book on that list has probably sold less than a couple thousand copies in the last decade
Proof? You have mentioned sales multiple times like a loser yet have no actual proof
source? source?? lmao what is with these reddit tier chumps?
Bro, you have basic b***h r/TrueReads taste. You keep seething and whinging like a little dyel israeliteboy about sales for your “obscure” books despite being a moronic monolingual, yet you can’t even demonstrate their obscurity.
it's actually insane to see these people absolutely seething over someone listing books they wish more people had read. Barthelme and Aira are the only books on that list that have any kind of notoriety, the rest have probably only been read by a handful of people in the last several decades yet these people are obsessed with claiming they're not obscure, why?
People are not seething over the fact that you want people to read books from immensely popular LitFic publishers such as Dalkey, Wakefield, among others, it’s your sanctimonious disingenuousness and crying about how you only have good taste because your entire personality — rooted in deep insecurity — is making knowing of Dalkey et al the driving force for some reason. Keep insisting with these moronic claims as “only read by a handful of people,” (which includes yourself). You’re not in the vanguard of literary taste and pretending only a handful of people have read John Hawkes or anything on Wakefield and @las (which, it you have been reading them for as long as I have, you would know that on some books they limit sales to 500 or so printings, which sells out quite quickly…so how can a book with only 500 prints only be read and known by a handful of people?) is pathetically moronic and how do you expect anyone to take you seriously?
it's disingenuous and pretentious to call a book with less than 50 ratings total on goodreads and literally zero results for on Google outside of people selling it obscure. good thing the gatekeepers or the obscure were here to shutdown someone trying to share books they wish they could talk to others about. what even is this level of autism.
>muh 50 goodreads reviews means it is obscure
Holy shit you are simply getting progressively gaygier with each post
its pretty crazy how books and authors even slightly considered canonical make up less than a few percentage points of the total books yet are so monolithic and oppressive that any book outside of them is incredibly obscure.
It’s more like the hipster image OP is putting on that is getting hate. Just because a book isn’t well known, it doesn’t make it better or the reader have better taste. It’s also the fact that these books mentioned aren’t really obscure as they are still mostly still in circulation
I can't imagine anyone could project this hard on someone simply saying they think the cannon missed some good books unless they feel extremely personally attached to it. the absolute obsession with "proving" a list of obviously obscure as frick books aren't obscure is such a strange take. the only reason anyone would claim a book is obscure is if they wanted to talk about it and found it to be incredibly rare to find someone that's read it not this weird superiority complex you people are projecting.
>ummmm asktuallly you are all just projecting on to me this entire time and now I will move goalposts and pretend I was never doing what you all are accusing me of doing
KWAB
you've spent the last hour seething about me posting obscure books I've never found anyone talk or even claim to have read. its a little bizarre, no?
>you've spent the last hour
he's been ITT for days
yea he's absolutely obsessed, god forbid someone mention they like a book that they've never seen anyone else talk about. I'd love to know what he thinks obscure means if he's calling the autobiography of a Romanian Surrealist from the 1960s not obscure lmao
Your definition of obscure is literally just fictitious readership numbers by looking at Goodreads then extrapolating to only a handful, yet when you get called out that it has to be more than a handful since certain “obscure” presses you fetishize despite being popular or else they would not publish as much as they do sometimes limit a book to being to 500 issues before being soldout, you just ignore it. You, responding to yourself
, should realize multiple people are calling you out for being moronic. Just because you recently discovered this Romanian surrealist does not mean you are the only one in the world who has heard of this writer. You could argue that fog & car from CHP is more obscure based on your definition
Also, Zenobia by the same Romanian surrealist has almost 2,000 reviews. I suspect you just found him through the Complete Review (if it is on there, it’s not obscure), then just picked the the book with the fewest reviews to make your point. Imagine being such a major homosexual that you take a 75-page book of a writer you just discovered and not even his most popular book (bus instead his autobiographical prose poem) then whinging like a loser that only you and a handful of people have read it despite, according to your metric, 50 people on goodreads who have read it
I hate to break it to you but the vast majority of books are very obscure close to 99% sell less than 1000 copies a year. your. absolute obsession with trying to argue with me that a bunch of books I've spent years posting about and trying to discuss online with no success aren't obscure is crazy and completely divorced from the reality of just how much the average book is actually read.
>I've spent years posting about and trying to discuss online with no success
Just you exclusively, bro. You’re the literary vanguard of obscure taste. Only you have read those books! You are the monolingual of Untranslated. Publishers and presses should start consulting you because your obscure taste is so immaculate that you can tell them what to publish — oh wait, you read and fetishize translations so you can’t do that. If you were not such a monolingual moron maybe you could talk with a few hundred Romanians on a Romanian forum about the book. Maybe you just belong on reddit since you are a whiny little b***h with no T.
>try to talk to people about cool books and find absolutely nothing about them anywhere online, get sad it's obscure
>mention how common it is to read awesome books that no one ever talks about
>PRETENTIOUS HIPSTER FRICK, HOW DARE YOU CLAIM NO ONE KNOWS THE BOOKS YOU READ.
why is this such a common response to anyone saying they read, watched, listened to or played something obscure? The sheer hatred at someone saying that they haven't seen many people talk about something is bewildering
nta, but I've enjoyed your posts and agree
the insecure schizo will call you a samegay for this
Not him but what is the point of these discussions? Obscure by what standard? It seems like everyone avoids specifying because they want to convince the reader that their (the person making the post's) natural, automatic, subconscious standard for obscurity is very high. Is there any external goal, besides finding people with which to discuss the book, in relation to which the measure of obscurity is important? It seems plausible that a relatively low degree of obscurity is sufficient to make discussion difficult. Do you have an alternative goal in mind for which the authors he's talking about are below the threshold of salience for obscurity?
I initially thought he was being a hipster gay but after arguing with him for many posts I would say he just had some flawed or distorted expectations about how the canon works, it seems like he is sincere about wanting to discuss things and see his favorites recognized, and the people like you going at him over it are the narcissistic ones. His thinking is certainly confused on some points and he jumps to conclusions about things outside his personal frame of reference, but he comes across as a decent enough guy and not really posturing. Genuinely seems like a case of "oh this guy is talking about [thing I have niche knowledge about], time to come in and show him up with my EXPERT take" without any serious regard to whether or not he actually exhibits the undesirable personality traits which you're using as your casus belli, and with which you yourself are clearly saddled. It's gross.
thank you.
the only reason I call a book obscure is because I can't find anyone to talk about with or even find more than one or two people mentioning it anywhere online. I would love for the books I posted to be commonly read so I could discuss the intricacies of them but alas that's just not possible with today's readership. As cool as it is to find media no one else knows about its always going to be better to have people to discuss it.
You write like a gay and are unable to “alas” discuss the “intricacies” of them
sorry, I write old-timey when I get stoned.
>INB4 ban for off topic
I think the issue is with the word “obscure” and the type of person who uses that word to describe the type of books they read. If OP used “minor classics” instead no one would care. And what is the definition of a classic anyway? If a book is over 50 years old and not forgotten, I’ve seen people call such things classics
Agreed, it's a trigger word that can't really be used without signaling the kind of full-moron feeding frenzy that's going on in this thread.
Yeah, I checked the archive and there's not a too much on most of those authors, a decent few posts about Hawkes but some of those were by a guy also mentioning Aira who I assume was you. Lispector comes up a fair amount but it seems like it's usually in the context of "woman authors discussion" and it's not really about her work.
I'm curious though, what do you like about Barzun? I don't really know his work that well but he seems like he would be a canon defender.
Since you're so bothered by people being monolingual you should probably exercise a little more humility when speaking your second language. I know people like to bait ESL posters, I personally don't care at all about that and I don't feel superior for being a native speaker of the lingua franca, but if "subconscious" and "plausible" seem like rare words to you, you are out of your depth.
I mean, if you met someone and asked what type of music they listened to and they replied “I’m into obscure stuff”, you’d have a certain impression and it wouldn’t be positive. If OP used literally any other phrase like minor classics, under the radar, hidden gems, less popular, no one is rubbed the wrong way
I got that, yes, I just consider it distasteful that one has to know these little shibboleths to avoid attracting unpleasant people.
Barzun's "The Use and Abuse of Art" was a work that outlined everything I've ever thought was wrong with modern academia/science and critique in one of the best write-ups I've ever seen on any subject. The man just blew me away with his depth of knowledge on literature which stemmed from a childhood spent in a French household that often had people like Albert Camus over to party. It was clear that what Barzun was saying and thinking about Western culture came from a most highly qualified individual. I don't normally like culture criticism because much of what I've tried just seems like someone saying a bunch of obvious stuff anyone could think of but not Barzun. The way he deftly cuts into the issues facing the West hasn't been equaled by anyone else I've read and one of the best parts is that he actually offers solutions to the problems. If this book could get memed into popularity I truly believe it could improve discourse, even if just a little. Here is a quote I wrote down from it
>"I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular, to make us understand the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies"
I will also add that Barzun has the best essay on the definition and meaning of "Art" that I've ever read and the way he challenges you to think about why Art is made changed the way I view Art. Although he cites many older French art critics I've never read (but now I want to)
Got it from libgen, gonna read it next week.
I hope you enjoy it. A perfect example of why I share the obscure/hidden gem books I read, you're like the 4th person on here to say you downloaded Use and Abuse of Art upon me mentioning it so hopefully something can be set in motion to make the ideas from it solidly enter IQfy and I can finally talk about it!
Given the laurels you laid at its feet, I'll be disappointed if I don't end up loving it. I hope one day I can make an earnest effort into submitting IQfy to my will and making them realize how great Alan Moore's two novels - Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem - truly are.
it's very interesting you say that because I have looked into Jerusalem if only to see if Moore's seemingly inflated ego has actually lead to anything truly great but I have yet to start it. I usually don't read long works because I think that more often than not their length is padded with unnecessary exposition, the enemy of all great literature but with Moore it always felt like I may be wrong. And also for some reason it always seemed like it'd be comparable to William Gass The Tunnel but thats just pure conjecture.
>if only to see if Moore's seemingly inflated ego has actually lead to anything truly great
I like to call it the Ulysses of the 21st century, but make sure you read Voice of the Fire first, a novel he wrote back in 1999. It's serves as an introductory chapter for Jerusalem, and you'll know if Jerusalem is for you based on reading Voice of the Fire. And if you're a fan of William Blake's poetry, you'll find quite a bit to appreciate about the novel itself, it's truly one of the great works of the 21st century that will be recognized as such with time.
How is that possible when Moore is such a redditor flying spaghetti man activist type? He's even a vocal supporter of the Labour Party (social democrats) in Britain despite also being a vocal anarchist for several decades.
>How is that possible when Moore is such a redditor flying spaghetti man activist type?
I don't care how you perceive him as a person or what you think of his political beliefs, but as an author and an artist, he is among the greatest. Lest we forget all the brilliant works he gave the comic world in the 80s and had a major role in revolutionizing the medium and opening doors of possibility for it, showing the depth that few have managed to grasp and being the prime example of what the medium can offer in terms of storytelling. From Hell is one of the greatest works of art from the last century and you can throw meaningless buzzwords his way, but time and time again, Moore has proven his worth and showed he's not all talk or that he engages in pointless posturing that passes because his fans eat it up and are lead by the nose to borrow the phrase from Shakespeare, unlike someone like Grant Morrison for example. Moore is simply the type of artist who had a glimpse into the future and around whom a perfect storm was created.
Moore is low brow trash. I can’t believe I’m actually reading this on this board. I knew it had gotten bad over these last few years, but holy shit.
Read From Hell and tell me it's low brow trash, then argue your case. I dare you, anon.
Nah, he’s too busy reading obscure writers like Lispector and Hawkes
I don't care about his politics or spirituality per se but I don't believe you can write Ulysses if your view of the universe is fundamentally juvenile. That's all there is to it.
>had a glimpse of the future
sounds interesting anon, I wonder what you mean by this I will definitely try it and see.
alright alright thanks for the overview. I will checkout Voice of Fire. Sadly, I've never read it or anything else by William Blake unfortunately. Moore's work sounds good enough that it's definitely worth trying out though so thanks.
Thanks for being willing to give him a shot!
How is his view of the universe fundamentally juvenile? He's not some hippy or a delusional leftie as you try to present him as, nor is he le funny reddit man. Instead of posting stupid pictures like that, read one of his interviews around the time Jerusalem was released or watch his lectures and interviews on YT if you're open enough to do so.
My post was sort of wonky there, but what I meant was that he saw the potential of comics and tried to open everyone's eyes so they could see what he saw in the medium.
Are you the anon who shilled it to me like two years ago? Barzun's criticism is indeed a breath of fresh air because it puts art into the appropriate context, rescuing it from the clutches of ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum. The title is a reference to Nietzsche's "Use and Abuse of History" from his Untimely Meditations, which I ended up reading after and also found to be a genius exposition of cultural criticism. I consider both works prime examples of the "pseud antidote" genre of essay writing.
I would assume so, I finished it September 2021 and have been posting it whenever I find a relevant thread since then. I found it on here posted with nothing more than a picture of the cover in a thread asking for something generic like good non-fiction books or some shit and read it on whim after several years of it sitting on my to-read list. That's why I love giving a chance to random books, because sometimes you find one that's unbelievably good. Just thinking about how I'm at 500 books on my to-read list and all of them chosen because they looked potentially as interesting as this book, it's exhilarating to say the least.
Ok, I looked at the Google Books preview, it seems like good stuff, very good about calling out assumptions. You might want to think about checking out types like Wagner, Nietzsche or Spengler on culture, some of it might be redundant but there's a lot to explore there and it's unfortunately pretty necessary for a modern person to reflect on these topics and do a lot of independent research if they want to understand how culture and art came to be and how they actually work.
yea part of what makes him so relevant and respectable is just how much credence he gives to those who came before him. In my opinion, his work is one of the best examples of addressing those who came before you and making sure to not forget/repeat what they said while simultaneously covering what they meant in a succinct yet flawless overview.
I genuinely can't think of anyone more qualified in the 20th century to address the issues with modern times, especially while considering what the people of yesteryear said. His work just cuts so deep and perfectly into the assumptions and misconceptions of the 20th century intellectual (and by proxy the 21st) that its no stretch to say there is no one better than him at speaking on the subject of Western culture in the modern age.
I'd love any suggestions for contemporaries that come close to Barzun, anyone that could potentially match him is worth reading but I honestly can't think of any. Certainly not Harold Bloom, he's rudimentary when compared to Barzun.
>subconscious
>plausible
>threshold of salience for obscurity
>casus belli
>clearly saddled
Listen, little guy, you can write a response without needing to use your Macbook’s thesaurus app to substitute words.
Oh my God. I should have known it was a pseud all along. Although it is surprising to see a thesaurus accuser on IQfy of all places. There is no better tell of a midwit than an honest need to claim words are too eloquent to use in everyday speech on a literal *literature* forum.
Imagine being such a whiny b***h that fetishes a certain period of French literature and yet you’re a moronic monolingual HAHAHAHAHHAHA
what do you think is more deserving than moby dick specifically, seeing as how if i'm reading you right you think melville had contemporaries who accomplished the same thing without being recognized? just fishing for a rec here i'm always looking
I don't think anything is comparable to Moby Dick. I've been specifically criticizing the last 100 years since that's when I think the issues became prevalent, after Moby Dick. Even so it still took decades for someone to finally find it and recognize its greatness which shows how random it is for great books to be found. Although I wouldn't doubt there are amazing American works from the same time that have been forgotten I sadly don't know American literature very well as it's never interested me much. I like Europe
what it comes down to is this - the only way to honestly believe great art survives by virtue of its greatness is if you've never explored enough to find great art that's been forgotten. the existence of the latter disproves the former. That is the fundamental flaw of those who actually think quality and popularity are correlated. There are countless pieces of art that represent some of the greatest examples of their field which have been utterly forgotten if they were ever even found in the first place.
>Jacques Barzun
My man.
I wish I could meme Barzun on IQfy. this is the best work of cultural criticism I've ever read and it's only getting more relevant as the years go on
he's a cultural critic, I don't know if he ever did translations although he could have. He was born in France to a home that had parties that people like Camus attended so he was surrounded by literature to the extreme from birth and eventually moved to America to be a lecturer and essayist. Although highly regarded in his lifetime he has seemingly been forgotten.
meant for
>this is the best work of cultural criticism I've ever read
okey-doke.
I hope you enjoy it and post about it here on IQfy. I truly believe if this book became a meme it would at least in some small way, improve society's discourse on Art, culture, science and a whole lot else. God knows we need some help.
Doesn’t he have a translation of Goethe or someone? I only know him as a translator unless I’m getting him mixed up with Jacque Cousteau, and translator mixed up with oceanographer
So god damn entry-level it hurts
Try owning their entire catalog like me, you damn pleb. Probably just discovered them last year too and feel superior and smug about it
There's a fundamental problem here where obscurity is taken as a virtue, which it isn't except sometimes with contemporary authors. Time separates the wheat from the chaff.
This list sucks. The canon is the canon because it well articulated a culture. Most of these books have basically no relevance to any one culture at all. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink? Sure, you make like that book. Nobody will ever consider that book for Europeans and English speakers especially the way Aeschylus is considered for the Greeks. Not even close. This is a totally midwit take and this list is mediocre.
The Golem was one of the most popular books of its era had multiple movie adaptations and inspired countless authors and stories and could well be said to have reinvigorated the figure of a Golem in Western imagination. You couldn't have picked a worse example if you tried.
So what? The fact that it’s popular means nothing. Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief was enormously popular and influential. You tell me if you think Rick Riordan’s Lightning thief is a canonical classic of Western literature.
My definition of canon is simply a work which is frequently referenced, parodied, quoted, etc. by subsequent works. Something that becomes a part of the literary milieu or consciousness, to the point that even accidental/coincidental reference will not go unnoticed. I haven't read The Golem (I"m NTA) nor do I know much about it, but if what that anon says is true, that it influenced other authors work, then it is canonical. In the same way that, say, Neuromancer, could be considered a canonical work.
I understand if you disagree with my perspective though. I think yours is also valid.
This is why the canon as a specific set of books is absurd. There are tiers of influential books and if you branch out far enough, there are thousands of canonical books
>original anon here
I agree yet I also want to point out that there are maybe a couple thousand authors, maybe several thousand tops, that are well known and recognized in English literature and their recognizability is most of what makes them canonical. Basically everyone outside that couple thousand is exceedingly obscure and unknown today no matter how influential they may have been when they were published. And it's that obscurity of most authors, no matter how influential or recognizable at any given point before today, which makes the canon largely random in its selection. Most canonical works past the year ~1875 could be replaced with one or two other works if not more without much change in a generation's understanding.
Personally the reason I'm such a stickler for this point is because it's incredibly common for people to hype up the cannon as the best of the best of any given category/movement and ignore the rest as worse because the canon is said to be the best in detriment.You can see as such in this very thread, but that's just my opinion
feel free to ignore this post if you want, I realize I'm largely just repeating what I've self elsewhere.
Authors that are popular on release and then forgotten are usually either only interesting for their novelty or for some relevance to ephemeral issues of their own time, I wouldn't call that random.
Industrialization and modernism may have started in the Anglo world (though some aspects of modernism have to be credited to France) but they didn't stay behind any particular borders, that's not how the world works. Cultural hegemony is a thing and it has been since long before there was any such language as "English".
>Cultural hegemony is a thing
I realize that very well. It's the reason I thought my friend's analysis is the consequence of that. But I don't believe that the effects of industrialization would manifest themselves the same way they would in Britain for eg.
It seems like you were irritated a bit writing this last comment, even though you seem to have been pretty chill throughout. And I can't make up my mind whether it's because I'm making you say obvious things or because I'm questioning the very legitimacy of some things you hold dear.
>It's the reason I thought my friend's analysis is the consequence of that
*I thought it was the consequence of globalism, but also of academia legitimizing itself by applying the same terminologies (which is ironic considering that the language I'm using now is itself borrowed)
Btw, dude, I understand you don't have the answers. I just felt like it would be a good place to put the idea out there (even it's not that original of an idea.)
Nah no ill will, I just don't always feel like taking the time to get my tone just right.
>But I don't believe that the effects of industrialization would manifest themselves the same way they would in Britain for eg.
Not in the same way, yeah, but conceivably similar enough that it would still fall under the fairly broad umbrella of "modernism". That was my point about details being important, you can be correct in calling it modernism but it can also be relatively unhelpful in disambiguating the subject of the present analysis from things that have high-level similarities to it.
>academia legitimizing itself
100%, there's definitely an element of petty orthodoxy and self-satisfaction - but the overall tool of the idea of modernism is certainly an actually useful one that has a significant relationship to reality, and there are other similar conceptual tools for which that also holds true. This is where judgment comes in, you just have to be able to discern where the real phenomenon of "modernism" ends and the lazy pigeonholing begins.
>which is ironic considering that the language I'm using now is itself borrowed
This too is a balance, I think. We can't always be fully interrogating our every choice of words and concepts, we'd never get anything done. We have to employ convenient heuristics sometimes, but make sure not to choose convenience over precision in the places where it really matters.
Sounds a bit like the de Gourmont book - that sort of thing is always interesting and relevant to issues around the canon. But yeah that's a very good example of how quickly ideas move and how receptive some cultures can be, especially those suffering from insecurity.
I'd say it's most likely still great and sublime without those reference points but you'd also be missing a whole dimension of understanding.
one the books I listed earlier - Romaji Diary from Takuboku Ishikawa is the diary of a poet from early 1900s Tokyo who talks A LOT about Modernism and it's influence on the literary world. Takuboku is a Japanese guy entering the literature scene for the first time in his early 20s who is very actively reading the newest books in his time period, the late 1900s and early 1910s and as such you get to see a contemporary author's view of a blossoming Modernist movement
You may well be right in your claim. But it could also be that 150 years is still not enough time to sieve the pretenders from the worthy, but if so, then it's not fair to discard the idea of a canon altogether. The canon, based on my definition, has a lot of utility to an initiate who wants to quickly get a map of that literary milieu. It's difficult, if not impossible, to really appreciate what Melville is doing in Moby Dick, if you haven't read Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, Homer, the Greeks, etc. And so I think the ultimate arbiter of the canon are not academics but, in fact, authors.
>It's difficult, if not impossible, to really appreciate what Melville is doing in Moby Dick, if you haven't read Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, Homer, the Greeks, etc.
Have you even read Moby Dick? I really don't think this is true.
NTA, but you'd be wrong, considering Melville draws from the epic tradition and an understanding of the Odyssey and Milton's Paradise Lost does compliment your reading of Moby Dick, and Shakespeare's influence is unavoidable and all encompassing, so I do agree with him. Of course, familiarity with the Bible and its importance for the story is quite integral to the novel, also.
I said this earlier but it's very common to see famous authors, in interviews, share authors they think deserve more recognition and are underrated, often going so far as to call them inspirations. it happens so much it's almost like a meme but it's quite rare for these underrated authors they share to actually blow up. just based on how many famous authors I've read talk about authors they wish were more well known, countless, I would say it's definitely not the authors determining the canon. Academics writing about and most importantly teaching books is what determines the canon
That list is just a list of my personal favorites, it's not meant to go against the canon, the only reason I posted them was because someone wanted to know how obscure my favorites were. also my post was calling out the canon for choosing popular books and missing the greatest books so I'm not sure why you think claiming the canon represents culture is some kind of gotcha, I already said as much. Obscure books are often anti-culture which is part of the reason they're not known
This reply only makes me think you’re even more of a pseud. Many of the great books in the Western canon were not even popular, even more so if they’re considered in their time only. I bet you assumed Schubert and J.S. Bach were really popular too.
This is all 20th century literature. The idea of a canon is to present texts from different times.
already addressed what you said repeatedly. canonical works after the 20th century are not the same which is half my point. historical works that defined genres are not what I'm referring to
A good portion of my obscure picks just come from the catalog of Wakefield Press and Snuggly Books who specialize in forgotten fin-de-siecle. combined I probably have like 15 - 20 books from them
Alright, there's nothing particularly wrong with this list, but it's not really non-canonical, it's just a particular modern-ish surrealist/psychological niche.
Your statements about canonicity are absurd but based on what you say in
it sounds like you are just not particularly familiar with the actual literary tradition. Your perception of "canon" is probably based on flawed contemporary ideas and curators.
drop list
Study logistics and do gardening
HAHAHHA op oh my god please tell me you're trolling
Change majors and read whatever you want
>majoring in something useless
Why? What job did you think you were going to get with that degree? Don't study for the sake of studying unless your parents are rich, get a degree that will allow you to live a middle class life.
Utilitarian homosexual shut up, nobody cares about your good goy job
>Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
I do, frick you!
Never go into academia out of love for the subject. That's a recipe for suicide. I'd know. Please, for anyone here who hasn't decided on their education yet: pick something for work. Nothing else. Doesn't matter if it's boring and you want to devote your life to art or humaniora, schools exist only, solely, exclusively to create competent workers. All the rest is garbage. Study your interests on your own. Please, don't ruin your life like I and so many others have.
You wouldn't if you'd studied it professionally.
This but exactly the other way around and for reasons exactly and diametrically opposed to the ones that you just stated. I studied math because I enjoy the subject for its own sake and I have never regretted this choice. The purpose of education is not, never has been, and never will be to "get a job".
Yes, I suppose it'd be better when your interest is in STEM or something directly practical. But I don't mean to say that the purpose of education is to get a job, I mean that the purpose of universities is not education.
>You wouldn't if you'd studied it professionally.
But I do?
This except history. I really should have gone with law. At least i could make money with that.
My greatest desire is that I could do my English Lit degree again. With a subject like literature, which requires some imaginative investment - some intellectual curiosity and independent thought - what you get out of it is in proportion to what you put in. I got a whole lot out of it, but if I were starting again, having now mastered my more debilitating foibles, I'd be able and willing to put in a whole lot more. Alas I now have but a few hours at the worn-out weekends to pursue my self-guided studies, but in addition to the lack of time I feel as acutely the lack of that lamp-charmed walk through the darkling campus after finishing my day at the library.
Well put, man. I found college to be really stimulating and it did me a lot of good.
Must’ve went to a good and relatively small school. The mean experience, especially for my demographic, at university these days is basically a miserable one. I felt caught between a student body that just wanted to be shallow and materialistic activists, party goers, and/or money-makers on one hand and a faculty that wanted to root me out and fail me for my demographic and views but also just hated students in general and wanted to preach their dogma and make people ask “how high?” when they say “jump” more than they wanted to teach. My university is ranked in the top 50 per U.S. News but it was a sincerely miserable experience. I work in higher ed now, not as a professor but a staff member, and my opinion has only gotten worse. Even in retrospect, the chance that I could’ve had a positive undergraduate experience appears as effectively zero.
>Doesn't like "Oedipus Rex"
>Doesn't like "A Doll's House"
>Doesn't like Shakespeare
Bro, we get it, you're a moronic weeaboo gay. Go back to /b/ and your coomer life.
School ruins everything fun. Major in something that will pay the bills.
>economic activity
>profile picture is a sculpture
The English have done great harm to the world by teaching all their doodoo colonies about economics.
>Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
Stopped reading there. I don't give a frick about Milton or Chaucer or Wordsworth or Whitman so I might just be a poetrylet, but Shakespeare is awesome. It's you specifically who shouldn't major in IQfy in this situation.
Are you seriously trying to shit on the best dramatist of his time not once not twice but thrice?
>more obscure means more gooder
Yeah you’re a unique snowflake
see how the midwit reveals themselves. every great author in history has an inspiration they bemoan the obscurity of so to denounce the obscure is to denounce the greats. "how dare you point out the canon is mostly just random! I've read so many of them and I won't stand to see you trivialize my achievements!".
You're worshiping a list of, essentially, bestsellers. It's a similar mindset to a video game achievement hunter talking about their platinum trophies. They could have found their own achievements to strive for but instead they're complacent in sticking with achievements others defined for them. Reading a book because it's canonical is like watching a movie because it broke records at the box office; it's not the worst way to pick a good story but it's never going to get you anything beyond mid-wittery simply because of the level of simplicity required for something to get popular. And yet, right on queue, people show up acting defensive and fallacious while trying to explain why they should be respected for admiring all these books just because they were on a list and attacking anyone that doesn't agree with them and the millions midwits like them.
sorry, I don't find a book being a best-seller or meme to be a valid reason to call it great and it's a fact that the greatest and most complex works of art are usually obscure because of their greatness.
/// We should have sat down and addressed the issues head-on /// It felt churlish to tell him that I was in a hurry, that the coffee would have to be quick /// She could always be relied on to hold court with hilarious tales /// Her remarks were intended to scotch rumours of imminent job losses /// The middleweight fight was said to be a grudge match /// After the row in a pub he drove off in a huff /// One is the passive failure to disclose something a negotiation counterpart doesn't know, while paltering is the active use of truthful statements to mislead /// Today, women tennis players are not encumbered by long, heavy skirts and high-necked blouses /// Even iconic Italian runabout boatmaker Riva stopped using wood for its hulls in 1996 /// The reason is misinformation for sure, and more fundamentally a lacuna in thinking prompted by an emotional reaction /// She thought that the houses were a nice little nest egg for her sons when they came of age /// There is widespread gloom and doom about the company's future /// Liquified gas is removed from the canister with a long offtake tube that runs up the length of the torch /// The unions have urged members to hold tight until a national deal is struck /// The sweet and tangy flavors of orange, honey and ginger coat the chicken for a quick, savory dinner /// Sally was tired of being called a stick in the mud by her friends just because she refused to drink alcohol /// The megasculpture reinscribes the values of colonialism on the landscape and regenerates the invisible power structures that made the creation possible /// Most orthodontic work is done on children between the ages of 10 and 14 /// Many central points of the concept were debated and challenged, such as whether the presence of a charismatic leader was a major influence on ethnogenesis /// This immunological tolerance can be influenced by intrauterine infections /// Planting trees helps offset carbon emissions, contributing to enivronmental conservation /// The room is lit by four fluorescent circular fixtures overhead, which reflect off the white lacquered surface of a large conference table like ring lights off a pupil /// As such, the solid stem auger was used in instances where bentonite was encountered in neighbouring boreholes /// Farley’s package last year included $15.14 million in stock awards, which also vest over three years with an ultimate value dependent on performance /// On weekends they hustle tourists on the waterfront /// What if the moment's prevailing mood is hard to pin down - sometimes voluble, sometimes glum? /// She loved the gracefully high ceiling, with its white-painted cornice, the heavy brocade curtains and comfortable chairs /// Though the name may make this degree sound like fluff, the course of study is quite rigorous /// She was asked a couple of questions about her private life and got a little prickly /// In those days, a trip to the West was an arduous journey ///
I double majored in German and STEM and loved it. Plus I have a good job.
Foreign language + STEM is the perfect mix of SOVL and job opportunities.
>majors in literature
>WTF WE HAVE TO READ SHAKESPEARE?
really
>Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
Only part I disagree with. Shakespeare may be cliche but he's cliche for a reason- he's the height of tragic writing in the English language.
russian literature >>>>> english literature, every single time
if I have to see one more english prof. telling me shakespeare "the prince" is a trans allegory, I'm going to throw myself off a cliff
This moron thinks and LARPs as the vanguard of literary “taste” HAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
>ummmm alshtually only two people in the last 15 years has mentioned this book
>therefore my taste is superior because this book is obscoooorrr
Loser mentality
>40 posters
>96 replies
some anons are really seething here
are threads somehow better if there are more posters?
That roughly equals a little more than two posts made by the same person, what's the problem in that? Do you hate it when people actually have a conversation and discuss, as opposed to shitposting?
How does one "major" in insectoidal institutions?
Studying at university would actually be extremely fun if A) the university wasn't a degree factory crammed with pointless assessments and B) the professors and students weren't almost universally smug vermin whose interest in their field caps out at contemptuously looking down on the all-time greats they teach and study.
>school is… BORING
I'll cut it short for you: you would've probably felt the same even if you majored in sth else, but especially in humanities (psychology, philosophy, sociology...). It's not because those disciplines aren't fun or important, it's because they're usually taught by doctrinaires who think it's their fricking time to spit their ideas. They think they've paid their dues when they were students and undergraduates and phd candidates ... and now it's their time to do the all talking. My supervisor was so insuferable, she made me hate my major, all because I wanted *my* thesis to reflect *my* ideas. First of all se made me do my research in a theory i hated all because *she* liked it, then she would tell me do x, and i don't like y and z. I thought we could be two grown ups who can respectfully disagree, but no. And she was no except, almost every other teacher I had in college was just as insufferable and narrow minded.
If you want to be le writer, maybe literature is a good degree, but probably only if you're rich. University is largely a waste of time if you're not pursuing a degree in STEM, law, or medicine. If those aren't fields you're interested in, then pick pick up a trade. Remember, it's better to be a baker all your life and be an expert in baking, than it is to have 50 different jobs throughout your life and no skills. If you want to write and you're not rich, do it on the side. You can learn everything they teach you in a literature course on your own at home, but with more enjoyment.
>You will hate reading
>You will hate writing
>You will hate everything God created
>You will hate your life
>You will hate yourself
i already do anon, and i'm not majoring in literature
none of this happened to me
the reason i regret majoring in literature is because i'm several years out of college and don't have a real job
I'm scared that would happen to me after graduation. I publish articles on Medium and Substack so I'd have a relevant experience in my CV, hopefully that helps. I'm also bilingual so I could be a translator if AI does not destroy me.
Since you're a terminally online autist, consider learning a bit of Python and few books on linguistics and become an AI linguist.
>articles on Medium and Substack
>could be a translator
When I was telling people years ago that copywriting and translating wouldn't be done by humans in the 2020s, and they couldn't imagine how AI could possibly ever be better than it was at the time, dragging in screenshots of Google Translate's blunders and thinking that it was evidence in their favor, they at least had the excuse of stupidity. Now this is just pathetic.
My second language is Arabic. AI is struggling with it because of how horrible Arab linguists are. The grammatical rules haven't been updated since the middle ages. The dialects, which are used in everything beside formal writing, are not standardized. And the dictionaries have the words that linguists think people should use, and not the ones people actually use. Classical Arabic and modern standard Arabic should be considered two separate languages, but they are not. Each dialect should be considered a separate language, but none of them is. When translating, Arabic translators ignore dictionaries and use the words they know or make up new words.
Ultimately, the AI will get good at Arabic based on the training data alone, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. And when that happen, I would have already got good at programming and linguistics to apply for AI Linguist jobs.
Dude, this is an entirely new major. You want get into arab linguistics AND machine learning... but you seem to lack purpose and put too much faith in "arabic is obscure language"
You underestimate how much time I spend each day on learning stuff that interest me. Once I start learning programming, after graduation, I will be studying it 8 hours a day and 16 hours on weekends. I literally have nothing to do in my life beside working and studying.
Still waiting for Alan Moore's Jerusalem to enter canon, it's the Ulysses of the 21st century.
I have an English degree in Film/TV screenwriting. I'm an IT guy now. And I just use chat gpt for all business emails.
If the moron revised xeir original claim to “these books are obscure only to monolingual Amerimutts such as myself,” then I might be willing to entertain their unfounded superiority complex for just discovering new writers.
I think it’s better to study literature at an undergraduate level than it is to study at a graduate level and that’s for the very practical fact that most people who would be inclined to study literature want most to be able to read it and second to write it. Simply talking about literature for a living is third on that list, second to the first two which are vastly preferable. But in graduate literature programs, you’re literally being trained to think about the theory of literature in a very technical way and to criticize literature and draw out rational arguments. Such thinking is almost hostile to reading and writing literature. It’s a bit like painting in that way. If I get really, really ultra-technical and rational about the theory behind my work and critique of art in general, I’m liable to miss the point and paint things that are very technically good but otherwise uninspired and just missing that special something which has always been fundamentally mysterious. This isn’t to say that the most inspired art comes from the uneducated rustic. That’s a romantic delusion. It’s simply to say that certain lines of thinking and interacting with literature don’t help to create it, it being anything really good anyway, because it does sideline that special something. You don’t really have that risk at the undergraduate level since an undergraduate education is semi-professional, only partly academic, and generally require fewer research projects. They also include more primary and direct readings and fewer readings of criticism and theory. You’ll notice that there have been very few great writers with PhDs in literature but plenty with BAs in literature. I think this is partly the reason why.
yeah, i guess in some sense you can say 'epic reality'
Dont worry, im majoring in art history instead
Based. Study something real in STEM so you can actually work to live, then live your life enjoying literature without monetary pressures attached.
>t. English degree-holding cuck
Did you guy know that every single book you have ever read from this board is actually thanks to me and my posting of said book? You can thank me now.
no one cares about your inferiority complex, have a sage and thanks for the laugh
Still waiting for you to thank me and my great, obscure taste that I have only read on this board until I got other anons to read them
>I MUST OBSCUUUURE!!!
> Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
Why did you major in literature exactly? What were you expecting to read?
Not OP but I always imagined that, at least after the first few semesters, you would start reading super esoteric and complex works that most people outside academia would never have heard of. Now I know that only happened in literary circles a long time ago.
Why would you be reading works that had no impact? I mean if you write a dissertation it’s probably going to end up being on some buttfrick issue nobody cares about concerning a book nobody read. If that’s what you want, just stay on the academic track.
Until that level of specialization you’re trying to work from a funnel structure, you won’t have run out of general knowledge blanks to fill in a couple of semesters. You probably haven’t even read more than a few dozen books in that time, seriously I mean. For school.
At least around here the niche courses are the ones people take over summer break. I read about apocalypticism in the Bible and other sources, there’s a course on roman poets I’m gonna take this summer. I’m sure if you look around you have similar options, remote classes if nothing else. It’s not that they don’t exist as much as they aren’t part of core coursework.
Nobody stopped you from taking optional classes that my have those works or to form a reading club of your own, you know, Dead Poets style.
A mix of genres and authors. I wouldn't mind studying Shakespeare or Drama if they were among a diverse collection of authors and genres.
>moronic dimwit cannot stop screeching and whinging about the canon and how the canon has excluded these super obscure books like Lispector, Hawkes, and waaa waaa gooo gooo only I read obscure books on IQfy outside the canon
>then admits to “Sadly, I've never read it or anything else by William Blake unfortunately”
KWAB hahahahahah
>Who gives a frick about Shakespeare?
>I could tolerate this shit if it was mixed with something fun and interesting, but it's not.
Shakespeare is funny
Extremely so.