Who are some authors that could be summed up by "damn. really makes you think...."

Who are some authors that could be summed up by "damn. really makes you think...."

Damn, it's a bash Catholics night.

Aren't they suffering enough? The pastors are being persecuted by unforgiving children.

>George Orwell, American Novelist

George Orwell is an entry level author that makes people feel like they're geniuses because they've read his books

"The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else."

-G. K. Chesterton

>George Orwell is an entry level author that makes people feel like they're geniuses because they've read his books

Well, he's certainly taught in schools.

This sometimes gives people the idea that he is "for children" and therefore worth dismissing. In fact, you'll find among the works most commonly dismissed as junk by Veeky Forums stand proud the ones the denizens are most bitter that their Middle-School teachers forced them to read.

But let's go over it the Orwell case. Again. Only two of his works are ever criticised here so I'll focus on those two.

Animal Farm - often dismissed as simplistic by people who miss the point entirely - was written as a straight Allegory. In other words, the fact that a teenager barely old enough to sustain an erection can grasp almost its entire message so long as they have a familiarity with the Russian Revolution is to its credit, not the other way around.

Nineteen Eighty Four doesn't even need defending. It is one of those books that has so pervaded and influenced our culture, its premise seems almost cliché and boring - however it's worth pointing out that it is precisely because of its merit that it has had enough influence for us to find its message commonplace - remixed and reworked as it is in various forms and ways. It's the precise same reason why old Monty Python sketches aren't all that funny to a modern audience - it laid the groundwork and influenced what followed. Manos gigantum humeris insidentes.

I'm not here preaching that Orwell is le greatest writer ever - nor even of his time - but to argue that he wasn't at least *among* the greats is an exercise in futility. His essays alone (not among his most widely read work) have influenced more of international policy, language and discourse than some entire civilisations.

I don't know why, but I feel the need to point these things out whenever people foolishly dismiss those giants of culture and literature that came before.

He is right.

Orwell was a bigoted racist.

I don't want to repost some of his hateful quotes here. He'll become too popular with /pol/

His prose was lackluster, his treatment of themes simplistic, and his forcefulness in his fiction is jarring to the point where it's Rand-tier. As a literary critic he's awful, someone who dismisses entire authors' works because of their ideologies.

I proffer the only response of which you are deserving.

- "lol no"

He was not lackluster or simplistic, but strsightforward and consice. If you want to see fireworks in your prose, don't read Orwell but Joyce or Pynchon. If you find yourself unable to get water in a desert is not the desert's fault, but your own for expecting to find something where there is none.

As for his criticism, the same could be said of a lot of major and, in some cases, better authors, the best known example here being Nabokov. Moreover, criticism is always biased, but fortunately it is, ultimately, an opinion. A well-constructed, thoroughly-thought one, but an opinion regardless. In the same way Orwell dismisses author's for their ideology, you may dismiss him for his opinions nd find yourself not his better.

Sorry for the terrible choice of words, I'm half asleep.

A reminder that 1984 was nothing more than a ripoff of Zamyatin's We.

>it's the precise same reason why old Monty Python sketches aren't all that funny to a modern audience

One cannot really be a socialist and grown up.

>In other words, the fact that a teenager barely old enough to sustain an erection can grasp almost its entire message so long as they have a familiarity with the Russian Revolution
Ime they still manage to miss lots of important points. It's insane how many come away with "Orwell hated socialism/communism".

>but strsightforward and consice. I
No, it's simple, nothing special.
>the best known example here being Nabokov. M
Nabokov for the most part would at least bring up style, themes, etc., whereas Orwell disregarded authors simply on the basis that they were too religious or idealistic.

Isn't every author supposed to make you think? What would be the point of reading one who didn't?

One cannot really be a Catholic and not burn in Hell for eternity.

Monty Python are just the same as Douglas Adams. Back to /r/eddit.

Only if they're stupid.

Kill yourself desu

Show the sketches to a millennial,

Then show the same 'the chapel show'

which will they find funnier?

Based Chesterton, always and forever relevant.

That's a pretty good quote but I think this one is even better:

"another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name."

Chesterton definitely makes you think. I don't think any agnostic or atheist can say he has made an honest and charitable effort to understand his opponents, who has not read him. I ain't even a Catholic or a Christian but Chesterton is something else and an antidote to the stupider sort of Christian you more often encounter in life.

Hmm there seems to be a lot of anti-Catholic propaganda going on recently.

You kind of repeated what the post you quoted said.

So what's his reasoning behind this quote?