/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6498070]

>- see it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry — or a long poem, alas — with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamour acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick.

DFW BTFO
PKD BTFO
Fauxkner BTFO
Sir Terry BTFO
Steinbeck BTFO

[Anonymous No.6498080]

>>6498070
>Such titles possess a specious glamour

This would be fine if specious glamour was all they could or ever do possess. Eliot considered calling The Waste Land "He Do The Police In Different Voices", for example. Chasing up the source of this title - a throwaway sentence in a Dickens novel - lends little in the way of glamour, but when the line as written by Dickens is considered in its context, it has explicative weight with respect to the poem.

Of course it is often just affected pose-striking.

[Anonymous No.6498084]

>>6498070

I feel the same way about anything that 'evokes' or 'pays homage' to past literary greats. Literature is supposed to be a triumph of creativity, and here's the author letting someone else's ideas take center stage in his book like some kind of literary cuckold.

[Anonymous No.6498117]

>>6498084
>literary cuckold

[Anonymous No.6498136]

Dont you ever, ever, talk shit about Faulkner

motherfucker

[Anonymous No.6498149]

Must hate Ulysses then. Joyce used the main character's name from one of the oldest and best known literary works of all time? What a hack.

[Anonymous No.6498162]

>>6498084
“The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

[Anonymous No.6498178]

>>6498162

You can say that about any discipline. I'm not talking about influence, I'm talking about conscious inclusion. Anything that's a 'modern day re-telling of x'. Anything with prose that 'evokes' some author who wrote a hundred years ago, and who nobody talks like anymore. It's like you're watching in the corner, crying an masturbating while another author writes your book for you.

[Anonymous No.6498179]

>>6498084
That's just completely retarded. Throwing some allusions or references in is fine so long as you actually use them to say something and the whole story doesn't revolve around referencing them.

[Anonymous No.6498180]

>>6498149
>Must hate Ulysses then
Of course. As should any decent man with taste.

[Anonymous No.6498183]

>>6498178
It's more like you're autistic because every work ever is built on the basis of something that came before it. The only difference is to what extent.

[Anonymous No.6498192]

>>6498178
You can't escape it is the point, everything you ever write is influenced by past works unconsciously or otherwise. I agree that it's annoying when an author purposefully and loudly alludes to a past work as a way of waving a banner that reads 'Look how clever and well-read I am!' Upholding writing as this bastion of originality is upholding an impossibility though. It's impossible to write in a vacuum, you're constantly influenced by others.

[Anonymous No.6498223]

>>6498179

>he thinks fiction can be good when it tries to 'say something'

Wake me up when the lecture is over.

[Anonymous No.6498451]

>>6498223
Are you saying fiction can't be good if it tries to say something?

[Anonymous No.6498463]

>>6498451
Are you saying you haven't said anything?

[Anonymous No.6498467]

You guys are fucking retards.

[Anonymous No.6498532]

>>6498223
>he thinks it's possible for fiction not to say anything

[Anonymous No.6500515]

>>6498070
>tfw Proust prostituted as "Remembrance of things past"

[Anonymous No.6500591]

>>6498223
>'Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.'

Wallace should have realized that fiction isn't restricted to narrow ideas of 'being human.'

[Anonymous No.6500622]

>>6498070
Hemingway also BTFO

"For whom the bell tolls" the bell tolls for your ass hemingway

[Anonymous No.6500659]

>>6500591

Everything you have ever thought or perceived or described, everything you ever will think or perceive or describe, is restricted to being human.

[Anonymous No.6500668]

>>6500515
Didn't Proust prefer that title, though?

[Anonymous No.6500676]

>>6498223
maybe this is more to your liking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQAzydOfRmc

[Anonymous No.6500681]

>this thread

[Anonymous No.6500686]

>>6500659
>he doesn't understand the autonomous nature of textuality

[Anonymous No.6500695]

>>6500668
No.

[Anonymous No.6501178]

>>6500686
>he believes a non-human experience of textuality is accessible

[Anonymous No.6502241]

I see nobody mentioned John Green.

[Anonymous No.6502245]

>>6498451
Are you saying that fiction can say something?

[Anonymous No.6502253]

>>6500659
No, because I have transcended human.