What is your most controversial literary opinion?

art is not inherently political and this applies to literature as much as any other medium
you have no right to insist a work has meaningful commentary when the author has clearly intended to entertain

The Aeneid is better than The Odyssey and The Iliad.

Nabokov was a fucking hack whose writing style wasn't even half as good as people consider it to be so the only option for him was making pseud edgy claims and cheap """"groundbreaking"""" plots in order to compensate his lack of talent

I was just typing this shit out fucking correct opinion there, I mean just look how facile some of the social 'critique' in Lolita is lol

'America bad Europe good'

Books aren't a substitute for living a life

I thought Nabokov expressly avoided social critique

as someone said, most books are political but the great ones have other things that appeal to the reader.
for example, Dead Souls by Gogol is no longer politically relevant since serfdom was abolished, but otherwise it's great, so it's a classic to this day.

some books are inherently political and are shit though, they'll only appeal to a certain demographic for a couple of years.

Great books are an Anglo meme. Prior to the 20th century, nobody gave a fuck about shakespeare.

The Anglos were threatened by the German literary might

this is the best post I've ever seen on this shithole of a website

'Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices under glass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will often see riders coming down Main Street on their way back from a romantic moonlight ride. “Often at 3 a.m.,” sneered unromantic Lo).'

Is that social critique? Whatever it is, I find it pretty boring/superficial to point out that America is materialistic/spiritually impoverished, that's not insightful and plenty made that argument before Nabokov. One of my pet peeves in general is how easy it is to blandly observe that America is shit, gimme something more worthwhile. Henry James made the perfect balance between critiquing America's follies while holding a sincere optimism in their potential.

That opinions, and especially literary oppinions, don't matter in the least. There is as much intellectual value in listening to ape copulating as there is in listening to someone's opinion.

if a book is memely notorous for being hard to understand (literal incomprehensible wording and retarded storytelling, not talking abput books on complex subjects) then it's not really good.
you're not a genius if you can't convey your thoughts.

I am in complete accordance with this.

books r gay

'living' and 'life' are both subjective

Dante > Shakespeare

The fewer words you need to convey an idea or feeling the better writer you are.

Also books are gay

wrong, but understandable.

Imagine coming to lit to post something as hideously overwritten as this.

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user hates tripfags.

An author who can't write women can never be considered great

Imagine being a newfag trying to pass judgment on other posters when you can't even recognize a Nabokov quote.

Samefagging isn’t a good look on you, user.

Why do you tripfag?

Dub dubs of truth. You need both positive and edgecore books under your belt.

"women" is a spook

Nisioisin is one of the greats.

I don't like the Divine comedy. Probably because bit was overhyped.

I don't care of proust is so widely beloved and agreed to be one of if not the best novelist, I'll be god damned if I read thousands of pages about nothing in particular by the power trio of literal degeneract: a gay french jew. The only other writer I have ever felt such a certainty in my lack of interest towards their works is William Gass who comes across to me as extremely fucking dull and superfluous in the face of all other postmodernists

Jorge Luis Borges' stories aren't very imaginative.

The Catcher in the Rye & The Stranger should be read back-to-back.

i don't like dostoevsky and hemingway

I dont you and your opinion.

Atheists are incapable of creating good art

See?

That made me sad.

Apparently Monogatari genuinely has great prose in Japanese so this isn't that controversial if you're reading him in Nip

But a lot of those types of books are fun to read whether you understand every detail or not
Ulysses is tons of fun if you aren't hung up on getting everything, because you won't

I have many, take your pick.
The Broom of the System is DFW's best novel and Infinite Jest is overrated garbage.
Of Mice and Men is horrible and is only taught in schools because it's short and teachers can't get kids to read Steinbeck's true masterpieces, Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.
The Fault in Our Stars is a terrible book, but Turtles All the Way Down is one of the best YA books ever.
Short stories don't sell as much as novels because short story writers became dominated by pretentious tryhards who only write for academia. Short stories in general are the lowest of all the literary forms.
It is not necessary to read a work in its original language to fully understand the work. Anything that gets "lost in translation" is minimal at best.
The author is alive and they can say whatever the fuck they want to about their work and you just have to deal with it.
There are genre fiction writers alive today who are writing stories just as good as literary writers despite their styles and goals being opposites.

Most of the well read people I know (of) are boring and have nothing interesting to say that isn't some kind of regurgitation of what they've read. Stop experiencing life entirely through someone else's words, go out there and live it and create some meaning on your own. Reading is complimentary to life, not its foundation.

based and underrated

It's not about the opinion it's about who says it.

Wow. I must heartily disagree good sir. *tip*

roadside picnic is shit

Dostoevsky is bloated.

Some females are actually good writers.

I'm gay

what would this achieve

Everything that Stephen King wrote until he got too far into drugs and was forced to quit is quite good, and deserves more respect than it gets.

kindly kys, only pessimists deserve a chance at life

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Most existential writing is self-indulgent wankery.

Indeed. All politics is inherently art, not the other way around.

What if I think there's intellectual value in listening to two apes copulating you son of a fuck? What then?

Have sex

I want you to know that neither I nor anyone else read your post. Here's a (you) for comfort honey.

I haven't enjoyed a novel in years and exclusively read non fiction now.

very good post user; you are describing the intellectual eros, a genuine yet 'detached' (from the singular human desire for constant comfort) joy, which betters people, through allowing change to occur. It is like reading without a clear intention to justify a wallowing and stagnation which many NEET anons want, out of suppressed fear. Your post is much simpler, clearer and effective than mine, I like it a lot.

Shakespeare is overrated

this

well actually, simply being a trip fag is not an opinion, it is a position; they have their own opinions/arguments which I would actually like to see you argue against. I don't hate you, but i've speculated and wondered what purposes you think that the butterfly identity on Yea Forums serves.

It is obviously built mainly on the conflict that you have to endure, but there's many reasons why that could be enjoyable to you. It could feed into a self-righteous victim complex (I doubt this actually) or be simply because you want to learn to stand up for yourself, and develop the rare skill of remaining emotionally detached when faced with emotional arguments and ad hominem. Even though it would destroy Yea Forums culture if everyone did it, I think that selfishness is good sometimes and I have been considering becoming a tripfag myself for the same reasons. It forces me to be more coherent as well, due to the definition that a fixed identity gives to posts.

what are your thoughts?

but what if i just enjoy to stay at home?

Take the if-you-recognize-your-inner-world-the-search-in-the-outer-world-won't-continue-pill, faggot!

I don't like Shakespeare as a dramatist but his language and metaphor is impressive, though too much at times. Without the footnotes explaining all the oblique references, it's not great. But with them, it's too dense, unreadable really.

Beckett's novels are terrible. Not worth a damn.

The smoothness of Elena Ferrante's writing, her vicious plots and emotional turmoil, make her candidate for most important 21st ce writer 2bqh.

I think Hemingway is quite overrated, though I do like him.

Can't really stand the Houellebecq/Brett Easton Ellis type brand of "no you don't understand, my wallowing in violence/pettiness/bleakness is ACTUALLY the most meaningful engagement with society". It is the easy way out to just stack horrors on top of each other, it takes courage and vulnerability to unironically write about happiness and good people, at least for literary writers.

Of contemporary authors I find by far most interesting novels are written by women. Granted I'm most at home in young authors from my home country anyway, it might be a little different internationally. I don't like all the female writers either but even if I don't like the outcome I can see they are trying to do something new. For many of the male authors, including ones that are skilled writers, I mostly feel like they are trying to write "another [name your favoriet classic]", that there's huge nostalgia.

Ossian > Homer

For (you) my sweet butterfly

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DFW has no discernible talent

Stop just stop

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Celine was not an anti-semite

Virginia Woolf > James Joyce

Proust is overrated
Castaneda is a fraud but a very good writer
Psychoanalysis is weird and vicious
i despise "feel good" litterature ( it's a genre here)
master of the high castle is a bad K Dick book
DFW's Unfinished comedy
the coran is the worst so called holy book I ever read

>it takes courage and vulnerability to unironically write about happiness and good people, at least for literary writers
That's deep user, I'll put that in my essay

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Low quality bait

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You want real controversial Yea Forums opinion?
France is to litterature what USA is to cinema, yet no everyone post randoms anglos or shakespeare or le greeks!!1

>France is to litterature what USA is to cinema
Very true. Exploitative, profit-seeking, and utterly unoriginal; only successful because of its power over a captive market due to the proliferation of the language.

lmao rekt

Intending only to entertain is itself a political act. Such works serve to imply that the status quo is acceptable, needing no discussion or opposition, or to distract from pressing issues - they are counterrevolutionary in nature, and in function. The elite do not consume the "apolitical" bread-and-circus culture they shovel downward onto us, any more than they eat the canned beans and ramen they use to keep us working for another day.

Kendrick deserved the Pulitzer

Hold the shift key down longer next time

Wagecuck MAJOR cope

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Thank God, living a life sucks.

user is on the right path
Get BTFO nihilist virgins

You should read at least 15 books at a time.

Interesting. While I value Houellebecq dearly, it's also hard to deny at least partial validity of your point. What are some of your favourite contemporary female writers?

Game of Thrones stole ideas from Dune prequel books

That may be controversial, but you're in good company: it was one of Nabokov's most cherished heresies. Personally, I think you're both crazy. I think Crime and Punishment is an intensely beautiful novel, and I like the Brothers a great deal. My own brother, though, likes only the Brothers—I think it's his favorite novel—and thinks Crime and Punishment is whiny and overzealous.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on hellenistic travelogues. Do I feel like I'm going to make it? Only to well-earned obscurity.

That, my friend, is a truly original interpretation of Lolita. It's one of my favorite novels, and I've read a lot about it, but it never occurred to me for a moment, despite the zany mania of Peter Sellers in the movie, that America, personified by an admittedly crass and materialistic girl, came of worse than Europe, personified by a sophisticated and duplicitous criminal who rapes said girl and causes her death. Admittedly, he has the gift of gab.

Umm... No.

based

lol faggot

Well read doesn't mean that you've read a lot of books, it means you've read the classics. My friends disagree with me on this one and women tend to say it's all about personal taste. I think it's BS. Also most books aren't worth reading but the only way to find the best books is to read a lot of books to find some gems that are underrated that people don't talk about a lot

Zola sucks

He stole ideas from a lot of things. That's not a very controversial opinion

Which is why Humbert is rightly condemned as a degenerate criminal.

Oh wait, no he isn't, people fucking love him/his relationship. Oh well. Maybe it even has something to do with the writing user?

A person who's read a diverse collection of 20 books from the western canon is definitely more well read than someone who's read 100 books of YA-fiction.

Alice Munro is my big favorite but she's kind of hit or miss with whether or not you like her. It's basically all psychological, more slice of (domestic, unremarkable) life than any whirlwind storyline or extravagant character. Very introspective. But to me no one tops her psychological insight and she manages to write about people with a lot of heart without trying to hide the serious misgivings/flaws of even pleasant people.

Other than this no real ranking I guess. Lauren Groff goes overboard sometimes, some of the twists in Fates and Furies made me cringe, but her enjoyment in writing is palpable, she has a style entirely her own that is otherworldly and compelling at its best, she is bold and not nearly as afraid as many writers are of laying it on too thick. Love what I've read by Zadie Smith, some is a little gimmick-y for my taste but she's so sharp, funny, quick, I would love to live in her head for a day. Reminds me of Salman Rushdie. Currently reading Rachel Cusk and I love her (Outline) too, it consists mostly of the protagonist listening to others. This description does not do justice to her skill. I also admire how much she dares to stay away from the tropes - nothing happens to the main character, there's no clash or love/sex, just observing life as we do most of our time here.
Also really loved Asymmetry, though it was the kind of novel where I was more in awe of the composition and artistic choices than feeling submerged in everything going on, particularly in the first third. But she writes amazingly well.

If you enjoy short stories, Scary Old Sex by Arlene Heymans is more classic but very warm-blooded and funny, all stories of (familial and romantic) love and mortality/time passing. Dorthe Nors is worth mentioning as well, not a personal favorite of mine I'd say but she has a unique style, she's made an art out of stringing together awkward, fumbly, spoken language-resembling sentences only to catch you off guard with a sudden shimmer of beauty or redemption. Some of her (ultra) short stories are a kick in the gut in the best possible way, not exactly shocking but quietly disturbing.

>people fucking love him
Humbert is great as a seductive unreliable narrator but he's a plain old creep. And Nabokov isn't THAT vague about it, there's a line smack in the middle of Humbert's reflections on his happiness and life where he straight up admits Lolita cries herself to sleep every single night and every single night he ignores her crying. Not to mention he single-handedly takes a young, bright girl from a more or less stable, middle class household and damages and abused her so much that she's willing to get pregnant and marry whomever at seventeen just to get some love and have a semblance of family life. This is still ignoring her attachment to a guy who tried to get her to play in pornographic movies.

He stole her youth and ruined her life and indirectly led to her death. The whole point of Lolita is that it is a romantic portrayal of something horrific. And people do romanticize it but if anyone's take-away from the book is that Humbert is more or less okay they did not read it carefully.

reccs?

I cba arguing the point, I think Nabokov failed utterly because he was unwilling to drop his style even for a moment. Just let me have an excuse to hate on his egotistic self-indulgent prose please.

I read it, I think user got point

interesting

Dostoevsky is mundane.

Milton is a vapid douchebag, enjoyable to read in the same manner as a limerick, nothing more

Eh, fine. I like Nabokov well enough, was quite impressed by both Lolita and Ada when I first read them. I do think his prose is pretty self-indulgent/self-congratulatory, especially in Pnin, which I struggled to get through for that reason. Not talking about the lyricism either, it's something else, there's something demonstrative and triumphant about his writing.

you're absolutely fucking wrong and you know it

Munro is on my must-read list, and I'll see about the others. I am quite curious about the male vis female writers judgement, and I'll try to observe it for some time. As far as Western literature is concerned, there is a fast-shrinking group of great male writers with no capable replacement in sight, so females may very well take the lead now. This provokes me to observe and consider. Thank you for that.

Shut up bitch

fido's conversational dialogue is the worst ever written

>Only to well-earned obscurity
That counts

>Being so fucking idiot.
everything that any person says or does is a rejuvenation of the experiences learned and observed by oneself or in others, in the past. Coming from books or not.
Read more.

Massive mental breakdown

An author who can write women can never be considered great

It is thelatter
>be simply because you want to learn to stand up for yourself, and develop the rare skill of remaining emotionally detached when faced with emotional arguments and ad hominem. Even though it would destroy Yea Forums culture if everyone did it, I think that selfishness is good sometimes and I have been considering becoming a tripfag myself for the same reasons. It forces me to be more coherent as well, due to the definition that a fixed identity gives to posts.
Well put. I agree and have been dropping bits of this here and there. Knowing most just don’t care, I leave it brief

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Sure sure, did you just do anything while thinking about me or not?

Be honest

Virgil has way more depth and meaning in his writing than Homer.

Women authors can't even write good women characters.

trip fag is a sign of attention whoring and women in their 20´s excelled in attention whoring

Plato's Republic is embarrassingly bad philosophy by modern standards. Obviously, I'm not going to blame him for that, and his works are of course important to see the foundations for Western philosophy, but you'd have to be a fool to follow the book's advice literally.

>what is your most controversial literary opinion?
Fiction is useless and contrived, fiction is a thing to be enjoyed by kids, women, and man-children. At best a silly hobby for serious writers, or a way to earn shekels.

Non-Fiction is where the interesting stuff is at, in all themes and topics.

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Achewood has the best characterization of any work I've ever read.

this, I can't believe people who post on Yea Forums without lurking for years prior

plot and characters are overrated. prose is the ultimate and only test of the quality of a book/written story.

butterfly, are you ryzhknd?

No.

>Short stories don't sell as much as novels because short story writers became dominated by pretentious tryhards who only write for academia. Short stories in general are the lowest of all the literary forms.
Do you feel this way about collections like Dubliners? The Dead is one of my favorite stories of all time.

Everything I've ever read by Dickens was horribly garish, and consistently overrated.
He's the literary equivalent of a telenovela, and even for a Victorian writer, isn't worth reading.

>Short stories don't sell as much as novels because short story writers became dominated by pretentious tryhards who only write for academia. Short stories in general are the lowest of all the literary forms.
this is the only one i really disagree with.

To expand on that: her mother dies, he contacts her summer camp to take her home early, pretends that everything is fine, attempts to drug her, rapes her regardless, and only then tells her that her mother is dead.

post-post modernism (whatever you want to call it) has already started and will start appearing over the next couple decades in "real" form
I guess this isn't that controversial in general, specifically what I think might be

get back in your fucking cage wagie

Edgy, unpopular, and respectable. I tip my hat to you, gentlemen.

incorrect.

I’d rather be right than happy

>OP : "post your most unpopular opinions"
>Anons post status-no opinions
>Anons that just barged in start taking potshots
>powerwording.exe on easy exposed targets

op did nothing wrong; he just did nothing right.

t. apathy pretending to butthurt to feel alive when click post

COPE

This thread is reddit.

>edgy
>redditspacing
>le tip le hat xD
Reddit.

Bulgakov is the best Russian author. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and all the others don't hold a candle to him.

reading matter less in improving the self than action does

Based

How does it feel to be dumb

I admire Nabokov but this is a sound critique.

this is correct but what the fuck are you doing on 4channel.org

ABSOLUTELY.

>The smoothness of Elena Ferrante's writing, her vicious plots and emotional turmoil, make her candidate for most important 21st ce writer 2bqh.
Based

Don’t take him seriously enough to inquire of him, he’s ignorant and dumb.

Kys

fiction is the useless space between philosophy, poetry, and screenwriting

Topkek m80

I don't like Homer at all. But I'm just a monoglot.

Only speaking one language probably makes your less empathetic.

If you want the hon to stop posting so much just ignore its posts. Most of them (especially this one) have a feedback loop between their dysphoria and histrionic issues, so by ignoring it, you will get it to post less, in addition to actually helping its general psychological condition.

Cormac McCarthy's prose sucks.
The Road is one of the worst books I've ever read.

Master and Margarita fucking sucks (comparatively, I mean it's ultimately a fine bit of fiction).
It's by far the worst out of any of the russian classics I've read. Doesn't hold a tenth of the value of tolstoy/dosto/turgenev/pushkin/lermontov/gogolchekhovetcetcetc yet it is so lauded.

A lot of you here pretend like you are smart because you read books others have not or have found some deeper meaning. I would really enjoy if someone could just give me a recommendation from the heart and not because they think this book is "important".

Hjalmar Soderberg is one of my favourite authors that almost no one else on Yea Forums has read him because he's not one any of the meme lists.

That sentence didn't turn out well. That's what I get for changing my mind about its structure mid-sentence and not proof-reading.

I guess it would be that >99.99% of all books are shit.

Yes

Reading The Idiot right now. I enjoy it for the most part but I've been wondering as I was reading: was it normal for authors of his time to fill dialogue with exclamation points and adding "he cried" after a character saying something? Even otherwise normal things to say are written as "You don't say! he cried." The characters seem histrionic.

That the Bible is extremely unimpressive as literature.

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Many of the big Japanese literary figures -- Kawabata, Mishima, Dazai -- are trash -- insofar as their novels unabashedly borrow from the Western tradition, yet add precisely nothing to it. A bunch of copycats, they were.

Correct!

I will always prefer Ulysses to Dubliners. Also, The Dead is a novella length story included in Dubliners, and I don't consider novellas to be short stories. I love The Metamorphosis, A Christmas Carol, and other novellas.

There's nothing wrong with being a copycat.

Lord of the Rings isn't very good.

Enjoy your obscurity, epigone.

thats based af user, stay strong

Its ok, most of them will grow out of it by the time they turn 18

>dodges the point
Lmao shut the fuck up retard, hurr durr short stories are worthless *presented Araby* uhhh but muh Ulysses
God we need eugenics

Imagine being this mad

George Martin wrote all the Shakespeare plays.

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I don’t have to imagine brainlet, I am

was here to say this
also Callimachus was a superior poet to Apollonius Rhodius

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Book fetishism is gross and most "big readers" only do it performatively. I've had better conversations with videogamers than readers.

>It is not necessary to read a work in its original language to fully understand the work. Anything that gets "lost in translation" is minimal at best.
Only women and children read for story alone. Quit being a culture of resentment idiot and learn to appreciate form and aesthetics.

That's the best response I've read to those "imagine" deflections. Fucking based.

The only thing women are unironically good at writing is history about men

What the fuck did you just say?

Fanfiction is literature.

There are almost no important writers of “color” and feminism within literature has failed to discover the library of forgotten, but totally incredible wah-men writers.

>what is Borges

>image
I was going to say cringe, but at least you understand and acknowledge that that is a very boomer opinion.

The only way to judge literature that is not in bad faith is to judge it based on personal enjoyment.

the fuck is there to explain

B&R

Shut the fuck up PHILISTINE

People try to make most literature seem much profounder than it really is when really most literature is just an elaborate game, an artifice, an entertainment, that people forget is just that.

Literary quality does not equal wisdom, and wisdom does not equal literary quality. The greatest wisdom could be found in philosophical literature, mystical literature, and/or religious literature that isn't very well-written technically. Extremely well-written books can have not too much wisdom in them. People who are extremely well-read in the classics can have not too much of a leg-up in understanding life or wisdom than anyone else.

>t. lost in the depths of pseudery with no way out

The only thing worse than what you described is finding the time to actually write that shit out on an anonymous imageboard.
It's more important to seek the truth of being than it is to be happy. If you think otherwise, you're retarded and need to read more and post less.

each book in the Yea Forums trilogy is unironically good, and so is Finnegans Wake
postmodernism is neither a force for good or for bad, and if you think it's either, you're legitimately retarded
secular philosophy is autistic, religious philosophy even more so
liking obscure things doesn't make you smart. and neither does hating popular things. liking popular things doesn't make you cultured, and neither does hating obscure things. 95% of everything is shit, and that 5% of good stuff is comprised of both popular and obscure things; strike the balance, no matter how trashy some genres seem (manga, YA, hell even fanfiction produced Paradise Lost)
for black people, what did you expect, the oppressed uneducated class to produce literature? find me an important redneck author. for women, imagine not knowing who Woolf is

- There are too many great books already, and authors should start focusing on writing shorter but better ones, like Borges did
- Due to the gigantic number of great books, no one can be cultured anymore, there are always hundreds of essential writers that you will be missing
- Lyrical poems are a rare thing, and almost no poet can write more than a 100 great ones in their lifetime, which means they should stop publishing collection after collection and, instead, start refining the best ten or so poems from each
- A person who memorized one great book is more well-read than a person who has read one hundred and memorized none
- The realist novel is a pointless exercise, because it's been overdone already, which means people should stop writing it
- Manley Hopkins was the greatest writer of the English language in the 19th century, after Keats
- In our day and age, fame is a curse. If you become a famous writer, after you die people will read all of your online messages, and discover your personal vices, like they did to Joyce. It is necessary to publish your works anonymously.

You shouldn't read very much. You should be limited to under 100 books or so in your lifetime and that's being generous. anything more will just turn reading into a surrogate activity.

>The realist novel is a pointless exercise, because it's been overdone already, which means people should stop writing it

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Yet it's what sells best...

?
I was defending realism silly user, Lukács famously argued Thomas Mann was a more important 20th century writer than Kafka

Here’s my controversial literary opinion

There isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any rule under the sun which says what an artist should or shouldn’t do.

mark twain

Well that's just your opinion.

Our Need for Consolation Cannot be Sated by Stig Dagerman is one of te shortest yet most feels-inducing thing I've ever read. It's the only translated piece of writing I've bothered to learn by heart because even through the translation it's heart-rending.

"Cried" is probably old-fashioned for "exclaimed". But Dosto's characterd are indeed often histrionic, because he often describes them in states of crisis and revelation. Compare with Tolstoy (his opposite in that respect) where every other conversation is masterfully retranscribed but mostly amounts to an awkward exchange between two courteous people talking half-past one another. Yet conversation in real life are often stilted and awkward just as they are often grandiose, ridiculous and, yes, histrionic. I think Tolsto missed the latter part when he commented that Dosto's dialogue felt unnatural ans excessive. It does but that excess is paradoxically very common.

Read Kawabatta's shirt stories.

You can't possibly read all the great realist novels that have already being written, not even if you spend your whole life just reading.

So what's the point of adding even more?

Of course you might do it in order to sell books or win prizes, but that has no relevance to the tradition.

That's far from controversial. In fact, that's the sort of stuff people usually expect to find on Reddit.

I don't think the value of realism is that a single individual can read through the entire genre, why would that ever be necessary/desirable? Find the stuff you think is good, discard the rest, the truth is you'll miss a lot. In reality, no individual can take in the total output of any established genre in the modern day. The point is that realism, an attempt to truthfully mirror reality, will have some justification for new material every time there's a change in reality deemed worthy of writing about, for me it has nothing to do with tradition or canon construction, which is a notion I think we've got to recontexutalise in the Information Age anyway, for fairly obvious reasons.

Philosophy is just abstract literary criticism.

It would be more controversial to say that art is nothing without rigorous craftsmanship backing it up at this point.

Shakespeare is overrated and boring as fuck.

care to extrapolate

That's the least controversial 'controversial' opinion ever

>one of the best YA books ever.
talk about damning by faint praise

>All language is a cope.
In the sense that it's an imperfect tool humans use to communicate and this imperfection is the reason behind all suffering, yes.

lol

Nabokov sucks

Yikes!

>this imperfection is the reason behind all suffering
theodicy BTFO

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Flowers for Algernon

Short stories and poetry are the only literature worth reading.
Novels are a complete waste of time.

>- A person who memorized one great book is more well-read than a person who has read one hundred and memorized none
recommendations of books worth memorizing in this manner?

not on this board

reddit has that old fashioned respect for the artist and Yea Forums doesn't?

Alice Munro sucks nigger dick. Literally every one of her collections could just be titled, "Bored Women of Southern Ontario". So shit. Fuck Atwood too.

There is literally no point to reading literature when history and philosophy books exist. It's the greatest story that you'll never figure out and will never end

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>will never end
lol

go to sleep fukuyama

Jesus Christ is Lord.

"history and philosophy books" are literature, user. You're conflating "literature" with some specific form of fiction, a common mistake on this board. Happily it's never prevented the board from discussing book-form (literature) non-fiction, though the board is disposed against certain forms.

Shakespeare is not exceptional

Anyone who’s read only the Bible is better educated than someone who’s read every dystopian novel put together.

Also, Yeats is the GOAT

Dante is quite bad.

>Also, Yeats is the GOAT

who said that's controversial

i really really think this post is based

they also love rick and morty for epic nihilism
just so epic woahhh

As someone who already went through their early twenties phase of being a nihilist NEET I have to agree with this.

What is even the point of reading if not to get a glimpse of another person’s opinion, experience, worldview etc

Well said, user.

You’re quite dumb.

i like your moxy, kid

Suffering and wallowing is it's own kind of joy
And I think for some people living a conventionally joyful life only leads to a sense of fakeness
I guess it's the kind of thing you can't expect everyone to understand

Your first language's most important epic poem.

Italian: Commedia
English: Milton
French: better not an epic, but rather Les Fleurs du Mal; could also choose a Racine play
Spanish: Cid, even though it's in ancient Spanish.
German: Faust
Portuguese: Os Lusíadas

There is no 'greatest writer' of all time. Shakespeare is equal among Homer, Dante, Melvile, Tolstoy, Joyce, and a couple other names up for contention like Goethe, Dickens, Hemingway ... He only gets nudged half an inch above his peers because English colonialism was a thing. The bardolatry on this board is so bad, these people are so desperate for some reason to say this guy was the indisputable best. Fuck, the only time you are guaranteed an articulate, impassioned response on this board is when you enter a Shakespeare appreciation thread, and even then the poster will just eloquently affirm their point, not really argue it.

Shit, I forgot Milton and Cervantes on that list

This isn’t an unpopular opinion dude, there are too many Greats, who are too different, for there to be an undisputed GOAT. Everyone knows that. For instance, how can you compare Homer and Joyce? We can say that both are Greats, but we can’t say one is superior because they’re coming at literature from entirely different angles.

do you really think dante, melville, tolstoy, joyce and milton are as good as all that?

I simply can't enjoy something that isn't depressing or at least cynical, even for a comedy I tend to seek dark comedy
so does romance, if it isn't tragic romance I simply can't enjoy it

You just listed Dante, Tolstoy, and Joyce, one of which is widely regarded as the greatest ever Poet, the second of which is regarded as the greatest ever novelist, the third of which is regarded as his close second, and asked if they belonged on a list with their inferiors—not if they possibly were not the best on the list, but if they belonged.
Today you learned you’re retarded.

i'm asking if he really thought so.

Milk and Honey isn't good but you only pay it any mind because you hate women.

Pretentious. The kid in school that the other losers didn't want to be around. Become aware of this now so that others needn't suffer your presence as we have.

>Aztec poetry or hellenistic travelogues or Chinese gods-and-demons literature
these aren't obscure. they're exceedingly well known

I challenge you to find one single thread on Yea Forums in the past week about any one of those three subjects.

>It is not necessary to read a work in its original language to fully understand the work. Anything that gets "lost in translation" is minimal at best.

If you can't comprehend that something is lost when you can no longer manipulate a language with nuance you don't belong here

Asinine.

i don't number of Yea Forums threads is a good judge for this sort of thing. but the're all mentioned reasonably frequently in everyday life, no?

Are you proud of this, you jenkem enthusiast?

I am in love with you.

>i don't number of Yea Forums threads is a good judge for this sort of thing.
you also don’t into English you stupid bitch, how can one man be so impossibly dumb? don’t even try to respond to this and redeem yourself, someone as dumb as you will only bring on their self further embarassment.

there's a latin tag 'our good homer himself occasionally nods'

This is a quote from another author.

I was writing within the context of Yea Forums, user. Basically, my point is that you can't just stick to the great peaks of (western) literature like Dante and Homer and Joyce. You should branch out and explore the stuff that doesn't get threads every day -- the stuff that appeals to you, but might not appeal to someone else. Otherwise you're missing the opportunity to get to grips with what you really love about literature.

And I've never heard any of them mentioned in everyday life, although they are mentioned in everyday academic life.

>comparing yourself with homer because you made an absolutely abhorrently grammar'd post
absolutely galactic brained move user
check out another latin "tag": pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo
I'll wait for you to google search it

>A c A d E m I c L i F e

Yeah what he said I told you to stop when you could you helpless, hopeless brainlet. There’s still time

3,000 iq

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What a sad empty life you must have, perceiving women this way. You're missing the character depth and complexities of 3.7 billion people. For shame.

Both of you are wrong, but pseudanon is more obnoxious

>no macrons
Gross
Here, let me show you:
>pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō

fair.
they're not obscure though, hellenistic travelogues especially.

Shut the fuck up CENTRIST

"Niche" was maybe a better term. The aim isn't to have an interest in something people haven't heard of (so you can show off or something), but to have an interest in something other people don't. Like, fairy tales are known by literally everyone, but getting deep into fairy tales is 100% the sort of thing I'd recommend.

I'd also say Chinese gods-and-demons literature is by far the most well known, even in the west, because Monkey/Journey to the West is part of the genre.

If you're older than 14 you need to rethink a couple things.

Supercilious = superior, everyone knows that.

You should only remember significant passages from a piece which ignited some interest in you, memorizing a whole book is autistic in the most literal sense of the word, and moralizing this practice by assigning it some virtue is insane.

Oh ho ho we've got a deep motherfucker on our hands, boys

Protip: if you're suffering to feel joy then your suffering is manufactured, not genuine, for show. This point is really buttressed by how special you think your suffering is. You've no more depth than a tween with a black fringe in 2007.

Be worry, don't happy.

But joy is a manufactured thing as well
It really only can be manufactured and for that matter any meaning people attach to anything is always manufactured
Everybody is off just living their manufactured lives
It's pretty pretentious to think the manufactured meaning you get out of mindlessly pursuing joy is the only one that counts
Personally I think there's few things that could possibly be more disingenuous than saying to yourself "I'm just going to be joyous" as if that can be achieved at all without any suffering and struggling beforehand
After all that's just a typical character arc isn't it? The one that's been told and retold in stories for countless years?
So I can only see a person who invites suffering and takes pleasure in it as someone who desires even greater personal growth and regardless of how manufactured you might think it is that intention is clear to me at least
To put it the most cliche way possible it's the type of person who would say it's about the journey not the destination
They don't want to just rush to the happy ending even if it is possible

Joy isn't something you analyze or control yourself into experiencing, it's a feeling you have naturally in reaction to some stimulus. Get out of your head and get in touch with the present moment. Spontaneity exists in a realm beyond caring what others think about you, which is probably why it eludes you.

P.S. you're projecting onto me the delusion that I think I can just "be happy" even under ill circumstances yet you yourself opened this screed by saying "joy is manufactured... it really only can be manufactured" so chew on that for a while. You're living your life in response to some perceived stereotypical narrative while the rest of us are living our lives authentically outside of the box within which you're confined.

I think Dante is boring.

I think War and Peace is superior to The Divine Comedy and all epic poems of the world.

If I could choose between having the writing gifts of all the biblical authors combined or the talent of Shakespeare I would choose the latter without a second of hesitation.

I think Joyce is overrated and that Finnegans Wake was a waste of time.

>everyone agrees
hot take, faggot

you should really get a trip it would suit your condescending and pretentious writing style

I guess you could call it... a controversial opinion.

>Quit being a culture of resentment
I fucking love books written by straight white men. How am I part of the culture of resentment?

I can't stand most literature written after 1945. American literature is garbage outside of Melville and Twain, and the golden age science fiction stuff.

Moby Dick is boring, overrated,and hamfisted.
And I’m not a classics bashing Redditor, btw.

What do you think of Chekov user?

i like Dostoevsky but not Hemingway

not him but you're dead wrong, there's a lot that goes into learning another language that cannot be directly translated, references, witty rhyming schemes, or simple cultural things that give a certain part of a phrase more emphasis because of where it lands.

My unpopular opinion is that you're not a pleb as long as you wholeheartedly reject pop trash.

That's ste standard opinion in the non Anglo world.

legit in translation. sure it's legit in russian.

compated to what?

do you consider knot tying a talent or a skill?

truely the negroid is blessed for he is unaware of the trivialities of the anxiety the white man conjures up such as existentialism and nihilism.

yeah he's too clever for all that

good post

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nabokov pls

Bechdel go back to drawing webcomics about your pedophile dad
Go and stay go

The whole essay is pretty good, the part where he says he missed his shot at becoming a playwright and the part where he says the best part of his novels is imagining how to write them better are BASED and accurate but the part where he says "I've never understood/felt 'the prophet' of Dostoevsky" is pretty telling for why he hates him so much

Do you like poetry?

Science Fiction > General Fiction

Nabokov's books are soulless as fuck Im not surprised he wouldn't get Dostoevsky