/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20962616]

Post-modernism is replete with this BS --- I find most of the authors to have far less insight into culture and life than I do, yet I'm supposed to pretend that their half-baked utterances about human emotion and the human condition are some product of deep philosophical grounding and reflection. It's a joke. They aren't fooling me, at least.

Then you have unwitting audiences, like the ones on this board, who have even less insight than the authors, who think these people are geniuses. Wallace talks about the banality of TV culture. Wow, my 4th-grade teacher told me about that, and then I built on that insight in high school. From what I've heard Foster say about it, I could teach him a thing or two on the subject.

Film grapples with all the same issues as literature, it just mirrors the stories back to us using a different medium. You don't hear the writers, directors, and actors posturing in this way. Listen to an interview with Sydney Pollack, or Scorsese, or Hitchcock, or John Schlesinger, or any other great director. There's no BS or pseduo-intellectualizing. Is there deep analysis? Yes. They understand the human condition as much as anyone else, as much as these so-called literary authors, but they are masters of the craft of FILMMAKING, and they talk about FILMMAKING with an expertise we don't have. And we learn from their interviews about that art. They aren't didactically trying to instruct us with some half-baked sophomoric insight they have, not realizing that we might have a much deeper grasp of the problem than they do.

With these literary people, they are supposed to be experts on STORYTELLING. And when you read a post-modern novel, it's abundantly clear that so many of them are not masters of their craft. They aren't masters of the human condition, nor are they masters of the writing craft, which is why so much post-modernism is CRAP.

[Anonymous No.20962629]

>>20962616
Okay.

[Anonymous No.20962636]

>>20962616
Until you actually publish something worthwhile, no one has any reason to take you seriously, faggot.

[Anonymous No.20962644]

>>20962636
>post-modernism is CRAP.
we all got this memo like 40 years ago

[Anonymous No.20962656]

>>20962616
>I could teach him a thing or two
Things were different back then, the ancients had barely any internet but lots of Simpsons. You have to think in Simpsonian terms to appreciate their perspective.

[Anonymous No.20962676]

>>20962636
spbp

[Anonymous No.20962682]

>>20962636
I'm allowed to criticize an author without being one myself. Same with movies or any other medium.

[Anonymous No.20962696]

>>20962682
Read again

[Anonymous No.20962701]

>>20962696
>>20962636
That's an appeal to accomplishment and not an argument.

[Anonymous No.20962702]

>>20962616
/tv/posters are the niggers of this board

[Anonymous No.20963943]

Bump

[Anonymous No.20963974]

>>20962616
IJ isn't post modern

[Anonymous No.20964265]

>>20963974
OP doesn't mention IJ. There is no mention of any book at all

[Anonymous No.20964325]

Wait, this isn't a thing Wallace said?

[Anonymous No.20964407]

>>20962636
>falling for the copypasta
you must be new here

[Anonymous No.20964803]

>>20964265
touchy

[Anonymous No.20965050]

>>20963974
That level of using postmodernism to turn on postmodernism is postmodernist. Regardless, he was full of shit and he even admitted as much when he didn't know what he was doing in college -- he was just trying to sound smarter than his professors. If you interviewed Hemingway or Fitzgerald, they could articulate exactly what they were doing. He could never explain himself, he just bullshat. Like so many contemporary authors. It's embarrassing for the genre.

[Anonymous No.20965461]

You don’t have as much insight as you think faggot, and if you did you would be selling books.

[Anonymous No.20965491]

>>20965050
You think he’s trying to sound smart in Broom Of The System? Holy fuck. Can’t believe people have trouble with his books—any response he had about his books being “smart” was always couched in an interview where interviewers were telling him his work was great and he’s so smart. I think him mentioning he was trying his best isn’t the problem you seem to think it is. You’re contending with the specter of DFW not the actual man. He had enough levity to make jokes at his own expense and all of this bitching about his writing style being overly pretentious is pretentious in itself. You faggots act like IJ is the same kind of book as the Bible or something. It wasn’t really supposed to be that difficult it’s literally just LONG and that’s mostly what he discusses about it. Try again.

[Anonymous No.20965618]

>>20965491
How does this counter the fact that he was never explain himself and just pretentiously waxxed about the human condition?

[Anonymous No.20965637]

>>20965050
Okay but it's not postmodern

[Anonymous No.20965675]

>>20965618
What you’re saying doesn’t even make sense, it’s like you don’t know what a book is

[Anonymous No.20965695]

>>20965675
Check out literally any of the interviews he's in. He legitimately cannot explain himself or what he's doing. Actual artists have no problem doing this.

[Anonymous No.20965727]

>>20965675
He isn't prepared in literally anything he does, nor can he explain himself. You sound like a squishy minded millenial.

[Anonymous No.20965740]

>>20965675
https://youtu.be/iGLzWdT7vGc
He literally cannot answer the most basic questions that are given to him in any interview. Can you tell me a single author that couldn't explain what they were doing? I most certainly think they could explain what they were doing I'm certain Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald could too. And in some cases they did.

[Anonymous No.20965763]

>>20965740
For hundreds of years writers and artists have been making things using their subconscious mind. Even native ceremonies lean into a view of abstraction as reality, black magic, the idea that there is no meaning. Do you think Dali or Kafka weren’t working from a place of subconsciousness rather than hard objective utilitarian observation? What you’re describing are didactic writers. You should stick with Hemingway and pretty much all Russian literature if that’s what appeals to you but you’re a toooottaalllll faggot that can’t comprehend complex abstract ideas if you think not only that everything can be quantified in art but that you’re owed an explanation. You’re a consumer. You’re a gay. And you will never be loved like DFW is and always will be.

[Anonymous No.20965772]

Recently I was at the Home Depot and I saw this guy who looked like a more gruff, tougher version of David Foster Wallace.

[Anonymous No.20965799]

>>20965675
Literally look at any interview he's a part of like the one I mentioned earlier. He cannot explain himself or what he's doing in his books. He's just bullshitting his entire way through the interview and he's asking the interviewer questions to reassure himself that his half baked ideas are correct. Do you know of any other actual authors that couldn't explain themselves? I'm certain that Steinbeck and Fitzgerald could too. And in some cases they did.

[Anonymous No.20965812]

>>20965799
There’s no such thing as “right” or “wrong” or even “ideas” in books. Have fun reading instruction manuals the rest of your life I guess?

[Anonymous No.20965840]

>>20965772
fr? glad to know the True Niger still lives in this doggy-eat-dog world and hes' keeping it real dog

[Anonymous No.20965876]

>>20965812
>There is no ideas in books
What?

[Anonymous No.20965918]

>>20965876
>he doesn’t know what formalism is

Oh anon

[Anonymous No.20966409]

>>20965812
>>20965491
>>20965763
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it well enough. He's not some literary master. He's a pathetic pseud.

[Anonymous No.20966479]

David Foster Wallace's books were so bad he offed himself to get away from them

[Anonymous No.20966559]

>>20966409
Seeth

[Anonymous No.20966640]

>>20962616
>Wallace talks about the banality of TV culture. Wow, my 4th-grade teacher told me about that, and then I built on that insight in high school.
Obviously a troll post, everyone knows TV is a flawed medium because you're LUCKY to get 5 minutes on TV to really flesh out your ideas. Most people resort to 5-10 second sound bites, which makes them sound fucking stupid as a result (think about every election in your country and how it's televised - normally the leaders just have to repeat the same slogan over and over because your average TV audience is too stupid to process multiple pieces of information a day). TV is not like a book or a conversation where you get hours to nut something out - when you go on TV you're competing with every other facet of entertainment, which means you need to have something engaging to say, you have to repeat yourself, you have to present everything in its simplest form, lest you run the risk of delving down a rabbit hole for which you haven't the time.

When you write: "From what I've heard Foster say about it", you indicate that you've only watched interviews where Wallace is talking. Because Wallace ganked himself in 2008 before the internet really took off, most of his interviews will have originally aired on TV, and as a result are subject to this flawed aspect of the medium. Perhaps you should read his works before you judge whether you can teach him a thing or two on the subject.

>>20965050
Hemingway was a spy (albeit a very bad one), so when he "articulates" what he's doing, he's actually lying through his teeth. Goes to show how easily duped your typical Ameritard is.

>>20965491
You have shit reading comprehension. That post said *in college* he was trying to sound smarter than his professors. Wallace even admits to this, that his early writing was him trying to show off how clever he was. Obviously when he matured and started writing books, he realised that no one likes a showoff and as a result his works don't read like pretentious wank.

[Anonymous No.20966658]

>>20962616
It's incredible that faggots like you can make such long, rambling posts where you declare yourself an expert on this or that topic and completely avoid placing a single detail that would make indicate you read any of the books you're making your sweeping generalizations about.
You do not once mention a book here or in fact anything tangentially related to literature that you didn't get from the first paragraph of DFW's wikipedia page. Every time I see these grandstanding "pomo bad" walls of text, it's the same exact pattern. You'll respond by saying you don't have to read any of "their" work because "they" are clearly tripe, which you'll vaguely describe as hating beauty or being obscurantist.

[Anonymous No.20966672]

>>20966640
>in college
I know fag, That’s why I referenced Broom Of The System which was his college thesis and first novel. I know exactly what DFW thought about it and he later distanced himself from the book, but he also never cucked out and said it was some kind of mistake. It’s a work he stood by and like any creative person he’s more focused on what’s next. He just felt like he had matured as any author would after writing more and he developed more of his own style. Do you know what a thesis is? I doubt you’ve been to college but I’ll enlighten you to the fact that a thesis is a project that’s being judged in a specific way by your mentors. If he was a pseud like you he never would of gone to college (like you).

[Anonymous No.20966686]

>masters of the human condition
made me laugh out loud for some reason

[Anonymous No.20966721]

>>20966672
Lol rage harder bro. Obviously he distanced himself because there were still aspects of him that were trying to show off.

>Do you know what a thesis is? I doubt you’ve been to college
You're correct in doubting whether I've been to college; I've only been to university because I live in a country with good tertiary education. A thesis is usually written towards the end of your time as a student, and so obviously when he was writing his thesis, he was more mature as a person. You don't spend the entirety of your college years writing a thesis, most of your thesis is written towards the very end, only after you've attained a more nuanced outlook (or in the case of STEM subjects, only after you've actually learnt all the maths and prerequisite material and spent thousands of hours reading and studying an extremely niche topic that your supervisor barely even understands, because his specialty is a tiny little delta away from yours, which generates a not so sufficiently small epsilon, &c...).

The point is, you can be *in college* and try to sound smarter than your professors, and then you can eventually mature and still be "in college" and be able to write with less pretension. Most PhD or Masters students don't consider themselves "in college" or "students"; really they're researchers without the livable payslip. Therefore, semantically it's a fair argument to say that DFW getting his Masters is not really "in college", since he's doing his own research using facilities the college has to offer.

>If he was a pseud like you he never would of gone to college (like you).
>would of
>of
Ok pal. Learn to conjugate.

[Anonymous No.20966779]

>>20966640
There's full unedited interviews on YouTube moron. Take a look at a single one of them.
https://youtu.be/iGLzWdT7vGc

[Anonymous No.20967049]

>>20966779
>>20966721
>>20966686
>>20966672
>>20966658
>>20966640
>>20966559
>>20966479
>>20966409
>>20965918
>>20965876
>>20965840
>>20965812
>>20965799
>>20965772
>>20965763
>>20965675
>>20965637
>>20965618
>>20965491
>>20965491
>>20965461
>>20965050
>>20964803

[Anonymous No.20967096]

>>20966779
what a little creep

[Anonymous No.20967176]

the worst thing about this board is it inherently fosters essay posters

[Anonymous No.20967200]

Come home white man

[Anonymous No.20967228]

>>20967176
>essay posters
low-attention-span zoomer detected

[Anonymous No.20967257]

>>20966779
You've just proven my point that you've only watched interviews and ignored any of his writings. You've linked an (unedited version of an) interview from 2003 that was aired on German broadcasting station ZDF. Doesn't really disprove what I'm saying - the clip's only 90 minutes. That's 90 minutes to form a rapport with the interviewer, discuss the ideas that the interviewer wants him to discuss, and listen to what the interviewer has to say. Really he gets about 45 of those minutes, and he can't spend that entire time talking about TV's defects. I don't really see what your argument is?

>duhh he had 45 unedited minutes to discuss a topic which needs hours to deconstruct for a typical viewer, and he didn't do a perfect job, what a moron

[Anonymous No.20967271]

>>20967257
You are expecting too much from an australian troll born out of /film/.
At least they were smart enough to detect his shitposting style.

[Anonymous No.20967285]

>>20966721
Backpedaling real hard here, semantics? Lol. Some people do spend years working on their thesis, for example someone like David Foster Wallace. You’re the one making the claim he’s showing off but I haven’t seen any proof of that. You posted a very famous interview of him that made him hyper-relatable and made his fans adore him so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Maybe what he’s saying is just over your head anon.

[Anonymous No.20967308]

>>20966721
>A thesis is usually written towards the end of your time as a student, and so obviously when he was writing his thesis, he was more mature as a person.
I'm not sure what it's like in other countries, but I know that in my country, a bachelor's degree thesis is usually a very long research paper that compiles a lot of information about a subject and tries to find a specific answer to a known problem using known tools or by the means of a well-developed interpretative framework, whereas a master's degree thesis is usually slightly more innovative, with a somewhat more "daring" thesis statement (even though it's almost always applied stuff that uses a thoroughly explored and validated theory and framework), and a PhD thesis is meant to be the one where a person actually makes some unique research on a topic for the sake of contributing to the creation of a new model or expanding upon/adjusting a theory.
Humanities students are heavily ego-driven in regard to what they focus on, and how they write, even when it comes to relatively serious, "rigorous" subjects like History, Archaeology, and Linguistics, since what they research is intrinsically tied to social, political, and aesthetic concerns. Even works about historical linguistics, that should be little more than studying changes in phenomena over time, are often tied to personal beliefs regarding ties between different groups of people and the ability of certain groups to resist linguistic mutation, which is why, for Humanities students, there is no such thing as "cooling down" or "accepting one's place in the academic world".

[Anonymous No.20967310]

>>20962636
>You cant criticize me until you make more money than me
10 Good Goy points have been deposited in your account

[Anonymous No.20967365]

>>20967285
>You posted a very famous interview of him that made him hyper-relatable
Wasn't me, I'm a different person, there's more than two (2) posters here, nigger.

>>20967308
That's about my understanding of it, though I wouldn't know what it's like in Humanities since my background is STEM. I always assumed that a humanities "thesis" would be more of a subjective disposition on a topic rather than a purely analytical breakdown, however I still imagine there is some level of research that goes behind the work. I'm not trying to say Wallace "cooled down" in his views as he got towards the end of his degree, just that he matured as a writer and became more capable of conveying something that was actually interesting and engaging for the reader, rather than writing something that was solely meant to show off how clever he was. I think if there's a reason he distanced himself from this earlier work, it's probably because he still saw that younger self trying to be clever.

[Anonymous No.20968122]

>>20966779
I love that interview I’ve seen all of it. It was one of the things that made me interested in reading infinite jest, I’ve always liked Thomas Pynchon and when I started reading it. I realized how close he wanted to resemble the prose of Pynchon. And I think the author liked the similar styles I really liked in Pynchon. But back to the interview, was he being pretentious, yes and no. I think in the beginning he was definitely trying to bring out some of the really smart things but kinda failed and then near the end. It seemed more human, everybody wants to write or seem smart and be validated. I think that’s kind of clear in infinite jest how all the characters try and fulfill there lives with trivial things, and probably the lack of a father figure, infinite jest was one of his more personal works, and it’s not all that bad or complex, alot of it is pretty funny. I can’t wrap my head around someone who finds using lemon pledge as sunscreen not funny. He’s not trying to be complex people precieve him that way and he tries to act that way. Only cause his book is long, and really other books are just as long. Game of thrones for example is the most boring book ever read and people read through it and record there reactions to the season finally I think that is the definition of pretentious.