Antivehicular posted:

I'm still reeling at the phrase "the complexity of linguistic tactics" used to describe prose style. What does it mean? What could it possibly mean?

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Thought about ordering Robert Coover's The Public Burning online this morning and decided to put it off since I couldn't really justify the price of the copy I wanted and there were plenty of comparable ones if someone else got to it in the meantime. Decided to stop by Half Price on the way home and found it there in very nice shape, all mylared up, for 8 bucks. Not bad.

LionArcher posted:

The only example I can think of a book that made me feel uncomfortable at the end was probably Lolita, which I think is a fantastic novel that i have no interest in re-reading.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

If you like kids' books, just read kids' books. Life's really loving short.

ulvir posted:

I read them in Norwegian

V. Illych L. posted:

yeah but which one

TrixRabbi posted:

No one grabbed on this, but this is the only book you've ever read that made you feel uncomfortable? That in itself says a lot about your reading selection. And I'm not saying you have to willingly subject yourself to upsetting books if you don't want to do that, but I don't think you can venture out of your comfort zone so rarely that you can only name a single novel that made you feel uncomfortable and then come out swinging with grand sweeping statements about all modern western literature.

I dunno, maybe I'm late to the party here and there's no sense debating it any further, but I do think a lot of the stuff you've brought up is just leaning on the same old excuses for not reading quote unquote "real literature" (which among the YA crowd increasingly seems to mean books written above an 8th grade level). You point to the Iowa/CIA story as some means of alleging all post-50s American lit is somehow compromised, despite the litany of authors both American and around the world who 1) Never went through Iowa 2) Clearly defy social norms and 3) Don't fit into the narrow framework demanded by mainstream literary trends.

I won't comment on the validity of the alleged CIA/Iowa connection cause I really don't know the details of the story. But whether it's bunk or it's real, this tweet I found googling really phrased the issue well:

https://twitter.com/taylor_dallas/status/1416810251840417792?s=20

It's a joke, but seriously. People bring this up all the time but they never provide the examples. It's just somehow all of literature. But mainstream literary publications, publishers, critics, they all play a role here as well. But there's endless counter examples as well -- do you think the government were big fans of Naked Lunch and Howl?

I do have issues with a lot of modern novels written by authors whose style have clearly been shaped by MFA programs and social media, but I also don't feel like I've read enough of them to make a giant sweeping statement against everything written post-2010, rather just the handful of novels I have read that fell flat for me that I feel are indicative of a trend in higher ed creative writing workshops.

Finally, as to YA and fantasy frequently being more "communistic" well, citation needed. I know this point was already addressed but YA is the most commodified literary genre today and, to sound like a Rose Twitter leftist for a moment, you can look at Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism where he explicitly shows how so much of this glib, surface level anti-capitalism is in actually in service of capitalism. The Hunger Games might rail against totalitarianism and other books may make overtures to leftist ideas, but again these books are written for 12 year olds and their ideas are always going to be a simplification of much more complex ideas that adult literature can dissect. Ultimately collectivism just because a theme of fantasy, while its proponents continue to participate in the capitalist system while priding themselves on seeing through it. Maybe they'll vote Democrat?

Why, in this case, do you not check out some Soviet authors -- there's plenty of socialist realism out there. There's American authors like James Baldwin who directly tackle the corruption of our system, there's the postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo who frequently challenge the nature of the clandestine state. I don't know, I might have lost the plot here or misread the original point so I'll end it here. Point is: Just read more and read widely and you'll be rewarded for it in the end.

A human heart posted:

the style of bit where you only pretend to have incredibly stupid opinions, to own your friend somehow (??)

TrixRabbi posted:

tbf i took neither time nor effort to write that. literally just my stream of conscious spew

ulvir posted:

much like Joyce

V. Illych L. posted:

farts and sex make for good literature, it is known

a bong of vice and ire????

ulvir posted:

I feel violated

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I was just channeling James Joyce, nothing personal.

ThePopeOfFun posted:

ulvir posted:

ulysses also has a scene where a man picks his nose and puts a booger on a rock

ulvir posted:

ulysses also has a scene where a man picks his nose and puts a booger on a rock