/lit/ - Literature

>>22700614
GR 5/5
IJ 2/5 -- this fluctuates daily
I'm reading Ulysses at the start of next year.

Yeah so this might have been the most obvious and least organic astroshill campaign in the history of guerilla marketing. OP is a retard.

>>22700614
They are actually good but who cares about /lit's opinion. If you don't like them, read something else

I don't get it either and I've been here forever.

>>22700614
back when /lit/ still read there used to be 10 daily threads about each of those books, hence they became memes. like itaots and /mu/

>>22700614
They are the masterpieces of post-modern fiction. Makes sense.

>>22700644
OP is from early 2010s. Who gives a shit about the meme trilogy anymore?

>>22700656
Ulysses isn't post-modern, and the argument could be made that IJ isn't either.

Nice try retard.

>>22700614
The meme trilogy books are like starter pokémon which will accompany you on your literary journey.

I never read IJ, so idk.

I read more of Ulysses than I meant to, and while I wouldn't recommend it and have no intention of reading it again, it is kind of fun in places and not as bad as a description of it makes it sound. I can sort of see why people like it, although I suspect that writing and reading this sort of thing is mostly about showing off.

I read GR twice, and most of the above applies, but it much more frantic and disjointed, sometimes more like a series of short stories, some of which are quite memorable. I frequently lost the plot completely, but figured it would make more sense if I read it again, but it didn't. I wouldn't recommend it and won't read it again, but I can sort of see why this would appeal to some people, but it is a bit much.

People I think read books like this to prove something, in part - I did - and they are "difficult" in a certain way which makes people want to advertise that they "get it", that they weren't filtered, etc. If you enjoy it, great. If you want to read something difficult, read mathematics.

>>22701194
IJ is the most normal & enjoyable out of these imho. I only made it through the others because I wanted /lit/-cred.

>>22701194
sounds like you got filtered

>>22700614
It makes more sense if you consider that Ulysses easily mogs the other two for complexity and difficulty.
GR tried to be a Ulysses for Americans but besides trite stupid stuff about truth and conspiracy its only merit is to have attempted a (failed) integration of the overly present american pop culture into some high literary product.
IJ is basically GR if it was a sitcom where everything is to be taken ironically until the heartwarming, wholesome finale (which happens in another untold half book - and this trick of the half untold book is the only merit of IJ).
But basically Ulysses does all of what the other two do or try to do better, plus doing many other things Pynchon and Wallace would never be capable of even beginning to conceive. It touches god at its highest metaphysical heights and it falls deep into the pits of materiality, all in one book. It's one of the few books that could stand absolute as a monument of modernity in 3000 years, while GR and IJ will forever be its corollaries and nothing more. They are to Ulysses what the Argonautics is to the Iliad.

>>22701285
Maybe. When I was in college I had more patience for this sort of thing, and I didn't think Ulysses and GR were bad, they were just very busy and not really worth the effort to figure out what's going on in some guy's made-up story. There are a lot of books one could read with a far better value/pleasure/significance to effort ratio than any 1,000 page modernist novels, no one could ever read even 1% of them, so why bother? People can like what they like, but there are reasons A) why people broadcast how much they love this sort of book, and B) why people don't actually love this sort of book, and sometimes people are in both categories at once. That was my point to OP.

>>22700682
define post-modernism for us then

>>22701352
If you don't understand how authors like Pynchon and Joyce are from two different movements, you need to read more of their respective contemporaries.

>>22701198
IJ has too much autism for my tastes. GR is where it's at I think about it every day

>>22700614
Infinite Jest is the joke one, and yes it's an old joke...

>>22701352
I will if you will.
>>22702039
Just don't respond if you don't know.

>>22700614
Infinite Jest is the best one there but literature circles started a massive shaming campaign against it so now everyone pretends to hate it.

>>22700614
Ulysses will continue to be memed for a long time, largely due to its #1 ranking from the Modern Library back in the day

>>22701313
Wish I could return my copy of GR, it's just a tiresome work overall. I'm plodding through it because I'm a cheapskate, even though the money is meaningless to me.

>>22700614

>>22700614
I currently own three of these and been planning to read it next starting with Infinite Jest then Gravity's Rainbow and lastly Ulysses

>>22703164

>>22701313
>until the heartwarming, wholesome finale (which happens in another untold half book

What did you mean by this? Are you talking about TPK? I finished IJ a couple of moths ago and loved it, though admittedly i am retarded

>>22703029
Gravity's Rainbow is fun

You're honestly lacking some kind of basic savvy if you can't understand why these books would become popular totems of this board.

>>22701313
>tldr: Ulysses>GR>IJ.
Your "arguments" are no where near as erudite as you would like to think.

Imagine being such an unread retard that you literally categorize Ulysses as postmodern. I hate this board and the retards who come here from /pol/.

>>22703978
postmodern means when a book is weird

>>22703978
What is Ulysses then? Late modern? Proto post modern? Either way its shit
Its in the right spot between talking about Classical culture (like books from the late medieval times to the 19 century) and talking about pop culture (like Pynchon and DFW)

>>22704024
Joyce was the height of modernist writers

>>22703029
>>22703854
>The Duality of Man
If you are the sort who likes GR-type writing - manic, psychedelic, highly referential, paranoid, satirical, all mixed up in a bowl and 1,000 pages long - GR is probably the book for you. What I mean is: GR is the best book which tries this sort of thing, and there are several.

For most people (eg me) it's intermittently amusing but mostly exhausting and indulgent and not really a "novel" in the normal, pre-modernist sense. A brain dump in novel format, maybe.

>>22704179
Just admit you got filtered by the prose and move on

>>22704226
Treating books like a test or a conquest is literally the ultimate midwit/bourgie take, the bookshelf full of "aspirational" purchases with curiously preserved spines prominently displayed like hunting trophies, always loudly discussing the title, yet strangely never the content, of these books you "read" (the words passed through your visual field).

The Einsatzgruppen of culture and SOVL.

>>22704287
Nice cope :)

>>22700614
Man NICE cover of Ulysses, it looks very similar to the original edition. beautiful -- going to purchase this immediately

>>22700656
>>22700682
>>22701352
Ulysses is modernism

PM is basically the recovery of past narrative discourses that modernism and the literary vanguards tried to bury and defeat so as to create their own thing. Postmodernism sees everything from the past not as an enemy to overcome, but as a discourse it can take from.
Modernism wants to make something new, Postmodernism wants to re-signify the old narratives, that have lost all their "power".

tfw own 2 of 3 of these

>>22704472
That doesn't sound like any description of postmodernism I've ever read nor does it accurately describe any major postmodern work

>>22703918
Brainlet

>>22704472
Modernism is awful and post-modernism is the failson of modernism so abjectly shameful that they never bothered to give him a name. All these terms are 90% marketing anyway, works stand or fall on their own, and genius is sui generis.

>>22704291
t. The Anthony Fantano of literature.

Go make a listicle.

>>22700614
Do you want the actual reason why they’re shilled here?

>>22704179
Yeah, see, my modernist tome of choice is Musil's TMWQ. I agree with how you describe GR exactly and, to a lesser degree, feel that way about Ulysses as well.

>>22704535
What?

>>22704787
>tome
Doubt you have even read TMWQ.

>>22704847
meds

>>22704502
It is a weird way to word it and I suspect anon was trying to trigger the trad larpers with it but is perfectly accurate. DFWs wording was that postmodernist exploited the tools of criticism and this would be a bit more standard of a wording. You need to remember that modernist and postmodernist literature have little to do with modernist and postmodernist thought/theory, works from the major movements are works which criticism has managed to unify with the school of thought. Criticism is the use of theory to explore literature and the world and when we say modernist literature we really are saying these works can be effectively analysed through the tools of modernist theory and criticism.

Postmodernists came about and took a look at those past schools of theory and criticism which were languishing and viewed as old fashioned and said lets use it all, it is still perfectly useful for the needs of literature. So postmodernist literature are those works which use the tools from many different schools of theory and criticism which often makes them impossible to analyze from the tools of a single school and the source of the meme of postmodernism being meaningless; the modernist critics of the times could not make sense of the works with their limited tools, you must meet postmodernist literature on its own terms if you want to make any sense of it.

>>22701194
>If you want to read something difficult, read mathematics.
It's always funny to see people try to ego one another over reading fiction. It's not that difficult.

>>22700614
The Meme Trilogy is ironically suggested to normies, newfags, redditor refugees, and /lit/izens in general whenever one of them asks for reading suggestions. While the works themselves should most certainly be read for their own merits, their complex structure, intricate use of advanced literary techniques, and meta-textual nature make them nearly inaccessible to the untrained or uninitiated reader. The suggestion of reading the meme trilogy is simultaneously serious and sarcastic, as it serves as a barrier of entry for readers who genuinely love the craft of literature and those who simply read as a time-killing hobby or in hopes of achieving pseud status. For this reason, the trilogy is held in high regard by /lit/ for both their literary artistry as well as their meme and shitposting potential.

>>22704867
Thanks for the confirmation

>>22705789
What does the word tome have to do with anything? I'm 900 pages into my second reading.

Only GR is not worth a read.

>>22707088
Wrong