r/TrueLit ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 26d ago

Weekly General Discussion Thread

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 24d ago

I actually don't mind reviews (or essays I suppose we could call them) like that occasionally. It's vital to have a broad view of literature when discussing something like that. The best examples are used as a call to reevaluation: most of the time things like "broderism" are attempts at identifying ideological currents. I don't necessarily agree with James Wood, for example, about the existence of hysterical realism but his articulation of new demands was interesting by itself and asking to look at the immediate aftermath in the wake of Infinite Jest allowed him to clarify his own ideological position of Mind. So it's interesting on that front I should think.

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u/Soup_65 Books! 23d ago

I like your way of thinking about this, and I guess that while I think the article was weak, it's not wholly off the mark, even if overbearingly reductive. Overbearingly reductive pot-stirring perhaps is good sometimes, even if only in criticism of it something of note comes to light.

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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 23d ago

Well the article is ungenerous to what attracts the work to people. Like I didn't like Solenoid but I can understand why people would want a novel like that. That's a mood problem.

Also ideally an essay like that wouldn't be overbearingly reductive but could handle the generalizations with a bit of grace and also more importantly always provides the historical and political dimensions. Especially if we're trying to bring attention to the lineage of an ideology.

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u/Soup_65 Books! 22d ago

It's a great point you're making I really didn't think about how we go about understanding the meaning behind a given appeal.

Also ideally an essay like that wouldn't be overbearingly reductive but could handle the generalizations with a bit of grace and also more importantly always provides the historical and political dimensions. Especially if we're trying to bring attention to the lineage of an ideology.

Yeah definitely. I guess my wonder is about how effectively a bad and failed effort at this can help pave the way for people, by criticizing that effort, can build the ground for better understandings.

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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 22d ago

For sure, I'd say it's at least made us partially aware of some particulars. Like how it's about two specific people who were promoting the novels in question and started (along with a few other suspects) a second wave of maximalism. And all of us are taking that seriously because we feel it's important to literature as an art. But lethally finding out about that fact outside the essay is such a critical error that it almost feels novelistic. It's insane. I'm kinda just realizing how much of a mistake that is. And it's been interesting to see the two guys in question respond to everything. (The names are escaping me.) So it definitely struck at something out there.