ITT: Unpopular opinions regarding literature that you wholeheartedly hold

It leads to things being popular because they are popular and lauded without any point of reference. Reading from a meme-core chart can open doors, but it more often gets in the way of doing actual research. Spoon-feeding is a bad habit to get into.

Speaking frankly, I don't know how to find information other than having it spoon-fed to me. I've tried exercises such as reading only primary sources and avoiding commentary of any sort, but I'm still just following this chart or that guy's recommendation, or this wiki list of writers from x time.

How does one have an opinion?

And yet discussion of books between people are the only way to find worthwhile stuff to read, unless you do what the other user said and randomly select shit. What would you rather see?

A book doesn't need to be patrician to be good.

Is everybody in IJ a fellow of infinite jest?
Because right now I think so

>far superior than reading
evidently not

pynchon is shit
dfw is shit
joyce is shit
99.99999% of post-war literature is shit

Damn right

Wallace Stevens is the greatest poet of all time.

Kurt Vonnegut is corny but good (not mutually exclusive).

Nietzsche was correct about many things and deserves all of the credit he receives. At the very least, he rebutted the pessimism put forth by Schopenhauer with fiery prose, psychological nuance, and intellectual courage.

Camus is a hack who did little more than redress Nietzsche's ideas in palatable terms. Happy Sisyphus and the Ubermensch are fundamentally the same. Camus is only venerated because he was hot, cool, and died young

Hunter S. Thompson is overrated.

Aristotle was an infinitely better philosopher than Plato. By extension, Empiricism should not be feared, and mathematical platonism is the only useful or interesting form of platonism which remains.

Catch 22 is fucking garbage.

The fact that Utilitarian is a normie philosophy does not make it wrong. In fact, it's totally correct, despite how nebulous the definition of collective happiness may be.

Shakespeare is slightly overrated.

Nabokov's work suffers because it is thematically empty. His novels function not as artistic communication but as beautifully crafted puzzles. I like puzzles, but I am rarely moved by them. Nabokov sought to engender the sublime -- or, as he calls it "that tremble in the spine," or something -- through style, but forgot to unify his work with purpose (which is a must in this medium). The sole exception may be Lolita, which is almost accidentally profound.

Hehe, I used reverse psychology on you >:)

...

kek fucking trolled you angry bruh?

>Nietzsche ripped off Stirner
I agree with this but not that second thing.

damn... you sure got me, Haha upboated :)

>utilitarians are correct

I agree with most of what you said, will check out Wallace Stevens.

I'd like to date Ayn Rand, make her understand she a cutie, then abduct her and keep her in my dungeon where I will devise sexual predicaments based around denying objectivism.
Same thing with Rowling, forcing her to appreciate classics (making her orgasm when I read real literature and spanking her when reading YA).
I have no plans for GRRM.

Rad. Hope I didn't set your expectations too high. I love Wallace's work because it alligns with all of my preferences (it is dense, thematic, and imagistic). You might leave disappointed if you're more into clarity and narrative.

Why do you think Heart of Darkness is bad?

Yui and Ritsu are the best girls. Mio and Azusa are overrated.

Also, The Stranger isn't very good and Albert Camus' position as an important existentialist is the biggest academic sham of the 20th century.

>Hunter S. Thompson is overrated.
You shut your whore mouth.

I'm not that user, but I found the prose to be empty and repetitive. I felt like I was dredging though reading it, I read it twice and hated it twice

>Nietzsche ripped off Stirner
This

I am nodding my head so hard right now. Let's be friends.

Shakespeare is not overrated

What do you mean by the prose being repetitive? I could understand finding the novel thematically repetitive, for Conrad designs almost every element to serve his thematic ends (e.g., the entire river passage would be useless if stripped of its symboling meaning); I could also understand finding the plot repetitive, as the novel is paced like an amputee running a fucking marathon. However, I think the novel is stylistically awesome. I got the "idea" of HOD within the first few pages, but Conrad never ceased to engage me with the ways in which he stylistically transposed that idea through metaphor and symbol.

lit loves Shakespeare, dude. How is that an unpopular opinion?

Ritsu is my favorite desu.

Also Jean-Paul Sartre is not a very good writer or philosopher.

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>Same thing with Rowling, forcing her to appreciate classics (making her orgasm when I read real literature and spanking her when reading YA).

Joyce wasn't great and he was not even the best stream of consciousness writer

also Mugi is best girl and she only sleeps with quiet and friendless white American guys like me, not blacks

>Camus is a hack who did little more than redress Nietzsche's ideas in palatable terms. Happy Sisyphus and the Ubermensch are fundamentally the same. Camus is only venerated because he was hot, cool, and died young
Camus is a hack as far as philosophy goes but he was a decent novelist desu.

Hey Stevens bro. I can't help wishing I could be your friend. Unfortunately the internet is not conducive to my rather restricted notion of friendship. I didn't even agree with all you said. But re: Stevens and Aristotle, I agree, except I think that Rumi is a better poet in a substantive sense. I don't know Persian, mind you, but I still think Stevens is the most technically proficient poet.

Dead on about Nabokov.

I think on a societal level utilitarianism is a necessary evil, but on a more individual level utterly stifling.

Nietzsche's entire philosophy was a way of justifying not killing himself despite being a sickly lonely loser.

Schopenhauer's entire philosophy was a way of justifying being a miserable cunt despite having it all.

Most of these are pretty true, especially Vonnegut who gets thrown out way too harshly on here. I disagree about Camus and Nabokov though.

Camus is Nietzsche minus one key point; Nietzsche's solution is that the Ubermensch must _create_ his meaning, his values. In Camus' view inventing yourself a meaning is simply another way of dodging the problem because that creation is arbitrary; you're just deluding yourself. Camus owes no more debt to Nietzsche than the entire existentialist and absurdist (because Camus has to be a hipster with his own special label) movements.

I don't really think Nabokov "forgot to unify his work with purpose". Nabokov was very much a stylist; his purpose was to create beautiful works, not necessarily to package up a moral in a novel. The fact that his books aren't trying to teach you something doesn't discredit them.

You are not familiar with Schopenhauer's philosophy.

>Nabokov's work is thematically empty

You were doing pretty well there, and then you had to go and say something unbelievably retarded.

You are not familiar with cock philosophy.

I think the best American novels and poems are better than the best English (England) novels and poems.

Absalom Absalom! was not very good at all.

Blood Meridian nearly matches up to Moby Dick in terms of aesthetic splendour-- and the folks here that despise BM are literally just too stupid to enjoy it

Ulysses doesn't live up to its name

Pound was a complete shit poet

Byron is canon because he was coolguy and friends with Shelley and Keats

Shelley was a sloppy poet

Harold Bloom has good taste but is a poor critic (Whitman is not as insanely profound as Bloom thinks)

Hart Crane was the best modernist

stillicide is the best english word

i am desu

She actually doesn't sleep with anyone until marriage like an upright and proper Christian girl, you fucking pig.

Not even that controversial (novels) and absolutely retarded (poems).

Pound is a good artist, okay poet. Same with Hemingway, good artist, bad author.

Byron is canon because he took the sublimeness of french and brought it into the English language. Shakespeare is good but it tithers on the precipice of sublime and eeks into the same English poetics.

My opinion? Tolstoy is worth learning russian for.

>In Camus' view inventing yourself a meaning is simply another way of dodging the problem because that creation is arbitrary; you're just deluding yourself.

Perhaps I just don't understand Camus, then. I always thought that Absurdism boiled down to "the universe is meaningless. Do whatever helps makes it bearable and embrace its meaninglessness." If this is is the case, would "embracing its meaningless" not be interchangeable with "saying yes to life," and would "doing whatever makes it bearable" not be interchangeable with "find your own meaning"? Nietzsche seems to define "meaning" and "purpose" in the same way that Camus defines "raging against the Absurd" - that is, creating something out of nothing, while denying any objective essence, in order to make life livable.

>The fact that Nabokov's books aren't trying to teach you something doesn't discredit them.

While I find the phrasing "trying to teach you something" a bit reductive, as it characterizes theming as pedantic, I do see what you mean. The problem is that I fundamentally disagree with both you and Nabokov. It all boils down to personal aesthetic values. I believe that purpose/theme elevates and enrichens art, and is especially necessary in the medium of literature. At the very least, I find that the purposelessness of Nabokov's work makes it less beautiful.

Mugi is half-Finn. She worships Tengri like all true Finns.

^'saying yes to life' sounds too much like the title of a Tony Robbins book

all wrong except about bloom

Damn straight.

I mean..yeah. Of course Akira is better.

Yeah, the thing about Nabokov is largely a matter of taste.

Absurdism, Camus specifically, rejects the idea that you can ever succeed in finding meaning. However, and this is where it distinguishes itself from nihilism, it does not reject the idea that you should look.

The analogy of Sisyphus is the canonical one. You can't succeed, and you have no hope of succeeding, but you carry on in spite of it.
This is basically what Camus is trying to say.

camus = kierkegaard - christianity

Prequel books to Dune are more entertaining then the original Dune.

DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE FORGETTING SOMEONE user?

>/a/

1) Delve further into the bibliography of writers you've already enjoyed.
2) Find the writers and artists that inspired/influenced their writing and read them.
3) Find classics that aren't so frequently discussed - recommendations are not a bad thing inherently but you should also learn to decide for yourself whether something sounds like your cup of tea or not.
4) Look at the writers that are popular today and see what it is their diluting to sell to the mainstream.

Nothing wrong with using charts and relying on recommendations - I always like recommendations and it brings literature into a social scenario if you hit it off with someone (plus, I think recommending books to people who read is a recommendation that's more likely to be taken seriously rather than casually shrugged off). However, it also feels very rewarding to discover writers you never knew about before/others might not have heard of. Sometimes it can be as simple as picking up a book at random from the store, as long as you've read the blurb and thumbed through it briefly to see if it's enticing.

Why is K-On the greatest anime?

>We could probably do without psychoanalysis in general and we definitely should throw out all French psychoanalysis (and all it has inspired). Starting with that chucklehead Lacant.
>Most of French philosophy is absolutely overhyped and the only reason it is still considered is because people like to romanticize the meaningless culture and life stiles it propagates.
>Hegel is bae.
>Schopenhauer actually came to the conclusion that phenomenology was the solution to all his problems, but he was too depressed to realize it.
>Dogen Zenji may just be one of the most underappreciated philosophers of our time.
>As a whole, phenomenology hasn't been as fleshed out as it should be by now.

>Greek themes and structures are not nearly as relevant as most people make them out to be and they have become quite obnoxious. Especially in poetry.
>We have fully explored sex in every art-form and philosophy and can stop now, as it has become nothing more than cheap attention whoring.
>The current Dalai Lama isn't a smart man and quite frankly a bit of an asshole and it shows in his books.

That's it for now. But I have many more unpopular opinions.

> forcing Rowling to appreciate classics

Nigga, you stupid. She's hugely fond of the classics, she never shuts up about Austen, Bronte or Shakespeare.

> Mio
> overrated

You shut your mouth.

Mugi is pretty cool. Why does nobody like Mugi.

Nah, Mugi is a dirty girl when her parents are out of the house.

Poppin that pussy to Young Jeezy.

I kinda agree about sexual representations. If it serves little to the narrative or theme, it always seems somewhat gratuitous to me, no matter what medium. Although I could just be a prude.

Žižek is a pseudointellectual fool who doesn't even know his Hegel that well.

The world would be better off once Chomsky dies (his theories of linguistics verge on the ridiculous at times).

Stephen Pinker is a fool.

Things Fall Apart is a bad book about perhaps the most unlikeable and unsympathetic group of faggots ever. It's filled with dangling plot threads and whomever Achebe intended me to feel bad for failed miserably.

Infinite Jest has some brilliant moments but it's so bogged down in show-offy crap that it's virtually unreadable. DFW was a huge show-off who had to be a smartass about everything and it shows. His style is irritating and I'm increasingly convinced the errors he made in IJ were not intentional.

Just because something in writing is on purpose doesn't make it good or acceptable.

Sylvia Plath is good.

People are capable of, and probably do, think and see things differently. It's just easier to pretend otherwise. The world is trending towards monotony; barring a global war nationalists and identitarians are prolonging the inevitable.

Azusa a shit.

I don't read for intellectual reasons, only for prose and feels.

>At the very least, I find that the purposelessness of Nabokov's work makes it less beautiful.

I don't think I agree with you that Nabokov's stuff is thematically bankrupt, though. He just happens to hammer home roughly the same stuff with each novel.

He's big on people's inability to achieve permanent, fulfilling transcendence (be that through love or art), and that shows up in most of his oeuvre.

> Just because something in writing is on purpose doesn't make it good or acceptable.
> Sylvia Plath is good

Not unpopular opinions at all. Ariel and The Bell Jar are considered modern classics and intentionally writing something isn't bound to make it good, which is why JK Rowling's intention of writing the Harry Potter series is a good example of that.

>I'm increasingly convinced the errors he made in IJ were not intentional.
Bullshit

> People are capable of, and probably do, think and see things differently

No shit, faggot.

Everything and More is filled with errors because he was a show-offs faggot. I don't think it's unfeasible that the occasional incorrect usage of long words or mistranslations/misattributions are errors.

With the former point I was talking about retards that are like "oh this book is filled with errors/long and boring/meandering and sloppy/vague and unclear on purpose so that makes it not shit." I'm all for making the reader have to work at fully comprehending a book and experimental literature, but I also believe the purpose of writing is communication, and to stop short of that is just poor, regardless of whether it was on purpose.

I don't think you need to read to be a good writer. Not in the traditional sense of sitting down with literature, at least.

I bet your writing is shit. You can really tell if a writer doesn't read much, everything in their work seems diluted, superficial and one-dimensional. Genuinely, if you don't read much and you want to seriously write, it'll show in your work.

Well, I am no prude.
But the use of sexual themes more often than not is a cheap trick to demand attention. And at some point it just hyper-stimulates. Not to mention that, when used in excess, it detracts from any possible nuanced experience one may have.
I just don't know, dude. Maybe it's just that many creators have become so calloused to it my mere exposure, that they have to go to new extremes to create the same experience.
Or it is as it seems. A cheap theme to pick, rationalized with regurgitated social criticisms, which aren't relevant anymore. Plastering an atelier with six feet high HD close ups of genetalia isn't offensive because we as a culture are prudish. It's offensive because it became such a norm, that we need a break from it. It's at the point where sex scenes in film are becoming straight up porn, because they so desperately want to have the same effect in an increasingly jaded society.

I'm at the point that every time someone shows me contemporary art or Veeky Forums with this shit, that my first question is "What's the added value here?" I shit you not, I've had selling artists tell me "Because it's hot lol."

>I know this upsets me more than it should.

I read constantly, I just rarely sit down with novels because I don't have that kind of attention span. But I'll read short stories, I'll read the news, I'll read textbooks and academic journals and essays, I mean, I'm reading what you just wrote right now. I don't think I'm personally a particularly good writer because it's not something I've ever really practiced, but I don't think that not being able to commit to reading long form writing would be what stopped me.

Wuthering Heights is the only masterpiece written by a woman.

I understand your concern completely. Don't worry, man. It's pretty refreshing to find someone who feels similarly about this type of thing. I'm not against sexual portrayals, but if they serve no purpose other than "Because it's hot lol" then it just seems immature, and I think quite a lot of portrayals of sex in media is just that. Immature. It makes sense they'd portray it for extra attention but even then that's not enough reason, imo, for it to really be used.

Maybe you should try practicing your reading. Like, maybe if you think your attention span isn't long enough, try reading a few novellas or plays (they're, more often than not, reading material you can finish in a day or a weekend).

I actually do this. I'll look at a title or author and just Google them to see if they have any good books.

I like reading Light novels in between western novels.

It's like an mouthwash for my train of thought.

I haven't finished Infinite jest. But at least I can spell methamphetamine.

Are you being contrarian for the sake of it, my man?

What about To The Lighthouse? The Bell Jar? Frankenstein? What about George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell's writings? I know men are very prominent as writers but I'd be surprised if you didn't at least enjoy another classic written by a woman.

Sometimes, yes. I'll go to the section of the shop that most appeals to me and see what there is by browsing extensively. Reading blurbs, maybe the first chapter or two, see if it's what appeals to me. I've picked up some of my favourite books like this. Sometimes it's just nice to take a chance like that.

Literary theory has ruined the English Department.

I can't finish ten page articles out of readers in a single sitting even when I enjoy the material and took my ADHD meds. Believe me that I've tried and I'd like to be able to, but I honestly can't name the last book I read cover to cover.

I understand how reading literature would obviously be an asset to any person wanting to write, but I think pinning writing ability on any one quality is essentializing the process and negates the beauty of diversity in thought. There isn't any one unifying factor that makes good writing because there isn't only one kind of good writing.

If you know literature and know your taste you know what to look for.

>Don't worry, man.
But it's getting worse and worse. T_T
Pic related; it's one of the most successful German photopgraphers right now.
And nobody in the scene calls anyone out on this BS, because it would be "prudish".

>fml; this is why I like Thoreau

Hey user! Over here!

HI WHO'S THERE

Man, that image is so tacky. If you didn't mention that the photographer was German, I'd have assumed it was straight out of Portland, Oregon.

The Beats are horribly underrated on Veeky Forums and if anything should be credited as the last poetry movement to actually be relevant in their own time.

Rimbaud's story is more interesting than any of his poetry.

The beats are horribly overrated and have spawned endless waves of students grasping for profundity in trite drug discussions