Do not read a book that is self insufficient

I don't have a problem with that, the problem is academic posturing, the idea that something can be "truly" appreciated, understood only in reference to a Canon; one does not need to know Sartre to get a hardon reading Genet. The entire exercise seems to be nothing more than the extraction of surplus enjoyment via intellectual labor; basically allowing the author to steal your time for something he did not provide.

>idea that something can be "truly" appreciated, understood only in reference to a Canon
A lot of times literature can be understood in a uniquely meaningful (not neccesairally "true") way by exploring analogues and references.
For example, when reading Chaucer it helps to have also read Boccaccio, because looking at moments where Chaucer copies and deviates from Boccaccio's work can help one form a more nuanced reading of his text.

I would like to add that when an author uses another text as an analogue, they are providing new ideas in the alterations they make to it.

I guess you are right, although i would not say that the Decameron necessarily helps you appreciate Canterbury Tales (they are very different books) but I guess you could get a certain sensation from the information fugue of having read all these Canon authors, I guess in some way similar to the perverse fantasies a psychotic masturbates to; it is a very discrete kind of discursion--but in the end I disagree that one has an elevated sense of something by comparing it or contrasting it to other things.

Chaucer does use the Clerk's Tale to retell the Decameron's last novella, but it might've been a bad example.
A clear case where source material is needed in order to understand a text is in The Wife of Bath's Tale, as Alisoun is clearly arguing against St. Jerome's Against Jovinianus.
Without knowing Jerome's text, one won't see the comedy in the borderline adulterous Alisoun using biblical technicalities to defend her cruelty and sexual promiscuity in a debate against a literal Saint.
If the Tale only taken at face value, it wouldn't be a stretch to mistake it as some kind of protofeminist endorsement.

Okay well then count that chapter as the kind of thing I am disparaging. A literal circle jerk.

Why would you disparage the context for a joke?

>t. anti-intellectual who can't into dialectics

Art isn't about creating objects. It's about having a conversation. Analyzing an art-object in isolation is like listening to only a single sentence of a conversation.

Good luck getting a hardon reading Hegel with no background

I guess I only disparage the effort to laugh at such a joke.
Then why not just talk to someone?So Hegel is worthless without his plagiarisms?

if you think needing context before you read something is bad, why do you read replies to posts on Veeky Forums?

>Then why not just talk to someone?
Because the medium of spoken language has limits (duration, the set of expressible things, what each interlocutor can remember at a given time) which text (and visual art, and music) allow us to overcome. There are certain ideas that are just too complex to have a straightforward, one-to-one in-person discussion about. Sometimes you want to respond to multiple people. Sometimes you want to respond to someone who isn't alive. Sometimes you want to go into a level of detail that ordinary speech just doesn't offer. These things, and others, are what art is for.

Just incomprehensible if you don't know the prominent thinkers who preceded him and the issues he is discussing. That's hardly plagiarism

So Hegel was having a converstion with Kant beyond the grave? I like it.
Still. I think originality has been to readily abandoned. Now everything is pastiche. It really nauseates me.

I guess there is an audience for barely comprehensible footnotes but count me out.

The point is that if you know your shit it's no big deal. If someone has written a criticism of Aquinas' cosmological argument then it's relevant to people who are familiar with said argument, and if you're interested in said argument it's common sense to read it and explore what others have said about it. Of course, this is philosophy we're talking about, fiction may be a bit different but you're still limiting yourself by avoiding anything referential or context-dependent.

>this book was made using letters and symbols already used by others, called the English language, therefore it is self insufficient
>this book follows the structure of something similar, which is why you expect certain plot structures and character development, because all fiction is based on some form or previous fiction
>all fiction is self insufficient
>do not read any books
>maybe FinWake