Is it modern? Is it postmodern? Is itliterature?
It's a damn fine book.
>>8135844
It's modernism which takes a punch at many postmodern techniques and subverts them, so a jumbled, almost chaotic narrative with an unreliable narrator has a message that God orders this world like an engineer and we can see his handywork if we look past the surface.
>>8135844
>literature
>Fantasyshit
Take a guess
>>8135858
lazy
>>8135858
posts like these are honestly true unfiltered humor
you can just feel the type of egotistical "discovering myself and Im smarter than most people my age" hipster who pretends to love the meme trilogy because they are /lit/ approved
typically doesnt have a personality of his own beyond "im into literature", 99% of women wont make a second date
>>8135844
It's a classic.
>>8135844
I need to say, "He closed the door." But that's boring. Should I make my writing more interesting? No. Too difficult. Let me get my thesaurus... Okay, here we go, the perfect archaic word. "He closed the porticulumion." Advanced writing for advanced readers like myself!
>>8136243
Considering it is an atmosphere rich story which is trying to intentionally be strange to point out that the only constant in man is sin which is washed away by God, yes, it is pretty good.
>>8135857
yes - Wolfe is a brilliant writer. All fiction is artificial. Spenser, Swift, Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Poe and almost all Romantic poetry mine the depths of myth and (though obviously before they were named) Jungian archetypes which Wolfe works with. Anyone who dismisses his work AFTER reading it is limited, inutile, and incompetent as a reader, blinded by artificial genre or foolishly believing only overdone, banal, and didactic utopian/dystopian and quite obvious SF is worthwhile.
>>8136264
I guess it's good you have a distinct style, for a writer.
>>8136188
This is the most autistic possible response to that kind of shitpost
>>8136259
The wit of Wolfe shines in every small detail: Thea says, to paraphrase, imagine the implausibility and difficulty of a language which has more than one meaning in words, while we are haunted with double meanings throughout: Triskele was the smallest of those dead; words whose meanings have been blurred by time and the slippage of language. Yet Wolfe is hinting that all of those multiplicity of meanings eventually collapse into a universal understanding, and that all things fall from the hand of the immutable creator, and all ground holy - even that trod by a torturer and a corrupt society.
>>8135858
It's actually not fantasy. It's not science fiction, either, btw. It's more of an adventure book.
>>8136298
the decay of institutions and traditions does not mean all communication and objective knowledge must fall to chaos and relativism, thus New Sun is clearly Modernist at its very heart, by subverting localized reception and creating a center immune; art, God, human mercy stand as something worthwhile, regardless of differences in soil, climate, or vast stretches of time.
>>8136298
two can play at this little game: lmao at preconceived self-limitations and the idea that modern nonsense supersedes logical philosophical systems which assumed meaning rather than random nonsense applied to the human condition. Did the use of trendy internet shorthand make that more scathing?
>>8136188
>being this mad people don't respect your stunted adolscence
>>8136298
>baby's first continental philosophy, lmao
Is Aquinas now a continental?
>and none of you understand what modernism or postmodernism mean.
Enlighten me, enlightened one
>>8136525
People like that guy can only think in pre-defined terms, so he labels things as analytic or continental without consideration.
>>8136542
Well I'm aware he's retarded, but I want to hear his definition of postmodernism.
The dry obfuscation that permeates the writing of Gene Wolfe and the legions of literary praise it receives does nothing more than demonstrate the pervasive pretentiousness in the higher echelons of the literary world
>>8136558
and yet it is not well known in comparison to others in the zeitgeist of obfuscation: Joyce comes immediately to mind. Go talk to the most pretentious literature professors you can. ALL of them will have read Joyce or attempted to. A few will have heard of Wolfe. Thus it is time to catapult him to the peaks of pretentiousness, where he belongs. Who can pierce the veil of Maya, and see the Real which lurks behind the illusion of reality, behind the hard and cold edges of a too mortal object? The reason so few write on him is of course obvious: they fear being wrong, or are too dim to realize when they are - the problem when all things are possible, but only one right.
The reason I love reading Wolfe is the joy of figuring him out - a worthy wit, for a change, one who is actually capable of defeating me. Then you have dull, unoriginal, and insipid "artists" like Franzen, who have never thought deeply about anything but somehow believe themselves to be great - why the fuck do I even know that dudes name? the lowest common denominator of the media, banal upper middle class twaddle with no soul and less wit.
>>8136308
I don't know if I agree with your interpretation of the series, but it is an interesting one nonetheless. Congrats on not completely misunderstanding modernism and postmodernism, which most people here do on a daily basis.
>>8136558
Wolf strangely enough doesn't get praise from those groups at all.
halted limpass prose trying to sublimate a D&D campaign with a depthless "dark and twisted" protagonist into the most incurious kind of Catholic parable. Peace was a pretty good book, and some of his short stories are ok, but Wolfe would get laughed out of town if a serious critic ever decided to actually appraise the majority of his work, which is probably why he writes genre fiction. This guy writes adolescent fantasies--that you people would compare him to fucking Melville, McCarthy, or Nabokov is just laughable. His writing is only austere and sophisticated in the way that people think of Dark Souls games as austere and sophisticated, if that's your standard for literature you should probably get off the internet.
Everyone here who thinks they might want to read this shit is wasting time during which they could have been reading something destabilizing and substantive. Instead why don't you read The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead? It's an underlooked book with actual and measurable virtues in terms of theme, plot, character, and prose (unlike this shit) and the misogyny of the author is both more complicated and more robust than Wolfe's socially-conservative one-liners.
>>8136734
what you are ignoring is the thematic unity, subtlety, and vast allusiveness of his work. Let's take simple There Are Doors: straightforward surface text, rich subtext of schizophrenia and suicide so subtly done that when Green turns the gun on North no one even realizes he is turning the gun on himself, though something foreign and destructive enters his brain in this scene. flags at the grand hotel depicting the double headed eagle and the griffon representing his condition and the hotel itself a symbol of his own frustrated and disappointed failures, a broken man who has lost greatness, with characters out of a joe palooka comic, whose creator killed himself - yet people read it as a serious fantasy novel when all of the fantasy is in our schizophrenic's head. The problem is Wolfe writes stories no one can completely appreciate because we live in an effete, weak, pathetic generation too lazy to do research and understand what they are reading. I will admit at times his prose suffers from the creation of ambiguous scenarios (which are not ambiguous at all).
>>8136734
and what happens when the "serious" critic misreads the work and fails to apprehend even the overall plot? laughed out of town.
>>8136734
Is this a pasta?
If it isn't, it should be.
>>8136734
and how the fuck are "destabilizing" and "substantive" being used jointly as arbiters of quality/something worth time? Is this like eating so many 64 oz steaks we can no longer walk?
>>8136734
Is that you Franzen? You are pissed because I characterized you as a talentless hack?
Of "The Man Who Loved Children"
writer Jonathan Franzen calls it, "the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you. I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it."[3] Franzen says of the novel's internal style, "Its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence!. . .The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours."
What a coincidence ... my oh my oh my.
>>8136679
>is a devout Catholic
>isn't praised by the intelligentsia
>strange
wew
>>8136829
If I weren't Catholic, certainly I would be Delphic Apollo, flying ever heavenward, and make these intelligentsia bow before me, subjecting them to my far more objective and lucid understanding of reality. As sexuality and gender is fluid, so too, would be mortality, for now I conceive of myself like a winged god of the sun, and expect others to treat me accordingly. They will be better for their devout worship of me. Trust me.
>>8136827
bad authors can like good books anon.
>>8136841
get over urself
>>8136857
All right. I will read the book.
>>8136827
e.g. I'm sure you're sure Neil Geiman, Wolfe's no. 1 fan, is much much different from Wolfe.
>>8135844
>Is it modern? Is it postmodern?
Literally who gives a fuck
>>8136877
Look at all that dewy nose snot sweat. You are right. Gaiman's praises always struck me as something odious, lacking in penetration (save for, one assumes, the legion of post adolescent but forever frozen in juvenelia "women" Gaiman may or may not exploit).
>>8136937
>may or may not exploit
I haven't heard about this.
>>8137026
amongst the sows and pigs of SF writers, Neil stands out as someone attractive to the other sex, and lo, one gets the sense that his relationship is not the most conservative in the world. There always seems to be a few somewhat appetizing specimens lingering near him throughout events - and they aren't almost famous singers.
>>8137026
I was at this event, and couldn't help but notice ... look at that smirk.
>>8137113
in this case, I'd have to guess green sparkly dress and Neil ...
>>8136734
