Sham bam bamina! posted:

Nah, scholarship is just really far up its own rear end. De Saussure has been almost completely superseded in actual linguistics but is still royalty in your average English department.

Strom Cuzewon posted:

I can't quite wrap my head about psychoanalytic approaches to criticism. Freud and Jung are pretty universally derided by modern psychologists (or at best, considered merely a curiosity) and their theories are somewhere between wrong and unfalsifiable.

So why are they such a major component of literary analysis? Have we simply trimmed away their bullshit bits and left the useful ones?

To some extent I don't think it matters - a shared framework for analysing literature is still useful, and I don't think we demand unwavering scientific accuracy without losing some of the richness of literature. But I don't see how analysing art through the lens of penis-envy or some other discredited idea is going to reveal anything useful (or true) about human nature.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Never foresaw that me wanting to complain about elfbooks would spawn the most dynamic and fastest-moving thread in TBB

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Dramatika posted:

So if I read a bunch of genre stuff like Novik and Jemisin and Le Guin and Claire North, but want to give 'real literature' a shot what should I read? I feel like that while they are not exactly fine literature, they feel much better and thoughtful than Sanderson and Rothfuss. I see a bunch of deserved making GBS threads on genre stuff, but no ideas on where to start. Should I go straight to Nabakov or pick up some Cormac McCarthy? Just go and pick up some Celeste Ng which Goodreads is raving about in literary fiction?

Mel Mudkiper posted:

for what does this thread exist if not to push back against obsolete ideas

lofi posted:

My original point was that 'canon' is what people will likely first use as an entry point to 'real grownup literature', and that it's too disputed (especially on representational grounds) to be of much use anymore, assuming it ever was.

Bilirubin posted:

Let's assemble the TBB canon:

Babyfucker
Gravity's Rainbow

uh,

Aquarium I guess.

Bear loving, as a general theme.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

The fallacy though is that the literature of the past we consider "great" only represents a small portion of everything that has been published. You can check, for example, a list of American bestsellers from the end of the 19th Century, and only two or three books might be remembered by people outside of specialist scholars (Prisoner of Zenda, Red Badge of Courage, and Quo Vadis).

chernobyl kinsman posted:

im making the executive decision to put Bear on the TBB canon and all of you losers need to read it this month

chernobyl kinsman posted:

by common consent the TBB canon is *glances at the first page* uh warhammer, james bond, the lord of the rings, patrick rothfuss, GRRM, the dresden files, internet webcomics, and a harry potter fanfic

Thranguy posted:

The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dracula, The Invisible Man, The Turn of the Screw, The War of the Worlds, Zola's Rome and Paris, and the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (that last likely off the list because it was a kids book)

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Yes, this is a fraction of the total popular literature publishind in the 19th Century.

Thranguy posted:

And for the six-year slice you picked it certainly looks like popular books with fantastic or speculative elements have done a better job still being remembered a century later than the realistic ones.

Sort of bad luck there, though. Ten years later, 1905-1910 and we're in a desert of remembered books, The Jungle and a little Chesterton and Wodehouse and that's it.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

famous science fiction works Prisoner of Zenda, Red Badge of Courage, Quo Vadis

Thranguy posted:

And for the six-year slice you picked it certainly looks like popular books with fantastic or speculative elements have done a better job still being remembered a century later than the realistic ones.

Sort of bad luck there, though. Ten years later, 1905-1910 and we're in a desert of remembered books, The Jungle and a little Chesterton and Wodehouse and that's it.

Thranguy posted:

Those three (plus the Zola pair) are outweighed by the eight genre/genre-founding books of the same six years, is what I was clearly saying.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

you are arguing against a misconstruction. a book is not inherently better because more "realistic", nor inherently worse because less. macbeth is not "realistic". 100 years of solitude is not "realistic". fantasy doesn't suck because it's not realistic, it sucks because it's poorly-written, intellectually-stunted, artistically-impoverished pulp which limits itself to conforming to a set of established conventions drawn almost entirely from tolkien. even when it violates those conventions (like Thomas Covenant turning out to be a miserable rapist instead of a plucky underdog), those violations are only coherent within the overall framework of the conventions.

this argument betrays the defensiveness and insecurity inherent in nearly all genre fans

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

You're trying to argue that popular fiction automatically becomes canonical literature... by bringing up six books out of hundreds and thousands?