/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22323026]

I read Notes from The Underground and his other short stories first in High School, never read more verbose prose with so few insights. I had searing hate for having spent the little money I had on that collection and that probably colored my opinion of Crime and Punishment.

I don't get literature culture in general. I love art. In my view art is aesthetics denouncing intention and information through symbology.

What I don't get is why something like In Search of Lost Time from Proust, which I love, is THAT much better than Diary of a Wimpy Kid, when it sometimes explores a lot of similar ideas except using a different aesthetic.

Is the value in art to be judged by how prestigious the aesthetics imply said art to be? Some SpongeBob SquarePants episodes have the same depth as a great Azimov short story except that's really far from how they're categorized.

[Anonymous No.22323122]

>>22323026
>In my view art is aesthetics denouncing intention and information through symbology

This word choice doesn't make sense in English, it seems like you are thinking "denounce" is essentially the same as "expound", "proclaim", or "elucidate", but to denounce something actually means to warn others against it, kind of in the vein of "accuse", "expose", or "slander". Your English is very good in general, not trying to be rude, just pointing it out because it's a pretty different meaning. Also you would say "the value *of* art", not "in".

As to your actual point, the view I've come to as I've gotten older is that ideas are pretty quickly exhausted inasmuch as they apply to anything real. You can play around with them a lot like philosophy does but that is all fairly insubstantial and it's basically just aesthetics under a different name. It's my personal belief that to neglect aesthetics is to neglect our inborn or at the very least unchosen and deep-rooted preferences, and we only impoverish ourselves by trying to strip them away for the sake of more purely understanding a "truth" which, if it is actually true in some meaningful sense, is undoubtedly something we already know. But at the same time I think having *something* true and lasting there under the aesthetics is important, aesthetics alone tend to be a passing forgettable pleasure.

[Anonymous No.22323129]

>>22323026
Read the first part of NFU but with the narrator as God, unironically

[Anonymous No.22323507]

>>22323026
>through symbology.

[Anonymous No.22324169]

>>22323026
I would have thought a work can be considered artistic if it evokes thoughts or emotions that the author specifically wanted to evoke, without outright telling the audience what the thoughts and emotions evoked ought to be. Following that, the quality of the artistic word is related to how complex the emotions and thoughts evoked are and the techniques used in order to do so.
To be honest I'm not completely sure how my theory applies to prose. I had music and paintings in mind when I came up with this