E/lit/e , i give you The MemeQuads

Fuck this, long live old meme trilogy. This can be gay meme trilogy if you want

It's a meme precisely because no one ever read it though. That aspect of it makes it the biggest meme of them all.

I like this post, for the implication of high literacy level and subsequent grammar problems.

old meme trilogy were actually books that people read, though. This new one is like the wew lad of memes, just shitty and poopy and crappy

Stopped reading 2666 at some point last month or so. Dudes just met the publisher, they all have boners for the murrcan qt in their friend group and that seems to be all there is to it so far, in over 50 pages. Somebody convince me to keep reading?

>no book that matches Ulysses in importance

>no book that matches Infinite Jest in defining our generation

>no book that matches Gravity's Random in lolsorandumb poopie harmonica

Good luck making it catch on OP.

>murrcan qt

Just stop reading it. Fahrenheit 451 is more "your speed".

you can't judge a book until at least halfway through. stay pleb faggot.

Replace Women & Men with Underworld by Delillo and you've got yourself a proper meme trilogy.

I'm the guy that made the thread with JR in the lower right. I can agree that 2666 fits better.

>not knowing how to rad a book
go back to r/books pleb

>no book that matches Infinite Jest in defining our generation
Oh fuck off.

Check your priv normie, there's no other book that defines the memetic generation we're a part of even half as well as IJ.

complete-review.com/reviews/bolanor/2666.htm

How tha fuck has Women and Memes never been reprinted

The Recognitions is arguably a foundational text of postmodern literature. The Cannibal by Hawkes is more "important" but no one reads Hawkes and it's not long enough to be on a meme chart full of doorstops.

It's expensive to reprint an 1100 page book, and stupid, since it's an avant-garde mindfuck nobody but Veeky Forums cares about

*note: nothing in the current meme trilogy needs to be "argued" for; their spot has been earned indefinitely and shown to be "foundational" simply by existing

It was in the 90s. McElroy sperged out and had it pulled or something at some point.

...

>ij
>foundational
Wew

Easily more foundational than the obscurities OP is listing. The only ones who found these titles foundational were critics who read the novels half a decade (or more) after they were published.

>The Recognitions is arguably a foundational text of postmodern literature.
Indeed. It was published the same year as Lolita (actually, three years before in the US/UK) - years before Barth, Hawkes, Pynchon etc hit the scene.

That's when you go to Amazon and offer a prayer at their altar for an e-book. And by that I mean click the link that says "request e-book from the publisher."

>years before Hawkes
The Cannibal was published in 1949, my dude. That's 6 years before The Recognitions.

Women and Men is already online.

How do people not know how to use the internet outside of amazon?

"Postmodernism" can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. We can reserve the term 'postmodernist' for these experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "post-modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative.

>ebooks
Memelit should only be read in print.

so ebin

>reading that big if a doorstopper as an ebook.

Completey killing the meme status. Nice plebbin.

I like this chart.

Memes were a mistake.

Having read all four all, I can confirm all are worthy as they are all excellent books that most people wouldn't read or perhaps even have heard of if it wasn't for their meme status. The Recognitions is my personal favourite , Women and Men is almost incompressible at time but is worth every bit of the hard work by the end and contains some of my favourite passages in literature, The Tunnel is as beautiful as it is detestable and filled with potential memes and 2666 is a book almost everyone on lit has read and loved and rightly so

>and contains some of my favourite passages in literature

Care to post a few?

>She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and for good fruitarian measure.

I don't have them memorised off by heart and my copies back at the library , but the section on the ship rock, Jim's meeting up with his father, George's lost year and the safe bomb are sections that have stayed with me since I read it over a year ago

Why don't you guys ever give credit to the book that invented memes?

Because it isn't circlejerked enough here to give it a real "meme" status.

Ok, OP here.
I see some discussion and i see user's defending the memequads.
So it's decided! Since conflict , disliking eachothers opinion and discussion is (arguably) the part of Veeky Forums's foundation that set us apart from Plebbit, i've decided that you fags are showing the perfect amount of hating/loving the memequads.
Which means i'll be pushing them.

Gassposter got The Tunnel to it's rightfull meme status (i applaud you, fat, corpulent, chubby white fuck).

So yeah, i'm/we're gonna make this one stick.

Deep down you know it has a rightfull place here, like it or not.

Tristram Shandy was the first meme book though

The way is see it, we don't have to discredit the Trilogy, it's great, perhaps even greater than the memequads.

But every fuck that's ever picked up a book knows Joyce and plenty of normies know IF.

So normie fucks 'knew' two third's of the trilogy.
With some luck normies have heard about 2666. That's just 1 out of 4. So there's that.

IF is defining yes, but The Tunnel and The recognitions both have that Veeky Forums define misantrophy.

No they don't have the lols of Gravity's Rainow, but they have the random 100 pages of violence in 2666.

I think they can stick.

[and they will]

It deserves credit, but it's too much of classic to be in the memequads.

It's like TBK or W&P.
We all read them (or should have) and loved them. But they aren't memes.

And you know it.

I'd actually say The Recognitions is at least as funny as GR, even if it's more deliberately crafted.

I agree, but i can see how it's not the same kind of humour and how it's less 'whacky'.

I approve of this.

I've read both The Recognitions and The Cannibal. Could you explain why you think Hawkes is the more important of the two?

To me, The Recognitions seemed to anticipate much more of what's interesting and innovative in the big postmodern stuff. The Cannibal seemed really indebted to modernism still, though obviously they're both somewhere in between.

Not being argumentative; I genuinely want a new perspective on this.

This is an alarmingly British-focused statement for a tradition that almost everybody agrees was practiced more widely and more impressively by American writers. Can you explain yourself?

>american literature
>relevant

pick 1

Gaddis, Gass, Hawkes, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Wallace are probably the most discussed postmodernists here. All American.

Then there's Barth, Bartheleme, Coover, McElroy. You can't argue that it's not a mostly American tradition, but I'd really like for you to try and do so without just dismissing me out of hand.

It's starting

To me it's about who Hawkes was and how he approached the specific subject he dealt with in that book. When you consider the content in the context of it being published 5 years after WWII, written by an American who served in Germany during the war, and approaching it in a way that didn't romanticize it while also not striving for that banal sort of realism most works about events like that tend to fall victim to, it's extremely important. Structurally, it could be thought as an in-between point between modernism and postmodernism, but thematically it's one of the earliest works which encapsulates that postmodernist sense of skepticism, of ideals which were previously seen as inviolable truths of the world crumbling under their own weight into a toxic, dilapidated, deluded mess.

You'd never get anything like Gravity's Rainbow, Slaughterhouse Five, or any of the books that deal with wars or disasters or any other sort of catastrophic societal failure/collapse in atypical ways without it.

For all the vitriol Gaddis has for the shallow and vain facets of society as seen in the arts and "high" society, the fact that he still led a sheltered existence shows. Hawkes does a better job of portraying all the comedy and horror of total human degradation and the failed promise of early 20th century ideals. They were both born roughly around the same time, and both went to Harvard, so this isn't even a class thing so much as a difference in their experiences which comes through in their work.

tl;dr: Gaddis might be more relevant to the strictly technical aspects of postmodern writing, but Hawkes is more directly relevant to the broader spirit of what postmodernism stands for.

Really interesting. Not sure I buy it, but I'm glad to have read it. Thanks for responding properly.

OP here, i didn't even do that. The fire rises.
All memes aside, thanks for properly discussing user. Nice arguments.

cool post

Thanks for the top shelf posting, lad.

dump IJ keep Joyce and Pinecone from this toast

>2666
>not vapid, edgy bullshit

Wow, I can't wait for 242069xnoscopex xd

A thread I made on women and men, gives you a taste as I appear to one of the few on here to have actually read the full thing
warosu.org/lit/thread/S7312916#p7313019

>No Infinite Jest

Thanks for that user, interesting stuff. Been waiting to get my hands on it!