Share your most contrarian literary opinions

>Dostoevsky is juvenile and overrated
>Eliot is a boring poet
>Pound is an awful poet
>English poetry in general is pretty bad
>Pope's Iliad is a fuckfest of neoclassical wankery and has nothing to do with Homer
>Semi-literates are way worse than illiterates
>Montale is the best poet of the 20th century
>This board is also pretty bad

Sartre is better than Heidegger

There are many good free verse poets, but in general its effects on literature have been negative

kek. I always thought that line was supposed to be referencing McCarthy.

They're both toilet paper manufacturer- tier

Faulkner is pretty good, perhaps even the best southern writer. His style can get pretty laborsome to read, though.

>savage detectives is bad

how does it feel to not have enough neurons to enjoy one of the finest epistolary novels ever written?

10/10
It's sad these have come to be contrary opinions.

so what do you like user?

Suppositories

Journey to the End of the Night by Céline is just shit.

English is the worst language ever for writing poetry.

Emily Dickinson is severely underrated and should be considered the best poet of the English-speaking world after Shakespeare.

Postmodernism is nothing more than a masquerade of falseness and pretentiousness to the maximum possible extent and reading its products doesn't make you smarter.

Being "political" and "ideological" and having strong convictions about the world makes you a weaker writer.

>Postmodernism is nothing more than a masquerade of falseness and pretentiousness to the maximum possible extent and reading its products doesn't make you smarter

Mold status: broken

Hemingway spent his whole life failing to master a style that was already perfected by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio.

My Ántonia is the best American novel of the 20th Century.

All poetry written outside your native language(s) is forever beyond your grasp. You can never learn it well enough, there can never be a translation good enough.

The idea of Classics and the Canon are no less of a marketing ploy than the Young Adult genre

>The idea of Classics and the Canon are no less of a marketing ploy than the Young Adult genre
Agreed.

>there can never be a translation good enough.
Almost agreed. Almost because it depends on the languages. Some languages are so similar (French, Spanish, Italian) that you can make 99% accurate translations if you're a good translator and a good poet (but you need to be BOTH).

Stream of consciousness is an awful, nauseating writing style without exception

Jesus christ

Search your feelings, you know it to be true

>Nabokov had an outstanding language, but his tropes just purple shit.
>Updike is Nabokov having vocabluary diarhea.
>Endo is boring and no substance at all.
>Tolstoy wasn't smart at all.

Prove me wrong.

>Updike is like Nabokov
Idk about this one

Videogames are often a superior medium in terms of art.

Yeah, problem is that when you play videogames you're not devoting yourself to the enjoyment and comprehension of the art. You're merely masturbating.

Bruno Schulz is #1

Virgil was a hack who did nothing but write Homer fan fiction

Shakespeare is overrated. I can recognize the beauty and humor of his writing style, but it departs too far from the reality of how people speak (even how they spoke in his time) for me to enjoy it too much. I also feel like the limitations of plays (mostly time and the types of events that can be shown) cause the plots to feel more contrived and silly than if they had been written as full length novels. Obviously his plays were hugely impactful in terms of popular culture, especially TV and movies, but I think that causes people to overestimate how much he's impacted literature.
I also don't care for his short poems, since most of it seems like bragging to his boyfriend, but I'm not sure how controversial that opinion is.
And I unironically think Macbeth is his best play.

...

Nah man, it's not "too" edgy. Even in Italy many scholars think that. If we put aside the perfection of Virgil's style, the best Latin poet is probably Lucretius or Ovid.

I like rupi kaur

Sci-Fi is good

Literature that isn’t existentialist in some fashion isn’t worth anything.

Who isn’t, then?

You have to rethink your life, brother. Try to go outdoors more, make some freinds.

If anything, liking sentimental 5647th wave feminist drivel makes you more of a normie

Gene Wolfe is a middling fantasy author, not some great talent.

Joyce is mediocre. Dubliners is middlebrow and Ulysses is just a bunch of stream of conscious gibberish.

A lot of DFW's fiction is borderline unreadable.

Reading for anything other than personal enrichment/appreciation of inherent beauty in writing is stupid, especially careers in academia, which are basically a combination of popularity contests and pyramid schemes.

David Foster Wallace died in a serious and sincere accident.

this makes me mad. Good job.

Yeah, well, duh. It's just an interesting idea with not much else

ill agree with the pope one desu

>problem is that when you play videogames you're not devoting yourself to the enjoyment and comprehension of the art. You're merely masturbating.
says you.. why not both? People can play a video game for 100 hours, or 50 years: some people see a painting in a museum once.

Most books are an unnecessary read since you can grasp the central ideas from a summary or an analysis. It is the multilayered masterpieces that have to be read instead. For example, the Bible.

I can offer a critique of a work just by reading its summary and even critical experts would not be able to tell I haven't read the work. Sometimes I can write a convincing critique that will be positively received by this board just by following memes about a particular piece for about a week.

>poetry was a mistake
>postmodernism is bad
>all of george orwell's books are dogshit
>if you get your politics from fictional books you should be shot

Searle's Chinese room experiment was totally ethical

Harry Potter is actually great.
Not all literature has the goal of being the next Moby Dick or The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
The HP series fulfilled its function of being books accessible to children and young teens, and as such, helped an entire generation get into books.

This

Name one

Dat rant

This

>Moby dick is boring and repetitive
>Ulysses is just a challenge for readers
>Brothers karamazov is just The Inquisitor chapter
seriously,i don´t feel the genius of this chapter;

Lt.Gustl was pretty good?

Lol at the gunpoint of Augustus

Kys

I actually got through an entire bachelor like this.

>T.S. Eliot is one of the greatest poets of all time and most people's complaints are to do with his character not his work.
>Emily Dickinson is severely underrated and should be considered the best poet of the English-speaking world after Shakespeare.
Never understood the praise for either of these. Not my cup of tea, I guess.

>English poetry in general is pretty bad
>English is the worst language ever for writing poetry.
I don't entirely get this meme. I agree that a lot of English poetry is pretty bad, but a lot of mediocre to outright bad poets contributing doesn't render the good-great ones insignificant. There seems to be a lot of subjectivity with regards to who likes what, so it might be a case of reading a broad variety of poets to see which ones you like.

>Tolstoy wasn't smart at all.
He certainly possessed talent as a storyteller. Don't find myself agreeing with his personal views, though.

>Shakespeare is overrated.
Perhaps in some circles. You also have to consider that many people know of him, but think badly of him without giving him much of a chance.

A few already mentioned:
>joyce & nabokov - both incredibly pretentious, don't care for the stories in their main works
>modernism/postmodernism in general - there might be a few things yet to look at, though
>was somewhat reluctant to read lovecraft (muh genre fiction), was actually pretty enjoyable

The only reason why critics don’t admit that Philip Larkin is a far greater poet than Eliot and Pound is because he said “nigger” once.

>Larkin is less PC than Eliot and pound.

>Journey to the End of the Night by Céline is just shit.
why?

Coleridge is the best of the English Romantic poets and it's not even close.

You seriously think people are more quick to give forgiveness to someone for making anti-American propaganda than for saying nigger?

Critics neglect Philip Larkin because he was a boring poet.

Aphra Behn
Austen
Bronte
Eliot
Woolf
O'Connor
Leguin
Diana Wynne-Jones
Angela Carter

Robert A. Heinlein sucks

Never read McCormack before so I tried reading All the Pretty Horses.

Utter crap, got bored and started to skim. Nothing interesting and cannot stand his writing.

There is nothing wrong with surface reading. (Though I don't defy that it is intrinsically less rich.)

he said name one not nine you lose

they're all the same woman

Fuck you, Satan.

>Being "political" and "ideological" and having strong convictions about the world makes you a weaker writer.
While I think think the first part of your statement can be correct at times-the dustbins of literature are filled with works where the purpose is politics and the writing suffers for it-I cannot agree with the second part. Those aforementioned dustbins are equally filled with works lacking strong conviction and written solely for form.

The culture of elitism that Veeky Forums crafted to keep out normies backfired, and now attracts borderline illiterate pseuds that think intelligence means parroting buzz words.

I think the elitism is the only thing that keeps this board from going the way of the rest of the site and becoming r/theDonald.

Try reading it in Spanish

I don't disagree, I think we need to double down harder on the elitism. Threads that are clearly just paying lip service to literature to push some other agenda need to be shouted down a lot harder.

Anyone reading on the train is a pretentious faggot and deserves to be shot on sight.

I knew you people existed but always thought you didn't read. Wait, never mind, this is Veeky Forums; carry on.

I do all my reading online

t. Nicholas Sparks

What are you supposed to do? Is it better to stare into space like a dullard or play on a cellular device?

"Staring into space" involves using your own mind to think about whatever in your life needs thinking about. Letting your mind wander, using your imagination.
Playing on your phone is passive consumption, you brain is blank, nothing learned.

What is wrong with you? Are you just jealous of people who don't get motion sickness?

(you)

Pls elaborate on Kafka

>at least 2/3rds of Don Delillo's output melts together
Eric Packer from Cosmopolis was just a jacked up version of David Bell from Americana. Cosmopolis seemed almost like a recycled vehicle for a bunch of Baudrillard drippings.

>You can never learn it well enough
How could you even know this? This is scientifically and phenomenologically unverifiable.

Bruh

And I really wish they would get the fuck out of them.

actually i read on the train coz i have nothing else to do and it takes a lot to travel

daily reminder that he who blindly opposes the norm is the greatest normie of dem all

I dislike that books like 1984 and Brave New World need a novel behind them to present their ideas. I understand that it makes the books more accessible, but reading through a few paragraphs of exposition just to set up a concept makes me lose interest.
Writers like Nietzsche who present their ideas in concise, separated and small chapters are more enjoyable for me to read and confer much more information.

I am profoundly anti-fun.

you know what sounds like a better option than both?
reading a fucking book

go on a Jordan Peterson thread once. that's how all of Veeky Forums would be if there wasn't elitist culture.

although the elitism might just be pushing us towards lefty-/pol/ instead, since left-/pol/ seems much more well read
>t. somebody who hasn't read enough Derrida and Marx to know if they aren't just talking out their asses

why are there so many of those fucking threads? I feel like I see multiple ones every day. Surely there isn't THAT much to talk about when it comes to some old leaf professor