Thoughts? Having been forced to read this I'm really unimpressed. Is everything Wilde wrote this lame?
Just started the book yesterday and honestly cannot say that I am enjoying it so far. Maybe it gets better?
>>7322611
>forced to read
Sorry about that. Maybe come back to it when you're more mature and willing to read it.
>>7322627
Not really. You should probably finish it for, like, cultural reasons because it isn't a hard read at all, but it doesn't get very good.
>>7322611
Dynamite concept, middling execution.
Aside from that, Wilde is a nothing more than a phrase monger, but, as a Schopenhauerian, I favor his degenerate aesthete lifestyle.
>>7322611
Maybe this is more your speed :^)
>>7322638
>Aside from that, Wilde is a nothing more than a phrase monger
Is this a Kierkegaard-term?
>>7322638
this.
He's overrated and usually the people who praise him are hipsters who want to seem cultured to their normie friends.
>>7322656
It is. I learned it from this place.
/lit/, I am learning!!
>>7322611
Maybe have sex with a man and then try reading it again?
>>7322611
>Having been forced to read this?
Are you in ninth grade?
>>7322679
A graduate level college course. This teacher is a nut case. I wish it was ninth grade so I wouldn't be annoyed about reading it.
>>7322611
I like The Importance of Being Earnest a lot.
But then again I'm an irony-loving faggot.
>>7322611
Yes. Read Chesterton instead. He was a man of the depth and intelligence Wilde sought to ape with his insecure, glib antics.
Wilde probably died wishing he was French. His legacy is a fucking cancer upon literature and academia.
>>7322611
Nobody would know his name if he hadn't been a sodomite.
>>7322611
Why is Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer on the cover?
>>7322611
I just assigned the first chapter of this, you'd better not be my student. I don't assume most of my students will read it all though... and I only assigned the beginning.
In any case, I think Wilde's plays and De Profundis are better works than Dorian Gray, but DG is better than his poetry, easily.
Wilde doesn't present great depth in his writing, but he was a hell of a character who could put out some witty epigrams, that's for damn sure. I personally get pleasure from DG purely from reading Wilde's own identity through Lord Henry and Basil. Wilde was adamant that the artist shouldn't come out through his art when he lectured and wrote criticism, but essentially Basil argues that art itself is a representation more of the pure artist than the subject. Woo, contradiction. I think this work says a lot for who people thought Wilde was based on the character he played socially and who he actually was as an artist.
>>7322703
Quit bitching and read it if you're a grad student. What course are you in?
>>7323145
Yeah no, Earnest was hugely popular just before the trial happened.
>>7322611
>not being able to enjoy Dorian Gray
You are a pleb. Know that.
>>7322611
Serious question OP, can you dig metafiction?
>>7323166
Came to post that.
Perhaps it's because he was handsome af
>>7323315
I was about to agree with you, but this picture says otherwise.
>Bécquer at 19
Probably just his awkward phase
>>7323382
Puberty, I tell you.
The uncensored version of Dorian Gray is much better. It reads like Huysmans and doesn't have all that stupid potboiler shit that his publishers made him add.
For example, in the uncensored book, Sybil Vane is like a four page scene and her brother (who, in the normal version is half the book) is never mentioned.
>>7323405
Yep
