What piece of literature has elicited the greatest/most profound feels for you?
And how much of these feels can one ascribe to the quality of the work over the context in which the book is read (i.e. reading whilst undergoing relationship issues/breakup; coping with a recent death; parental divorce; a particularly bitter spate of 'tfw no gf' etc)
Basically all of the "classic" or "canon" literature I've read has been provocative, difficult and (if I'm willing to wrestle with it) feelsy.
Naturally some seem more relevant than others, but I think it's a huge mistake to read literature as an augmentation or response to one's biography. It can be the other way around, and I think that's much of the "value" of literature.
Im a robot without feelings so the cold precision of delillo and darkness of mccarthy are the only works that arouse me.
So you're self-obsessed and unable to respond to anything you can't hold up as a mirror to yourself?
Kate Gompert talking about why she keeps trying to commit suicide in Infinite Jest
How did you reach that conclusion?
"Im a robot without feelings so the cold precision of delillo and darkness of mccarthy are the only works that arouse me."
"I am like X, so works like X are the only works that I enjoy"
"If a work is like me then I enjoy it"
"If I do not enjoy a work then it is not like me."
The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft.
The quality of Lovecraft is always hit and miss for people. He is consistent in his work but I mean that some shit on him and say he can't write while some (like me) think he is just fine.
The context is what makes this short story for me. It made me realize that maybe it's okay to just not be normal. Even if you are a weird freak at least find company in such other types instead of trying to be part of humanity in general.
I was reading Book of the Short Sun while doing hospice for a dying person and my puppy had just died. How the book talks about the nature of death and aging deeply effected, then and just as much now. I was never young, I've never had fun, and I will never be able to accept my unending mistakes.
The Sound and the Fury depressed the fuck out of me.
Taipei
probably self-analysis
You're not very intelligent my dude. The question was what pieces of literature moved you the most. I said delillo and mccarthy because their works are clinical and not sentimental, a distinction i made due to the context of his second paragraph referencing sentimental and trying periods of a person's life in relation to the profundity of a text he's asking us to list, and since I am a robot without feelings (sarcasm/irony/whatever btw) they are what I respond to instead of maybe me saying dante because I just broke up with my gf or whatever. I get the impression you're thinking that I'm saying I cannot respond emotionally to any literature, which is just poor reading comprehension. Have you read delillo or mccarthy at all? Just because they are absent of sentimentality doesn't mean that empathy or something like it isn't the foundation of their work.
> which is just poor reading comprehension
what you initially wrote did not convey most of what you're now saying
> I think it's a huge mistake to read literature as an augmentation or response to one's biography
Totally agree. But many often speak of 'revisiting' works and 're-discovering' texts at different junctures in their life -- which will make the literature challenge or resonate with the reader in a different way to when initially read, thus evoking different or 'more profound' feels
I'm wondering if anyone here has had a greater emotional response to literature upon later readings, precisely because they're approaching the text from a more mature perspective.
If this has happened to be the case for anyone, would you, in turn, emphasis context, over the quality of a novel per se, as the determining factor for the feels evoked? Or is this a false dichotomy: that the generation of differing responses at differing times itself being a testament to the quality of the literature read?
The blood on the living room rug chapter at the end of The Tunnel. Anyone who has read this would surely agree. Just finished the book today and that passage is still killing me. Specifically pic attached on why the mother is an alcoholic.
>What piece of literature has elicited the greatest/most profound feels for you?
Kant's CPS. Not just reading it, but understanding it.
Schopenhauer was right in saying that anyone who hasn't come to grips with Kant is stuck in intellectual childhood.
It could be humorous at times, though. Anyone who's read the preface of my edition, or simply knows what it refers to, will enjoy the keks of pic related.
The legend of st Julian hospitaller by guayaberas Flaubert.
I'm already sad from the opening paragraph of Stoner. I think it's the verisimilitude of the bit about the medieval manuscript, but could be just because the plot summaries already give you a fair idea of what comes next.
what's your edition? post pic pls
Good lord, this was vivid.
For me it was The Stranger, but parts of IJ reach that level (not like IJ is inferior, it's just full of parts with varying intentions, and that one was executed perfectly)
>anyone who hasn't come to grips with Kant is stuck in intellectual childhood.
Fuck it, my man, I'm sold. Starting right away, but, man, it is dense...
Oblomov because I'm a NEET slowly alienating himself from everything and anyone but I can't stop because it feels better than not doing so, which I realise every time I attempt to do normie things.
>I'm wondering if anyone here has had a greater emotional response to literature upon later readings, precisely because they're approaching the text from a more mature perspective.
I don't usually re-read books, especially ones that I dropped for whatever reason, but after reading Anna Karenina I gave War and Peace another go. I had originally tried W&P as a sophomore in high school, just to say I had read it, and gave up when Pierre was once again a useless cuck (this was back when "emo" was all the rage to call anything that was uselessly sad or depressing, so Pierre was emo to me). Ten-plus years later I pick it up, and could hardly put it down (at least until the later parts where Tolstoy gets into his philosophy of history a little too much).
This desu.
I have two sisters, thus i know how that nigga feels, although i agree with the father and his views on virginity.
Definitely Stoner for me too. Touched me in a way that I feel all human beings must feel at some point in their lives.
Night by Elie Wiesel
It just depressed me to realize how many Jews escaped the holocaust
grisostomo in don quixote
"go - for thy stay, not free, absents thee more" from paradise lost
i was a needy and insecure teen
Probably Mason & Dixon. Just the most profoundly satisfying and awe-inspiring and heartbreaking thing
>Schopenhauer was right in saying that anyone who hasn't come to grips with Kant is stuck in intellectual childhood.
You've really mastered the art of getting insecure Veeky Forums anons to force themselves to read a pseudo-obsolete text that they're totally unprepared to understand, congratulations.
Of mice and men probably got one if the strongest reactions from me upon finishing. But long term the illiad and the odyssey continue to resonate in my mind since I first read them. I always think back to them. And I reread then both every year.
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