ITT: We post one of our favorite books or books we have read recently that we'd rec

>changed my way of seeing a world around me
How so, user? Is this a good point of starting with this ol' chain-smoking frog-eating absolute madman?

Houellebecq is author which for someone is a real genius, erudit, brilliant observer but for someone he could be a no talent, fool and pornography maniac. But he made me aware of the problems that affect our civilization.

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Just finished pic related.

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Is it?

Man I couldn't really get into fifth head of cerberus. I got the sense there was something really interesting going on but the story on the surface was nowhere near as enticing as Book of the New Sun. gotta give it another read.

which english edition should I get? the "atomised" one or "elementary particles"?

tell me about it

Watch out tho, whatever book you try to read after that one will seem like the unbearable whining of teenage dilettantes. I tried to read "Sailing alone around the world" and the guy seemed like a giant pussy, tried it again 6 months later and realized he was a bad-ass, just not in relation to Ivan.

What do you think about it?

I think there aren't any differences in content between these editions but i don't know them very well .

i read this and i am currently reading dead souls. i like dead souls but my favorite thing about the divine comedy was that unlike many other works that express a lot of ideas and meanings this one wasn't very still moving but rather had quite a bit of action and exciting imagery could you recommend anything similar to that

>Dead Souls
What translation are you reading, mate? Meaning to start with Dead Souls but couldn't make up my mind on what translation to choose.

I read Sometimes a Great Notion a few weeks ago. It was great senpai

J R

richard pevear

Saw James Purdy recommended in a Flannery O'Connor thread and decided to give this book a read.

A very interesting book it was. Written in that style of "so manly you realize women are bad fucks and start sleeping with guys" kind of way. Purdy's style is very dialogue-based, using sparse descriptions of locations and allowing for character action to be the central focus. He's good at revealing the characters through dialogue, but I'll admit that the best sections were more focused on building atmosphere: in a different world, Purdy would be a rich thriller writer, IMHO.

I've been meaning to read that forever but it intimidates me. How difficult is it, really? I don't know if I'd be able to get used to the whole constant unattributed dialogue thing.

I'm going through the complete stories of JG Ballard right now, and there's some really great shit in there. I didn't expect to like his early stories much but they were surprisingly good.

>richard pevear
Are you sure? How is it? Have you read and compared other translations?

no just the current one i am reading

Are you enjoying it? Any other Russian to English translation have you read before?

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Just let this fucking shitty thread die already, you fucking tool.

>Shitty thread
/pol/ is where you belong, cuntsack.

A portrait of the artist as a young man.
Yet to read Ulysses but I seriously doubt I will be able to enjoy it as much as I did this.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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Is this book any good?

Yes.

I was really skeptic at first to be honest. It starts of as a kind of academic satire (the protagonist is head and founder of the first Hitler Studies department) but soon delves into themes like the dynamics of the modern (American) family and our deepest fears of death. It's as funny as post modernism gets but still heart warming and even disturbing at times in the sense that themes and unanswered question may haunt you for a long time. It also paved the way for and heavily influenced writers like Franzen or Wallace.

Thanks, guys.

jameson argues that marxism is the only semantically complete mode of literary/cultural criticism. his strategy for doing so is a bit more diverse than the usual class reductionism, however. rather than arguing, as most marxists before him did (usually in the lukascian tradition of marxist lit crit) that representations of class struggle in the text were the object, or that, on the other hand, the text was always the site of the reproduction of ideology (althusser), jameson starts by dividing the process of critical reading in two.

the first moment is the more traditional literary criticism we are familiar with, but with a few later-order twists. this moment has to be rigorously formalizing, paying attention to all the usual new-critical obsessions like metaphor, syntax, and especially paradox. but also at this moment is the time to bring in your extraneous literary discourses, like psychoanalysis or mythical/ethical criticisms. the text is to be "rewritten" in the discursive languages of as many of these as can be managed. this practice, what jameson calls "transcoding," prepares the ground for managing the contradictions that inevitably emerge between, for instance, the psychoanalytic and the feminist reading.

in the second phase, we pay attention to those contradictions, not only those that bubble out of the text itself in the form of paradox, lacunae, repressions, etc, but also those that emerge from transcoding. playing these off against each other, it is now time for the transcoding's "opposite number," as i call it, the "metacommentary," whereby the critique justifies itself: contradictions in the text are used to explain the text itself, but contradictions in the transcoded readings of the text are used to explain the historical determination of the different ideologies popular in literary critical discourse today.

these contradictions are then funneled through three widening planes of historicization,

1. political: this is where the contradiction is articulated in terms of class struggle. the individual enunciation, both sides of its mouth split off, as it were, is now seen as the entry of proles/capitalists into collective discourse

2. economic: this collective discourse is then widened again using historical knowledge of the present moment in order to paint a synchronic picture of the mode of production as it stands

3. historical: finally a "metasynchronic" picture which combines diachrony and synchrony is produced which searches in the negative spaces for evidence of the survival of older modes of production, as well as hints of what is to come.

by tracing the contradiction to this widest stage of its articulation, the reading finally settles into a "dialectic of utopia and ideology:" the text is always at once reproducing the current mode of production while at the same time presaging the coming utopia. marxist criticism, he finally argues, has to be sensitive to both if it is to remain useful for political praxis.

that covers the first and last chapters. in the second chapter he glosses different perspectives on genre criticism, so as to show how it can become a site of transcoding. chapters 3, 4, and 5, meanwhile, demonstrate this mode of criticism in the works of Balzac, Gissing, and, in a really fantastic critical essay, Conrad. through these jameson argues (almost incidentally by this point) for his tripartite scheme of capitalist historical evolution, from realism, to modernism, through to postmodernism. Conrad a postmodernist? yes, he claims: with only a gentle push, he claims, Conrad's texts explode into the polyvalent schizodiscourse we are accustomed to in postmodernism. of course, conrad himself isn't really aware of this. that's because, for jameson, the three aesthetics correspond to three phases of capitalism: competitive market capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and finally financial or multinational capitalism. at his moment, in his "political unconscious," conrad could "hear the future knocking at the door," jameson claims, and so his texts, to our eyes today, come to resemble the future of literature more than its present or its past. think also of Joyce's Ulysses here: is it really fair to call Circe's playfully incoherent experiments in form, or the self-destructing boredom effected in Eumaeus, purely modernist? jameson would argue no: we should keep our eye open for the future in the past. the trickiest thing, however, remains keeping our eye on our own future, and this is basically jameson's project throughout his career.

This sounds really interesting, and thanks for the great writeup. But I have to admit it makes me strain to see how this is part of any practical program. Not just this, I mean, but things like this in general.

It reminds me of the burnout of scholarship on "late capitalism" in the 90s and early 2000s, where it just seemed like industrialised academia finally subsumed and devoured the last gasps of Marxian thought, and the old hardcore Marxists finally died off. You get this moment where all the theory is being done by grad students looking for the most baroque meta-theory, and it seems like everyone stopped caring in general in the past 10 years.

Jameson always set off this flag for me. Like he was the last great expression of that shit. Another one that triggers this for me is Agamben, who is a great and brilliant thinker just like Jameson, but there's this subtle leitmotif I can almost see sometimes, where they really are just sleight of hand tricksters who have staked claims on flashy meta-theoretical things like biopolitics and Schmitt.

Maybe I am just getting burned the fuck out myself on all this.

nah i'm with you man. jameson describes himself as an "enthusiastic consumer" of postmodernist culture in his big tome on that subject, so there is a kind of cloistering that happens. but i wouldn't lump him in with agamben. part of the problem is foucaultians like him believing in critique as politics in itself. they're basically semiotic idealists in practice, only ascribing hard reality to the discourses it's draped in. at least in The Political Unconscious, jameson takes shots at that kind of thinking: for him all its fabulations are still only the first step of reading. you have to remember he's writing in the late 70s, publishing the book in 1981. we had only just gotten the first whiffs of reaganomics—more ideology was knocking on the door than utopia. jameson is a student of the 60s, i think he really believes knowledge of history is power. but all that gets co-opted very quickly when neoliberal realize they can virtue-signal with cultural studies while effectively only protecting their own tenure. marxism of the jamesonian kind is more marginalized than his reputation would lead one to believe

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(bilingual master-race here) neither matter. elementary is US and atomised is UK. no substantial differences in the printing.