Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 329. page
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About to begin reading The Illiad? Any tips, advice? Using the lattimore translation
Should I try to memorize the whole thing? If so, Greek or English? Do you think it would impress people? I know Mark Zuckerberg did that.
Anyways, general Illiad thread
>>8119240
>Any tips, advice?
Use summaries. Just normie ones you can easily find online. LOTS of shit happens, many parallel scenes, lots of names. Easy to get some things mixed up.
>Should I try to memorize the whole thing?
No...
Lattimore's great if you can read Greek. Can you? I definitely recommend selecting passages you find particularly striking and going through the original using the translation for help. Lattimore is very literal, shouldn't be too difficult if you're familiar with Homeric Greek. Geoffrey Steadman has written wonderful commentaries (from a purely grammatical and entry-level standpoint) which you can find online. For something more in depth, De Jong is a personal favourite. Enjoy!
>>8119240
>.
If you have the choice between Greek and English, why would you choose English? I assume the Greek would be closer to Homer.
The advice I have is not to feel bogged down by all of the patronymic writing, and the catalogue of ships. It is not necessary to recall minor and incidental characters.
>>8119240
H-h-have people on /lit/ actually memorized the Illiad? What autism level do I need to unlock this skill?
>Green text the plot of your book
>>8116817
I'm not giving you my ideas.
>>8116817
>guy comes up with 5 internet friends to trick a girl into dating the real him
>Mother shows up pregnant in ruins of previous world
>She builds a shelter
>Gives birth to a kid and gives him a weird name
>Kid grows up with her until she dies
>When she does, he roams an empty earth
>He sees a bunch of spooky shit
>There's a spooky black monster at the bottom of a cave
>There's also some spirits that roam the earth
>Insert plot here
>At the end, the boy looks out into the distance with his cool dog that he found
>In everything we encounter in our lives, its essence precedes its existence. Yet in our consciousness, existence precedes essence.
>“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide.
I'm tired of feeling that life is meaningless and becoming anything is a trivial pursuit. I want to unlearn.
>>8139798
Your problem is that you made the same mistake every nihilist, absurdist, French fuck made.
You applied the dichtonomy of "meaning/meaninglessness" on the realization that "meaning" itself is not a thing, falsely deducing everything must be meaningless.
The entire idea is false.
Schopenhauer may have been one of the few European philosophers who kinda-sorta resolved their own problem. Je just didn't realize it.
>pic related
>>8139815
>*dichotomy
Uh... I need sleep.
>>8139815
>on the realization that "meaning" itself is not a thing
wut
Hey /lit/,
I need to contribute 10 literature-oriented questions for a quiz night in a couple of days.
Give me your best normie friendly questions, the participants are all university educated, but vanilla as fuck. Topics can range from popular novels/fiction to more classical literature.
Pic unrelated
Which wars did Stendahl fight in?
Which Pliny died in his eruption?
How many broads get raped, in total, in the Greek tragedies?
What did Hitler say was the "secret" to reading books efficiently?
How many female equivalents of Shakespeare or Kant have there been throughout history?
What was the full name of Huck Finn's companion?
Which group of people was equally hated by T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Kingsley Amis?
Which continent did Kant and Hume agree has never achieved anything notable in history?
What is the gender of the five most cited authors in feminist critical theory?
How did Pericles say women could help Athens, at the end of his famous Funeral Oration?
What was Walt Whitman's favorite word for his black friends?
Name one Lovecraft poem.
>verse translation
>>8139553
>translation
>>8139553
>verse
Verse translation is the greatest kind of translation. Only a true patrician translator is capable of doing it. This is why inferior translators are butthurt about them, because they make their work look bad.
Can someone give me the name of that website where you pay about 5 dollars a month and they will submit your articles?
I cannot.
>>8139317
Damn anon I was just thinking about this the other day. Here's a bump.
Duotrope? I dunno.
>I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.
John Kennedy Toole
>>8139137
>Christianity
>>8139137
Man's fall?
>that one time 1,895 years of christianity was completely and utterly BTFO forever in just 88 pages of text
>>8139135
What does btfo mean?
>>8139204
>btfo
backed the fuck off
>>8139250
Cheers
y'all.
I'm literally crying right now. I can't handle the fact that sacks died. I read his last letters at the bookstore a few months ago and i can't control myself anymore. He didn't even write much about death. I don't know what to do with myself. Did he publish anything on death? I just want to email him again. I just want to imagine him alive again.
SACKS MORE LIKE BALLSACKS
LMAO
>>8139016
HOLY SHIT OP ON SUICIDE WATCH
>>8139016
DOHOHO FUKN REKD
THE MONSTER DID NOTHING WRONG
how did hollywood fuck this up so bad
>>8139004
You think normies want to watch a movie about a well spoken ed monster, it might shatter their pre conveiled notions of good and evil
The real monster was us all along. :(
Have any of you read Spencer's The Faerie Queen? I read Pope's Rape of the Locke a few weeks ago but it was over too quickly and I'm looking to scratch that heroic couplet itch. What's a good edition?
>>8138971
>The Faerie Queen
>heroic couplet itch
you will be disappointed, anon, it's not written with heroic couplets, it's written with spenserian stanza
if you want heroic couplets read... pale fire
Pope's Homer if the form's really important to you.
if you want to loosen it up a bit, you could read fourteeners too, which brings in Chapman's Homer.
Keats' Lamia is pretty strict, come to think of it. There's a BBC 4 radio play of it too, if the form really isn't important.
But yeah, not Spencer.
>>8138996
>Spencer
Any historybros still on /lit/ and want to talk about history books?
/his/ is a shitty fanfiction board.
Related disciplines also welcome.
How about we talk about Dickens' A Child's History of England?
The classics of History books, can someone name a few for me?
I think that Anne Frank's diary is one of them, but i'm not 100% sure
Thanks in advance
>>8139618
The Big Ol' Book of Stuff What Happened
What's this book about?
Why does it inspire killers?
Is it worth the read?
>What's this book about?
An edgy kid
>Why does it inspire killers?
They relate to the edgy kid
>Is it worth the read?
You like YA?
>>8138442
how have you not read it?
didn't you go to school?
>>8138457
I was supposed to read it senior year, but my teacher made us read Catch-22 instead.
Are any of Gaddis' other works as Salinger-esque as JR? It finally just clicked for meat the introduction of Eigen's wife and their relationship followed by Schramm's suicideand I'm hoping The Recognitions has the same, despite its main focus on following the story ofFaust.
>>8138421
Bump
Just a sentence, for gods sake
The Recognitions isn't that much like JR to be honest, you have to consider how much time there was between these two novels. The Recognitions itself took like seven years to write and JR wasn't published until twenty some odd years after that.
>>8138653
Thanks, fella.
Can someone walk me through Nietzsche's catalog of work and give a brief explanation of what each one has in it so I can decide which one I want to buy? I already have Thus Spoke zarathustra, but I don't really like the whole story metaphor set up. I was thinking about getting Beyond Good and Evil just because the title seems to both something interesting, but I really have no idea.
>>8138345
>not your personal wiki
>>8138435
humor me
>>8138345
Birth of Tragedy: Sets up Nietzsche's aesthetics, understanding of Apollonian and Dionysian through a new interpretation of Greek civilization. This is the first of Nietzsche's forays into historical deconstruction. His one and only major work as a philologist, though his education obviously echoes throughout his work. Was one of his most popular books but was panned by the philology community of the time. Over time people came to respect Nietzsche's viewpoint though most modern philologists disagree with his account for different reasons
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense: Sets up Nietzsche's approach towards epistemology, it's a very short work. Many people credit this work as the founding document of postmodernism.
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: Nietzsche trying to psychoanalyze Greek philosophers through the lens of their work. He abandoned this before finishing it to start writing Untimely Meditations.
Untimely Meditations: Another unfinished work, he intended to produce 13 essays but produced only four. The ones on Strauss, Schopenhauer and Wagner are interesting bits that require some historical background to appreciate but the true gem is On the Use and Abuse of History for Life which expounds on the ideas presented in On Truth and Lies. This was the essay that inspired much of Foucault's philosophy.
Human, all too Human: This is the first work of 'middle Nietzsche', the period immediately after Nietzsche abandoned Wagner and Schopenhauer's philosophy, quit his job at the university and became a wandering NEET. In this period Nietzsche is a little less bombastic than the late period and much more optimistic towards the merits of science and skepticism. Nietzsche begins to write in aphorism in part due to his poor health and eye problems (which contributed to his failure to finish his prior two works). This work explores a lot of questions of what it means to be an artist or a thinker (he also trashes the idea of 'genius' and 'divine inspiration' here) and the early portions spend a lot of time talking about dreams. This book was a major inspiration to Freud. He develops the idea of the Free Spirit in this book which is in some ways a prototype for the Ubermensch.
The Dawn: A short, odd work where Nietzsche presents many ideas that are completely antithetical to what he posits elsewhere. He writes antagonistically, almost reminiscent of his later works.
The Gay Science: Nietzsche claimed this was his most personal book. This is where the Eternal Recurrence of the same and the death of god emerge in Nietzsche's thought. He also includes poems and songs that make no sense if you don't read it in German.
