How am I supposed to enjoy literature from a time so different than ours?

How am I supposed to enjoy literature from a time so different than ours?

Even liking this painting or reading romantic poetry feels like I'm lying to myself about the world I live in. Someone from the 1800s resonate with the greeks far more than any of use could ever resonate with Keats.

i feel the opposite, i rarely read any contemporary literature. good art is always timeless anyway.

>lemme just ignore all the unstoppable problems currently facing the world like nothing else before and read this prutty poetry about nymphs and shit.

>good art is always timeless anyway.

lol

>How am I supposed to enjoy literature from a time so different than ours?
Study history and philosophy enough and you'll understand why it was enjoyed, and then be able to enjoy it yourself.

lol

lol I'm sorry you're shallow, user

What a fucking weakling you are.

>he isn't unironically le wrong generation

>all the unstoppable problems currently facing the world like nothing else before
Like what?

For some reason I can identify really well with ancient greek and roman writing, but not at all with 19th century writing of any kind.

I've only recently started reading contemporary literature. The problem with the classics is that you can't help but romanticize the era. I have a rule that I need to remind myself to constantly find parallels with modern society, for example when it comes to epic poetry - heroes are just like today's rappers, they yearn for respect, glory *Achilles*, being the best and wanting people to remember them - they want immortality *Gilgamesh*. It might be a stretch, but it's not far from the truth. But also, not like I am any better them, so I just apply all of that to myself. For those layers of society, gangster wars are a real thing. I can pretend that they are brainwashed, but then so were all those Greek heroes. And maybe they were, but then there must be a reason that I am brainwashed, so I read to try to see that. I don't think I'm lying to myself, as long as I don't read the classics just for the sake of learning about the past, but also about the present, very actively. Appreciate the past, but don't live in it.

I hate 19th century literature, it's all bloated 800 page tomes because the writer got paid by the word

>trying to draw parallels from a society that was vastly different then ours
>never picking up a history or a philosophy book
>being this pleb

I find that 1800s literature resonates with me perfectly fine. Shakespeare's tragedies, while enjoyable reads, have never made me cry or feel particularly invested in the characters the way that Austen, Dickens, Hugo, Twain or Hawthorne can.

Seconded (and bumpéd).

>good art is always timeless anyway

You feel like a fake precisely because you feel obligated to enjoy them. Stop trying to "get" things in some sort of idealized correct way--not only does that not exist separate from a subject, you only want it because you wish to not be corrected by and/or correct others on how you like your books. Deal with whatever comes your way in whichever way you can, instead of wondering how someone "better" than you would do it--not only is that self-degrading you're deflecting authority onto someone else.

I've struggled with this myself actually. Thank you.

>appreciate the past
It's kind of hard when those stories were all about glorifying violence and being super manly and cool.
The Aeneid was roman propaganda.

>reading """""literature""""" from after 1941

That's fine OP, you're simply trying to reconcile literature as disposable entertainment with literature as it is promoted by the academia-media-publishing industrial complex, as a "soul nourishing" and "enlightening" tonic, which is then immediately used for social signalling purposes.

Literature is good because it creates a kind of time outside of time, an experience which doesn't belong to either the social present or the past, but is formed by both of them. It's not ahistorical and not about 'timeless beauty', but about the generative connections that are formed. Nietzsche's reading of Greek society didn't summon up the essential spirit of those times, but it also found something that wasn't visible in his present.

I think this guy is being kind of reductive, by characterising the reading of old literature as being a source of criticism or illumination for the present, by way of finding universal parallels. Instead it's a way to bring about something 'untimely', in Nietzsche's terms, something strange and discordant and not necessarily applicable either to the present or the past.

There's a line in a Chaucer poem, Parliament of Fowls, where the narrator is discussing why he reads old books:
"For out of olde feldes [fields], as men seyth
Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere"

I completely sympathise with people who do this desu.

Never to the level that it was intended though

This is what I wonder about the Infinite Jest. Although it was written very recently, it seems like television is such a massive focus of the book, when that's not really a part of my life at all (and it probably would have been if I grew up in the time period DFW did). Is it already outdated to me?

>inb4 entertainment is a timeless constant

Yeah but I would argue that internet addiction is very different from television (which is a very passive activity).

Why does it need to catter to you? Why do you have to instantly be capable of "relating" to the problems presented? If that book where a person, would you again not care because they don't have the same problems as you do? Don't you read books for new experiences? Don't you find trying to understand what others are going that you haven't experienced (at least yet) much more interesting than solutions to the same old problems?

omg i love pre raphaelites

the human mind is still the same.