ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41u0oA1ReQL._SY300_.jpg

has anyone read this? is it good?

Pride Prejudice and Poops

persuasion def the short one to me. mansfield park the long one.

Never given these two a proper go.

http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/norte-end-history

^ However I am watching this film -- 'based' on C&P -- so that might inspire me.

In regards to Austen boyz who are into ECONOMICS are reading her: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p020wmkt

I liked this talk by the climate ethicist, Stephen Gardiner. He uses the opening chapter of S&S - where a husband and wife incrementally talk themselves out of their obligation to support the husband's mother and sisters - to analyze moral corruption around climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChgJIhWXXbE

giving p&p another try. it's pretty funny!

Mr. Bennett!

Yeah, the relationship between Lizzie and her father is one of the great joys of that book--he's retreated from the foolishness of his family to the point where he's actually letting them all down, but the vibe of intellectual equality and pride he has in his one really clever (not just "book clever") daughter... It's just lovely.

making Donald Sutherland perfect casting in the otherwise meh 2005 adaptation.

"Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody."

^^^

good thread let's do again

I'd probably go for Austen this time. there was what Kevin Blackwell once memorably called on some TV punditry "the width of a gnat's cock" in it the first time round.

twoagc *in it* the first time round.

it's not a particularly Janeite phrase I feel, but a buffoon in Dostoevsky certainly.

darragh do you mean a new matchup or, let's just argue about austen some more

my next one was going to be the romantic Big Four vs pound/eliot

def both thomp

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 21 July 2014 20:16

I wanna know more about this.

Austen, of course.

it's about the same as saying smth is "mission"

a chore? an unrewarding effort?

but you can use it of anything from visiting friends in zone 4 to, like, a family member, a genre of music, the ouevre of a major novelist

I want to see which one gets cut to make a romantic Big Four.

yeah apparently for some minutes earlier i totally forgot about the existence of john keats?

well if he will write his name in water

https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews/schmausterlitz-58d005d29592#.ijei72fuu

^ reminded me of the fun we had in this thread.

in laughs, the first seventy pages of demons is giving jane a run for her money

I am finishing Karamazov and I picked Mansfield Park to re-create the um, spirit of this thread.

I’ve read Crime, Underground, Brothers, Demons, The Idiot, The Gambler/The Double. Haven’t read any in a numbers of years. I am so anti-religion these days I don’t know if I could deal with D’s nonsense now.

Haven’t read any Austen, unless I read something in high school and forgot. This thread is making me want to!

Austen captures the politely strangled reserve of her characters just as fully as Dostoevsky captures the extreme emotional volatility of his. She's great, but the tone of their respective novels could hardly be more different.

This is the top Goodreads review of Pride and Prejudice pic.twitter.com/ZXbbUh6uAj

— Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) July 11, 2020

Feel like Tolstoy would have been a more appropriate comparison? Idk

― 龜, Sunday, 20 July 2014 bookmarkflaglink

As I finish Middlemarch wonder if Eliot would've been an even closer result with some of the "politics of taste" we got here.

This piece reminded me of this poll

Men make up just 20% of the audience for literary fiction. Please, I beg you, get over yourselves and into novelistic chitter chatter! https://t.co/R8x8ZYlFuP

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) May 17, 2022

Broadly speaking there is a mini-genre of pieces by women writing about why men hate fiction and why, which could be worth exploring though I haven't as I'm pretty dismissive.

ime it seems to be men who don’t read who don’t read fiction, I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction.

This piece is a bit different because it goes onto talk about men who don't read fiction at all from the set-up which is more SF/genre reader Vs 'proper' canon fiction.

I wouldn't say the piece does a great job of selling literary fiction.

Or it seems to concede the premise that literature is basically about chitter-chatter.

conversely, it also suggests sci-fi isn't about prodding the nooks and crannies of the human heart

it then goes on to talk about changing demographics in successful literary fiction as if these same demographic shifts weren't happening as much or more in sci-fi (N K Jemisin, Ted Chiang, Ann Leckie, etc etc etc)

Or that literature will help you understand the human heart in a way that other things couldn't xp

it’s a v painful read for the reasons noted here and lots more besides. in fact considering it is dreary as comrade alfie suggests.

i mean one reason that flares up at me is that so much so-called literary fiction is terrible. a lot of genre fiction is as well ofc but the terms come with some priors (not examined here) that infer “quality” and “*meaning*”.

the male/female writers, male/female readers isn’t something to go into without a lot of consideration of both history and actual information (not considered here)

much of it seemed to be implying men don’t like feelings and women do, and feelings equate to chit chat (by which i assume is meant a novel of manners??), both of which are ludicrous implications.

in fact it’s so bad that it feels wrong to dunk on it any more, and consider instead how to approach gender in the modern novel, as subject, as audience and as author.

i had some thoughts on the latter here. V Imperfect and insufficiently accommodating of the LGTBQ reaction against and operation outside of the male canonical paradigm, rather than just seeing it through a lens of childbearing. Feel a writer like Isabel Waidner needs bringing into the mix.

Another overall point to make is that Jane Austen and George Eliot are two of the greatest literary innovators in the English canon, and the whole premise of the piece seems to go down a “women feelings, men jack reacher” which ime is total nonsense both ways. oh wait i’ve said that. terrible piece.

someone should write a thinkpiece about 'why do so many 'thinkpieces' contain such sloppy thinking?'

i should add i was lazy and unfair on ash there - it was her male friend who said “chit chat”. the implication is “what you see as chit chat is actually Important Literary Fiction”.

yeah The Last Samurai is a massive spanner in the works of that article, from which my main takeaway is that Sarkar, her boyfriend and Knausgaard are all massive normies

I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction.

oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

_I’ve never known anyone who reads at least semi regularly who was dismissive of reading fiction._


oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

It's probably my irrepressible elitism, but I don't consider people whose reading is confined entirely to books about how to be a better mid-level manager, how to grow richer or thinner, or how to program computers using the newest scripting language, to be "readers". It's fine to read those things, but in my prejudiced view you have to read at least one book a year that speaks to more than gratifying your ego or improving your financial interests in order to be a "real" reader.

yeah The Last Samurai is a massive spanner in the works of that article, from which my main takeaway is that Sarkar, her boyfriend and Knausgaard are all massive normies

― imago, Tuesday, 17 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

You can talk

This is so tedious, can you not.

The caucasian Big Dogs of prestige lit can’t present themselves as the universal perspective anymore. No one needs Jonathan Franzen or Martin Amis to speak on behalf of humanity.

So who are men when they don’t get to claim the status of godlike narrator?

does Franzen do this? I thought the standard criticism of Franzen was the opposite, that he is too concerned with a narrow, white, male, middle-class etc perspective.

oh i envy you, i definitely know people like this. mostly business/tech types who see nonfiction as "learning about the world" and all fiction as "stories for entertainment." and you're never gonna believe it, but most of them they are successful in business but very clueless & boring to hang around with & seem to have very little curiosity or self-knowledge.

^^^
I know many people in law and business who read nonfiction but no fiction. And they are NOT reading self-help or Seven Habits or whatever. Plenty of biography and history because it is "real" while fiction is "just made up."

_The caucasian Big Dogs of prestige lit can’t present themselves as the universal perspective anymore. No one needs Jonathan Franzen or Martin Amis to speak on behalf of humanity.

So who are men when they don’t get to claim the status of godlike narrator?_


does Franzen do this? I thought the standard criticism of Franzen was the opposite, that he is too concerned with a narrow, white, male, middle-class etc perspective.

who the fuck cares about "prestige lit" or gets riled up enough about it to denounce it? the phrase itself strikes me as weird, and raises questions in my mind, such as where does this prestige come from, where does it go, and it is any different from self-congratulation?