ITT: Post your most elitist literary opinions

ITT: Post your most elitist literary opinions

i honestly believe if things were fair then a tax would be levied against plebs to transfer wealth from them to me and everyone on this board to finance our shitposting and reading because we're superior beings that need our solitude and it's an injustice for us to even have to be in the same room as a philistine

read the books /lit isn't talking about.

The idea that the quality of a piece of literature can be objectively qualified

There is nothing more subjective than literature. For one thing, you have to speak the fucking language. For another, your comprehension of the language will have a direct bearing on your judgement of the piece's quality.

That alone makes it more involved than a painting which anyone with eyes can see.

The only books being published today that are of literary value come out of Eastern European countries.

James Joyce, Vonnegut, and Steinbeck are the most entry level classic writers.

My responses to the authors you listed in reverse chronological order:

Yes
Yep
Fuck you, scum

The only thing books are good for is ripping out a page and blowing your nose in it. That and wiping your ass, we should export some to Venezuela.

>beauty of a painting isn't left up to the eyes of the beholder, but lit is because it requires knowing a verbal language
it's a "DFW ignorantly believes he can directly translate his literary theory knowledge onto films" episode

People who spend more time coming up with flowery images to stuff their prose with than they spend on actually trying to convey a deep and meaningful story are killing their work. There's a fine line between vivid and twee.

Most political ideology books are masturbatory garbage written by hacks for fools. If it's not on a college syllabus somewhere, there's probably a good reason.

Writing a book is easier than writing a story.

I hate reading most genre fiction but love writing it

> For another, your comprehension of the language will have a direct bearing on your judgement of the piece's quality
>Confusing the qualities of a thing with a person's abilities to appreciate them

>That alone makes it more involved than a painting which anyone with eyes can see.
Do you really think some random sub-Saharan African Muslim can look at an etching by Durer and have anything but the vaguest idea of what is going on. The time, style and medium that Durer composed works in had its own unique visual language of symbols that makes it as alien to say the abstract expressionists. Visual art requires the sort of inherited and learned language in order to appreciate. You don't just mindlessly look at it with your eyes.

women and negroes can't write for shit

Nabokov was right about everything

you take that back, Nabokov is wrong about everything

Unmetered poetry isn't really poetry.

That over half of Veeky Forums is 20 years old or younger, haven't read more than 100 good books in their whole lives and are bad at interpreting what they read but are vocal about hating Camus because it makes them feel smart.

can it still be good?

this desu

but uneducated teenagers are the modern audience for camus

It can still be good and it can still be art, but we need a new name for it.

>can't read mcgee thinks he's elitist

"free verse" isn't good enough?

Literature is dead.

Other mediums have taken over. YouTube, Blogs, even Twitter have taken over as the means of communication via feeling.

The greats of our generation will not be in print, will not be books, or poetry, or novels; the greats now exist in the form of social media.

One-hundred years from now society will look back and see YouTube creators (not all them but the well created essayists of sorts) will be seen as our generations greatest artistic medium.

Literature is dead. No one with words worth speaking, is writing books. They are making videos.

Nabokov in his opinions is no different from Lord Byron. A childish, whiney, little fellow with big words and a smooth delivery, hellbent on hating the old and their contemporaries for the sake of attempting to make their own work flourish.

Needlessly, I may add. Their works speak for themselves without the need for their petty, unintelligent remarks about their formers, their contemporaries, and their to be predecessors.

The best book I will ever read is the one I wrote, that I will never be able to publish.

Anything written in English in the last 100 years is not worth reading.

You might as well go all the way and point out that the average poster here isn't any smarter than the average poster anywhere else, they just have a higher tolerance for shitposting and extremist ideologies.

This isn't my own post, but I agree with it

>People who spend more time coming up with flowery images to stuff their prose with than they spend on actually trying to convey a deep and meaningful story are killing their work. There's a fine line between vivid and twee.

>Writing a book is easier than writing a story.

Have you ever read The Rhetoric of Fiction? If not, you should. It would be right up your alley.

Not even a gommie, but capitalism vis-à-vis art pisses me off to no end. Everything bad about literature today is rooted in the fact that the system rewards populist hacks and demands potboilers (cf. that thread where people are posting excerpts from Ready Player One). The rise of the internet with free self-publishing , 'Patreon' accounts, vloggers, etc. is another nail in the coffin.

Also this , though maybe more like anything post-1940s as there were at least some competent Irish writers still kicking around like Beckett, Yeats, Joyce, and Heaney

The Bible is the best book ever written.

Thanks, friend, that looks really good.

I do love metaphors and pretty sentences, but sometimes I read bits from people's short stories on here and worry that people are copying literary prose in inartful ways that take the reader out of the story while neglecting to convey something underneath it.

Studying poetry is really invaluable for the modern prose writer.

I honestly believe that reading a translation is a very shitty substitute to reading the original doesn't give you the right to talk about quality of the original. Trust me, I studied to be a translator in college.

I agree to an extent, but I don't really care for poetics and beauty in writing. It shouldn't be a problem so long as the wording retains the original meaning of the text, right? So it shouldn't be a problem if the translator isn't a shitter

Any recommendations? I've been steering clear of contemporary books, but perhaps wrongly so.

>joyce entry level

vonnegut was a hack tho

blacks just cant write and their works wont be remembered or kept in libraries except at howard uni.

Not that guy, but the further the languages and cultures are from each other, the more stuff tends to get lost even if the translator does a kickass job, and that's before getting into whether the translator focused mainly on easy readability in the target language, directly translating as much as possible, capturing the feel of the original without regard to exact wording, or whatever.

But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying the work, especially since you aren't gonna get a much better understanding of it unless you master the original language and learn the culture yourself or find a heavily annotated version. You'll still pick up the plot and stuff.

I honestly believe that people who read books in 2016 (especially '''literature''') are either pretending to like it or are just fucked up people. Just deeply fucked up people who just need to get laid or to... IDK, something.

GET
OUT
RRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Everything went downhill after Gilgamesh

>Thinks you can actually have 'unmetred' writing.

This. Don't underestimate painting, nor any other artistic medium so quickly, especially if your knowledge about them is little.

Raskolnikov was a cunt

Joyce is entry-level for what, your diary desu?

You sound esactly like Stephen King, he's the only non-childrens writer I've ever heard use the word 'story'

Reading "hard" literature, such as that finn book where a man crossing the floor to lit his pipe takes 71 pages, is totally positivistic pleb grade.

>le book is la 3897 paegs long
>therefore is bester

Confederacy of Dunces (written 1969) is the most recent novel worth reading.

Yep. Not a single novel worth reading in the past fifty-odd years.

>No one with words worth speaking, is writing books. They are making videos.

Which will be discussing papers, pushing papers and read from paper. What the fuck are you talking about?

Literature is not dead. The stuff that future pseuds will like from the current day is stuff that the pseuds of today call rubbish.

>People who spend more time coming up with flowery images to stuff their prose with than they spend on actually trying to convey a deep and meaningful story are killing their work. There's a fine line between vivid and twee.
Wow, easy there Dostoievski

I agree

wasn't that the point?

>this new medium will kill this old medium, even though they function in entirely different ways!

also
>literature is a means of communication via feeling

>positivistic

>Hating the old
Nabokov liked Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Melville, and he also enjoyed several newer writers, like Updike and Salinger.
Why do you corncobbers resort to lies so often?
I'm pretty sure there's something said about lying in that Holy Bible you steal all of your material from. SAD!

Stream of conscious is horseshit, but surrealism is legit.

I just don't know anymore.

just like your post

I don't have an elite literary opinion; I have the only literary opinion. None of you exist.

this is the cleverest "my diary desu" i've seen so far

Im sure youre right this time Adorno

Lazlo Krasznahorkai would be my personal favorite. Victor Pelevin, Andrus Kivirahk, and Mesa Selimovic have all written some great stuff.

Forgot Chingiz Aitmatov.

favourite book for each?

plato was right all along

I would highly recommend Death and the Dervish by Mesa Selimovic. Northwestern UNiversity have a set of Eastern european books called writings from an unbound europe. tBh i agree with the posters that it is the only region with good contemporary lit

>implying he was ever wrong

I prefer video games and anime to literature. The former hobbies are just more fun for me

Personally I prefer video games and literature to pretty much anything else. Anime is only slightly better than movies.

Alright, Girl on the Train it is!

>the Victorian period was over a century ago
>we aren't temporally far enough removed from it
Just admit that it's shit

>Girl on the Train
What's wrong with it?

>Joyce
>entry-level
If you're reading Joyce as an entry to literature you've fucked up.

You read Joyce AFTER you've read the rest of the Western canon.

I feel that this is somewhat true for everyone because the amount of stimulation is greater and instantaneous with video games. However once you spend enough time with those, you become sick of it and you realize their limitations.That is when you begin to appreciate and enjoy literature as it kind of "lets you breathe" with your thoughts

That's what I was thinking. I just call unmetered poetry free verse.

>literature isn't dead! It's just going to take 100 years for people to realize that there are good books coming out!
wew, I guess that in the early 20th century nobody knew about Joyce, Pound, and Eliot right?

I think any modern writer should study poetry as well as whatever their specialty is. In my opinion, it aids the writer in breaking free from the rigidity of language (especially English) and allows them to construct their sentences in a more creative way.

If you are someone who 'just doesn't like books' then I think you are stupid as books are the foundation of modern civilization and you should take an active interest.

Favorite for Krasznahorkai is Seiobo There Below, but I'd reccomend reading The Melencholy of Resistance or Satantango first.

For Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra is a quick, strange read. The Man Who Spoke Snakish is the only I've read of Andrus, but I loved it. And as another posted said, Death and the Dervish is 10/10.

Ironically, Dosto objectively has the most beautiful prose of any author out there. Just ahead of the Bible.

Oh! I get to take part!

I think you're a massive pseud if your main motivation for reading literature is out of some anxious duty.

James Joyce is all style and no substance.

If you consider Slaughterhouse Five to be anything other than trash you should hang yourself.
If you list 1984 in your top five you're literally 16.
If you describe The Stranger as life changing you're YOU NEED TO GO BACK

Joyce doesn't really have that much to do with canon. He has his personal canon which consists of the Bible, the Odyssey, Ovid, Dante, and Shakespeare and then the rest is just Irish folk songs and shitty British meals

>If you list 1984 in your top five you're literally 16.

nice try big brother hehe

>> 8847505
Veeky Forums is better than /r/books

>comrade