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MockingQuantum posted:Not to step too far away from the current discussion, but those excerpt from DODO had me wondering: are there iconic instances of books where the prose is subjectively "bad" by technical or widely accepted aesthetic standards, but work in favor of the thematic "goal" of the book, and succeed in creating an artistic whole? In Foucault's Pendulum, there's a part where the protagonist finds his friend's notes including his attempts at writing, the texts are intentionally of a lesser quality than the main prose but they are important in a narrative and thematic sense
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Mar 17, 2019 06:43
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Also, I've been meaning to talk about this for a while. It seems that in anglo schools there's a lot of emphasis in analyzing a text for themes and while I don't think it's a bad excercise, maybe it's a bit too much for young kids. Here in my country in South America the main focus of literature classes in primary and secondary school is mastery of the language (and that's the metric by which a book is considered proper literature) and you're supposed to just enjoy the books because the language conveys meaning in an aesthetically interesting way; later in school we go a bit into style/prose but I didn't touch thematic analysis until college, when you're taking specific lit courses and wanna delve into theme, genre, symbolism, semiotics, etc. Somewhere in the old thread someone mentioned that making high school kids in the US do thematic analysis kinda burns them on good books because it makes them think that reading *real* literature is homework and it kinda made sense but since I don't live there I don't have a good perspective on the issue, only my outsider view
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Mar 17, 2019 06:57
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Gnoman posted:"prominent use of the color blue always means that the author was suffering from depression, while red invariably signifies that the story is an allegory for anger management" through "the Mask of The Red Death is about the futility of the First World War" to "A Tale Of Two Cities is about Charles Dickens's struggle with his closeted homosexuality". Yikes
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Mar 17, 2019 07:34
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Copernic posted:By treating people purely as outputs of a system you dispossess them of a common humanity capable of acting. People can be good and bad, lazy or hardworking, irregardless of the system they were born into. By simply ascribing results you don't like to 'capitalism' you ignore the possibility of a deeper human impulse at work. Would a communist or socialist country necessarily break the connection between popularity and value? And why? Ok, I know we have moved on to art chat but I just wanted to point out that Marxist Criticism is just a tool for analysis, in that you interpret a text through the lens of class struggle, ownership of the means of production and other parts of marxist theory. It doesn't promote a marxist viewpoint or that a text is good or bad depending on how communist it is; a capitalist can do a marxist reading of the Ilyad
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Mar 19, 2019 19:28
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I'm gonna go out of a limb here and say that you waste yourself arguing against someone defending Death of the Author if that person has a poorly understanding of Death of the Author. I mean, the text starts by separating the authorial voice and the IRL person doing the writing, it's less about what opinions the IRL author has and more about understanding the "author" as a character in a text. Pierre Menard and Library of Babel are good examples and I also propose The Name of the Rose since the main story is a text, that's probably fake, found by not-Umberto Eco. Another excellent example is Lord of the Rings since the main text is a story taken from the Red Books and then transliterated to English by not-Tolkien. One of the fun things I liked reading in the Lost Tales of Middle-Earth is that the famous Beren and Luthien poem was written by some bard in the 4th Age or something so it kinda drives the point about how the whole Middle Earth Mythos has been shaped by narrators and coloured by their context, the same way Arthurian Legend has. That's worldbuilding
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Mar 20, 2019 18:14
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Mel Mudkiper posted:that is explicitly not what the essay is about Uh, I expressed myself wrong, I was talking about the introduction: Barthes posted:In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this And how at most you can discern an "authorial voice" but this "author" is a semiotic construct that depends on the text. My point is that a lot of people have politicized(?) Death of the Author conflating it with "separation of art and artist" or even weirder stuff, and other people strike back at this misunderstood idea of Death of the Author, which is the impression I got from the last page
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Mar 20, 2019 20:04
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I've finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness a week ago; it was my first LeGuin book and I liked it a lot, then, for something completely different, I've strated reading the Shattered Sea series, by Abercrombie and to my surprise it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be after the first couple of pages. The experience of reading that book after LHoD made me think about how a lot of elements of contemporary fantasy can be traced to older genre writers. Yarvi's journey in Half a King strongly reminisces Wintrow's turn as a slave in the Liveship Traders series and Genly crossing the Ice in LHoD, but those books are better written
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Apr 8, 2019 19:13
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Makatka posted:I've read Card's "Ender's Game" and its sequels and at some point some fancy sci-fi communication device pops up, I think it was called ansible. I didn't pay much attention at the time, but I remembered the name because it sounded weird. And hey, later I read LeGuin and turns out she 'invented' it. I guess it shouldn't be surprising with almost entire fantasy being just a reiteration of Tolkien but I was still shocked. Sometimes I feel you can trace ancestry and lineages in English genre because younger authors remain too close to their inspirations and hardly ever challenge them. LotR is one seminal book but I think Asimov and LeGuin have their own branches. I need to read more classics to see if I can map out a Sci-Fantasy Family Tree
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Apr 8, 2019 22:06
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I want to read that series, but here in latin america we only get genre books translated if there's a tv show or movie about them 
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Apr 8, 2019 22:08
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A human heart posted:you really need to stop whining about stalin.. like were you even alive back then? just doesn't seem like something to get worked up about Hey, I've just finished The Shattered Sea trilogy by Abercrombie. The second book was the high point, the third book was a mess. What I particulary didn't like is that sometimes Abercrombie sets up a good metaphor, simil or analogy and inmediately robs it from all nuance by explaining it. I believe that between those three fat books is a good novella about what pushes young people to war and violence but it gets lost in the bloat. Also, the third book has a bad boy anime angsty protagonist, ugh
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May 13, 2019 22:37
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Sham got super mad at me in the last bonfire thread because I said its dumb that in fantasy dragons are always big lizards because dragons don't exist and are not based on anything real, so they could technically be anything. I argued Dragons are more of a narrative concept than a collection of actual physical traits, so almost anything could be plausibly called a "dragon" in a fantasy world if served the narrative purpose a dragon serves because there is nothing demanding they be big lizards. Dragonhood is a pretty flexible concept, they have represented A Lost Age, the Devil, the Apex Predator, Lands Unknown, Magic itself, the Fury of Nature, etc. Why would anyone challenge that idea, specially in fantasy where there are elemental dragons and dragon-turtles
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May 14, 2019 17:30
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:I mean even among people who I know like DBZ and stuff know that's a flaw, that after like say Frieza Arc the numbers kept going up but what was actually happening on screen stayed pretty similar. I like the concept of DBZ more than I actually like it In only enjoyed the first Dragon Ball series, when Goku was a kid, because those were fun fantasy/martial arts adventures and not the slooow fights and power trips in DBZ
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May 14, 2019 22:42
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chernobyl kinsman posted:there was a twitter thread making the rounds last month about "show don't tell" reinscribes white male dominance by extracting emotional labour from the reader I understand "show, don't tell" from a scriptwriting perspective, but from a literary perspective it doesn't really make that much sense because everything is "tell" unless we are talking about a writter being overly descriptive or lacking nuance which seems like generic bad writer problems. Also, I think extracting emotional labour from the reader is kinda the point of literature, isn't it?
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May 20, 2019 21:28
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I enjoy both the detailed vivisection and the general criticism of genre I also enjoy genre unironically
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Aug 7, 2019 18:42
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Sham bam bamina! posted:nothing's ever stopped literary authors from being enormous perverts anyway. This. I mean, Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has a whole book whole book about the sexual escapades of a rich family, including pederasty and getting off to spider sex
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Sep 9, 2019 07:11
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The theme of Jemisin is not that masters are bad, the theme is that the wrong people are masters. The orogenes have hereditary superpowers that regular people cannot hope to match (they can freeze entire towns in an eye blink and are essentially immune to conventional weapons. The natural order of things (once the orogenes appease the oppressive evil earth) is that orogenes can do whatever the hell they want and the average person has no recourse but to beg a noble - er, orogene for help. I've recently read the Strong Female Protagonist webcomic and it has an interesting take on the whole superpowered thing: There's an event that gave random people all over earth superpowers and its treated as a geopolitics equalizer in that the most populous countries, no matter how wealthy or developed, got more superhumans; and there's an implication that bio-engineered or inherited superpowers would create a dangerous world elite And there's a rival secret superpowered group that's probably it So yeah, X-Men world would probably descend into a neo-feudalistic superpowered distopia if not for the aliens, weird-tech, magic and the rest of the Marvel stuff
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Oct 2, 2019 21:35
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Went to a random chapter and was not disappointed. The commas are all over the place to the point of almost making it unreadable. Is this the result of high school english lit education focusing on "themes" instead of language and prose?
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Nov 22, 2019 17:54
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I've just started reading LeGuin's Always Coming Home and its pretty good
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Nov 24, 2019 04:47
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You can make a well-written children's book. It just needs to be well-written. The problem with a lot of genre books is that the authors believe their ideas alone can carry the book and sometimes they even overestimate their ideas and they're not that interesting or creative
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Nov 24, 2019 06:06
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Blood Boils posted:The landed gentry fellow tried to keep it, his enslaved wretch bit it off him and fell in. But that was his stated goal tbf Yes. In LotR Frodo and Bilbo are gentry and you can pretty much tell if other characters are good or bad depending on them recognizing them as gents. Gandalf, Elrond and Aragorn, despite being some of the biggest players in Middle Earth treat and respect Frodo as a fellow noble while Saruman and Sauron underestimate him because he's small and not powerful and that's their downfall. Sam is basically the only non-noble of the Fellowship and he ends up becoming gentry in the end
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Dec 1, 2019 07:00
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chernobyl kinsman posted:like can you imagine a work that began by launching a salvo at Harry Potter and then still expected to be taken seriously as a book for grownups The City and the Dogs but on a School for Battle Mages chernobyl kinsman posted:no it’s not. magical realism is a particularly Latin American genre and i dont think attempts at applying it to any book that has a ghost in it or whatever make sense. at that point the term loses all meaning In all my lit classes in college here in Latin America it was widely regarded that the definitive traits of magical realism was the style of the prose (realistic, costumbristic), the view of the fantastic as part of the mundane, magical thinking as part of society and themes of tradition and change in postcolonial/neocolonial settings which could be applied to many parts of the world other than Latin America (and most teachers really don't like a reductive approach to magical realism as "a latin american thing")
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Jan 7, 2020 20:31
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The Book Barn › The Genres Ablaze: The same thing as choosing to buy free range eggs at the farmers market
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Feb 3, 2020 22:51
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These last few pages I feel there's been a misunderstanding. Mexican authors are published all the time; in Mexico, Argentina and Spain. Latin American literature in general is probably better regarded than US literature. Mexican authors, and other minorities, being mistreated and overshadowed by white people in the US is a problem that goes beyond the publishing industry and I don't think it has much to do with the literary medium. It happens in other media industries. If you want to support spanish-speaking authors there's hundreds of years of literature for you to pick a book. You can start by reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (A Chilean that wrote a lot about Mexico, incidentally)
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Feb 3, 2020 23:07
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Relax Or DIE posted:taken as a whole, is shoplifting a copy of American Dirt from Barnes and Noble and reading it just so I can scoff at it a moral act, or an immoral one They cancel each other
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Feb 3, 2020 23:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah who gives a poo poo about the world building and hard science of a psycho sexual manifesto written by a huge weirdo. But what about the magic system?
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Feb 15, 2020 21:44
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I think it's a quirk of the American (?) editorial scene that writers jump start with long form books and even "sagas" instead of cutting their teeth with short stories and poems. Moreso with contemporary genre authors. Like, the only recent short stories collections I'm aware off were stuff that GRRM was involved in editing. Short stories are great to polish your prose without overcommiting time
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Jul 31, 2020 22:54
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In my experience in "literary" latin american literature, it's less "x meets y" and more "The next [insert famous literary author]" or "breaking new ground in [insert literary genre]" 90% of them are just long drawls about the ennui of the upper middle class and they wonder why people buy the books with a dragon
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Oct 30, 2020 19:17
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