Why does Veeky Forums care more about the quality of the prose, than the actual content itself?

Are you the man who officially understands the codified doctrine of Patriciandom?

This is not true. You can imagine the story being presented without prose at all, for example using cinema as a medium.

because sound > imagery

So you would rather be blind than deaf? Bullshit.

*This* is not true. Just the other day right here on Veeky Forums someone made a comparison that prose in novels is like cinematography in movies, and it's a perfect comparison.

Plot is history
Prose is day-to-day life

OP why do you think Veeky Forums cares more about prose? I care about both equally.

In the best books, the content and the writing are seamless.

Prose, or cinematography, is a medium, a material of which the work consists. In this way they are similar. But can you comprehend a higher level of abstraction than the material? Ideas and meanings that remain when you adapt a book or completely rewrite it.

I never implied that

I mean that I enjoy books more for their prose then the images/stories it provokes in your mind's eye

>Ideas and meanings
I bet none of your fav novels present any "ideas" or "meanings" which are specially complicated or intriguing, or require more than a page to be developed and properly displayed.

>but things like plot and character development are ephemeral and very hard to show examples of in short format or discuss beyond "I thought it was good/bad".

Of course you can talk about these things in detail. It's just that Veeky Forums is stupid and illiterate, so they have to grasp onto talking about "muh prose" in an effort to appear patrician.

that would be a fundamentally different work though, so prose is everything FOR LITERATURE.
basically you don't read literature to be told a story, or rather, you do read literature to be told a story and the words used are an integral part of the story.

Was Literature born because people wanted to hear nice words or hear stories that sounded nice?

>Prose, or cinematography, is a medium, a material of which the work consists.
"no" (For the sake of discussion I'll ignore the obviously layman terminology and reply the above.) They're both one of the elements in their respective mediums.

>But can you comprehend a higher level of abstraction than the material? Ideas and meanings that remain when you adapt a book or completely rewrite it.
"yes", but from a consumer (and not a creator) approach, only reading books for philosophical ideas or only watching movies for philosophical ideas is not really the proper way to exploit the works in those two MEDIUMS.
Nor any in other storytelling medium. Story-telling. Story. Telling. The "telling" is just as important as the "story".

You can shoot your own amateur film with any idea you like, but you can't just say that "I don't care about cinematography so you should just ignore that in my movies" because people will just BTFO you. The cinematography is always there. If you don't pay attention to it, you'll just simply make a film with shitty purely functional cinematography.
Same goes with prose. If it's bad, you might get a niche following from some edgelords who like your ""ideas"" (although arguably much easier than if you were making films with shitty cinematography), but don't expect yourself to be considered as a great novelist. If you don't have a personal prose style, it's only because you're not even aware of prose and how to manipulate it in order to tell your story, which just upfront means, per your objective unskilledness, that you're a bad novelist.

Veeky Forumsmu/ here. My fellow patricians are correct, you're a fucking embarrasing pleb if you think prose isn't fucking everything.

It's like how the sound is the most important in music, if you read for the fucking plot, you're a pathetic dilletantey pleb.

Ah, so you make a distinction between literature and philosophy. Sometimes that does not work, see, for example, Dostoevsky. And even "regular" literature can, and often does, contain insights into the nature of humans and the workings of human mind, if the author took effort to construct his characters in a realistic way..

I think you have no fucking idea what the word prose means, what you're saying sounds to me like "I don't like films for the story or images, I just like the pixels"

who cares "why" literature was born, we live in a different world with different aesthetic values than Homer did.

when literature was "invented" there wasn't even a printing press.

That's not an argument

So everyone here reads aloud?

>you make a distinction between literature and philosophy
how are you getting that from

They don't.

That being said, prose is an important element of a work of literature.

Each element mingles with other elements. For example, the pacing of the prose can effect the tension of the scene.

Nobody tells that the telling is not important. My point is just that the story is also important, so prose isn't "everything". Or, rather, you can imagine - and enjoy - a work of pure great prose. But most of the best literary works have something beyond it.

Because in philosophical works the prose is, obviously, secondary. To the point where a good part of essential philosophy is nearly unreadable.

>a good part of essential philosophy is nearly unreadable.
>who is Nietzsche
>who is Plato
>who is late Heidegger
>who is Schopenhauer
>who is Spinoza

It's not a dichotomous thing though in my opinion.
If you don't have sufficient mastery over the prose there will be ideas that are too complex for you to know how to convey properly. To someone who's attuned to getting the ideas from good prose, at least. I guess you can always just write "methinks X is A and not B", but that's not literature, that's philosophy.

>actual content

Everything written down can be Literature, it's all relative.

If prose were everything it would be verse.

are you implying these guys are readable or unreadable? i don't get it

these writers have a prose style that is enjoyable and adds to the ideas being explained.
also late Wittgenstein.

I'd argue it's their main tool since they use it to obscure their bullshit.

Spinoza purposefully avoids anything like that.

True enough.

who gives a shit

and

"literature" was never "born"

That is I.

Prose is the only element.

yes I can always come up with cop outs too, but why tho

isn't it more fun to work at becoming a great novelist

Why is relativism applied to sculpture, paintings, etc but not books?

it's not

prose is -long story short- (or at least his main golas) the ability to condense many contents possible in few lines possible.
better is the prose, more are the contents
more are the contents, deeper will be reading

Nabokov has god tier prose and next to no contents.

I do care about content. It is the meat. Prose is just the dressing, seasoning and is secondary.

but that's entirely wrong

No

Again, you make the mistake of separating prose from everything else. Compelling characters cannot be formed from bad prose. You might come up with an interesting plot, but if it isn't revealed well it won't seem interesting. A good prose style can make any subject interesting.

To better illustrate this point, look at film. Films with grand ideas and impressive special effects sometimes fail because of how the story unfolds, what the director decides to direct the audiences attention towards. And many of the most memorable films are about ordinary, sometimes boring, people going about their lives; this is because the director knows what to pay attention to, and for how long. So it's not what the story is about that makes a film or novel good; it's how the story is told.

By 'content' I assume you mean storytelling, plot, characterization etc.

If I wanted this I would go watch tv or just think something up in my head. The point of reading fiction is the mode of expression.

Because Veeky Forums is full of fedora tipping autistic dudes who value 'perfection' and 'taste' over everything. Tbh senpai it's a meme, don't take it too seriously

so, using your analogy, if the way meat is prepared is secondary, then it doesn't matter if a steak is properly seasoned and grilled or if it's boiled in piss?

*pats head*

Just because something is secondary doesn't mean it is entirely negligible.

You do read literature to be told a story. Otherwise everyone would just read poetry, you probably don't understand that because your brain can't comprehend deep and rooted characters

Poetry is literature,too, lol.

Music isn't the same as literature retard and prose isn't everything....

Plot is what makes literature , literature and not poetry

Still doesn't mean prose is everything

Thanks for conceding.

i literally already said you read literature (i.e. fiction) for the story, so maybe you should check your own comprehension skills.

If you want someone to follow all of your specific posts, use a trip. Learn how to use Veeky Forums, buddy. *gives supportive pat on the back*

Plot is not important because you can reduce plots and see how they're all the same. Prose, characters, themes, etc are the only things that make a work distinguishable from another.

Why would there even have to be a competition between the two? Both are absolutely necessary to become an accomplished reader

Aristotle knew this, why can't you?

Atmosphere, too!

>they are equal

Said the lazy fool who cannot think and discern.

> Otherwise everyone would just read poetry
Am I to assume that according to you poetry doesn't tell stories or that the plot in a poem is irrelevant?
Have you read poetry at any point in your life?

>umberto eco is a lazy fool who cannot think and discern

oh you.

plot is a minor, rather unimportant element to modern poetry.

today, it's more rhythmical.

>blind authority

no thank you.

>Am I to assume that the plot in a poem is irrelevant?
Hwaet! unfrozen Spear-Dane friend,
Yes, you are to assume that.

Fuck plot, it's gay. It's how you get shit like Grrm

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