#also modernist lit

[thesunsethour]

it’s incredible how you can walk into your college class for your english literature degree and have to sit down and listen to someone (IN THIRD YEAR!!!) say “yeah i just don’t like long literature. yeah like novels. i’ve never liked any old-timey books either i guess. i’m more interested in exploring human emotions instead of like whatever jane austen was trying to do in Emma”.

whatever JANE AUSTEN was TRYING to do in Emma????????????

[miloutic]

> having to quit reading a bg3 fic in the middle of plot bc Life

> reopening the tab to continue reading

> first line i read is "Ah. Foolish,"

> Ah. Yes. Foolish. Foolish Gamers. Ok.

> Mind is set to BBH appearing next

> Astarion starts talking

> closes phone

mcyt has ruined me

[anghraine]

On a less cheerful note, I was thinking with some frustration that I've reached 2024 and somehow I'm still not okay, even though there are so many good things about my life and so many people in it to help me, why am I like this-

And then I was remembering a conversation I had earlier with another early modernist about how her conservative Southern Baptist upbringing led her to feminism and academia, and how I didn't say "I get it" because I didn't want to make it about my Mormon-raised-with-some-Catholic-influence personal issues when I've had basically nothing to do with Southern Baptist anything.

And then I was thinking about discovering lesbians were a real thing via visiting a church bookstore at around... age 12 and seeing pamphlets for conversion therapy. I don't remember clearly what they said, just that they were from Evergreen whatsit and I was scared for years after.

And gradually, I figured out the weird way that people talked about my bio dad's sister was because she's also a lesbian, but her conservative Catholic family found it easier to pretend not to know. This led to a weird conversation a few years ago with my grandmother (bio dad's mother) where she was asking why I never have any men in my life. I mumbled something about just not really being interested, and she was like ... oh, you're like your aunt :)

me: Um—well—yes.

my grandmother: Just so devoted to your career :) There was this wonderful man I thought she really loved, but she just didn't have space in her life for marriage.

me: *blink*

And I was also thinking about, basically, a million other things from growing up in rural US towns when I did. At the time, much of it felt too individually small to justifiably get worked up about, but much of it still rattles around my mind. Some things were bigger than I even realized, in fairness—say, the Evergreen pamphlets represented something much bigger and worse than I really comprehended at that age. I was pretty much on my way out by the time I fully got it (and Evergreen is more or less gone now, I think—while I'm still here and still queer, hah). Some of the gender shit + homophobia of that time seems almost comically trivial in this era of senators ranting about the corrupting filth of LGBT+ people, or alternately it's so dated that even said senators wouldn't bother.

Anyway, it's kind of wild how I just ... don't think about a lot of this a lot of the time, and actively wonder how certain things got so fucked up in my head even though my life has been easy in many ways. And then I'll have this early modern British lit/feminism conversation and not think about it much at the time (we ended up having a perfectly nice conversation about the Pacific Northwest and the deficiencies of Shakespeare scholarship) and have a mostly good day and then somehow end up staring blankly at the wall at quarter to midnight thinking about how scared I was as a teenager.

I do not like being angry tbh. I'm irritable, sure, but rarely actually angry because I find it so unpleasant, even in the fairly slow and cold way that I generally get angry.

But I've been trying to organize my thoughts and I think I might be angry about this. I was more familiar with "gay" as a slur than as a descriptor into my 20s because, see, the church preferred to talk about people struggling with same-sex or same-gender attraction as part of these earthly trials, not gay people. Describing people as gay might be too validating or something, at least then.

And part of the reason this stuff can be so difficult to navigate in the present is that very "at least then." Because things could get far better than has ever actually happened, and it wouldn't make anything better for who I was at 15. I'm the one carrying that around. Not uniquely, since tons of us came out of that environment and others of similar kinds, but—

Okay, ethically, I believe that people always have the choice to simply do better than they did in the past and this should be encouraged. But that doesn't un-do anything for me.

It's fine and good to say, look, certain things are much better than they were in 2000 (or whenever). And that's true, some things are, and I'm not at all sorry about that. But sometimes it seems like those of us who are still around are supposed to just forget the things that shaped us when we were reaching adulthood, like it doesn't matter any more because that was another time and we're in our 30s or older. Like we shouldn't still be affected by our own pasts, even when the main actors are still around and completely unrepentant, or were hateful until the day they died.

I am angry about it, in my way, I suppose.

[tickletastic]

Omg other Duke fans!! the favorite child is my baby!! In my head hes ticklish but he so nice and gentle with his sibs when tickling them that they only tickle him when he actually wants to be tickled.

yes yes yes omg, he's absolutely so soft with them, except for the few times he feels extra playful (usually with tim or jason)

i think he probably falls lee to dick and jason a lot, dick because of his whole older brother act, and jason because jason secretly really really loves duke but absolutely doesn't know how to show it. eventually tim probably clues duke in on the fact that messing with people is how jason shows affection, and duke just lets jason mess with him every time after.

i also think duke and jason would bond over books and literature. while jason's books of choice lean towards regency/edwardian english literature, i think duke would love love love modernist american literature, and he'd also sometimes dip his toes into post-modernist american lit. I think duke loves ralph ellison, william faulker, eudora welty, and tennessee williams, and him and jason absolutely both bond over having niche guilty pleasures for kafka

[thebirdandhersong]

popping in to say I am alive and somewhat healthy :)

am in the midst of midterms season (this will continue until halfway through November...... I'm fortunate, however, to only have 6 midterms. I have friends with 10-13 this semester, the poor lads)

Grandpa's in the hospital still and things are not looking up

PCOS health problems persist unfortunately and the stress is not helping, I imagine

up to my NECK in school readings (just finished The Sun Also Rises and Great Gatsby for the modernist lit class...... there is a TON of German lit readings to do though)

am trying to find other ways to exercise now that I've peaced out of the dance club

at this point in time I am, unfortunately, in love (ask me about this at a later date because the circumstances are both tragic and hilarious)(think John Hughes Movie! that's literally it) and can't do anything about it

however:

loneliness problem at the dorms is mostly resolved (I did as many of you and my parents suggested and am working hard at being the one fostering community here and it is working!)

my friend brought me flowers yesterday and I danced all the way home!

I'm nearly done writing the last part of my Inklings Challenge story

the Lord is incredibly kind re: the boy issue (ask me about this later too... there's a really sweet story in this)

I laugh really hard at least once every day!

[futurebird]

The Overdue Man

Have you ever had an uncanny or possibly paranormal experience?

I have.

It happened when I was in undergrad, I had a work-study in the Archivists Office in the rare books section of the library. The library is a classic modern building from the 50s, once ahead of its time, now well behind. The computer system was similar, my college being one of the first to adopt a digital library catalog in the late 60s

So, as you can see, this is, in part, a story of a haunted computer terminal.

I had returned early from spring break to pack in some extra hours in the library so I could avoid working during exams week. The campus was lovely in spring, dogwood trees shed pink petals on the quad, tulips tossed & bobbed sudden short thunderstorms. I got lost in my work on the solid library terminal with it's chunky keyboard & blue-green matrix screen.

My desk was under a little sky light in a hidden corner of the 5th floor. That's how I noticed the light changing.

The library was a modernist building, as I mentioned, and many people called it "ugly" I think simply because it was modern. Secretly it was one of my favorite buildings on the campus. Because, although built with clean minimalist lines, it was made with care. The architect clearly cared about light. During the day, the building hardly used any electric lights at all.

So, I was alarmed when the sky suddenly darkened so drastically that the runners came on. But, this was spring and I looked up expecting the thunder and another violent little thunder storm.

Gazing up through the skylight told me little. The window was frosted, and I could only see a steel gray haze. The green blue glow of the old computer lit my keyboard and I endeavored to keep working.

Before I could apply myself to my task the light shifted again. This time growing brighter... golden. The runners switched off. The air grew still. The library was empty.

The light from the skylight and from every window was a lustrous pink-gold, a sunset color although it was only early afternoon. The effect was beautiful, dust motes played near the stair well.

The bell at the front desk around the corner rang. Strange. I didn't hear anyone enter.

My main duty was cataloging, but if the head archivist was out I was tasked with lending out rare books in his place. I went around to see who it was.

The light was much more dramatic in the rare books library lobby where there were more skylights & windows, the whole space was bathed in that peach-toned light. And there, by the bell, stood a young man. Smartly dressed. Too smartly dressed.

In fact, a large part of the "paranormal" nature of this experience will require you to trust my (even then) finally tuned sense of fashion.

He had on tweed pants and a sweater, leather shoes and a button down shirt. All of his clothes were out of time. His sweater, to take one item, was a campy letterman affair in school colors. Hand knit. It was the kind of plain sweater that no one would bother to hand knit. It was hand knit self-consciously because whoever bought it couldn't afford store-bought and aimed to approximate the mass produced look as best they could. In short, it was very old.

But, it was also brand new.

The same was true of his plain, white shirt. I could see less than perfect hand stitching on the collar. Who, today would sew a white button-down shirt by hand?

Under his arm he held a notebook, and even it struck me as all wrong for the date of our existence. It was a composition book the likes of which I have never seen except in archives, the black and white dapple pattern was made by splattering ... not printing.

His outfit, though very plain, had that effect of a costume. I took all this in and decided he was from the drama department.

Not everyone could check out rare books. We had our own system, hence the computer in the basement and the beautiful, clunky terminals. I asked for his ID. That's when things got even more strange.

His ID was *laminated* and contained a *real photograph*! His name inscribed by typewriter. His student ID? In pen! I started to have my doubts about my theory that he was from drama. Maybe this was an elaborate book heist!

I tuned over the ID frowning with doubt. "This isn't-" "I'm a grad student." He explained quickly. "Have been for a long time. I know that photo is old..."

The photo didn't look old to me at all. Though, perhaps it was that strange light, concealing and repainting things, for as much as I'd noticed his clothing, I took more notice now of the man himself. He had an uncanny ageless quality. I could not have said if he were 25 or 45... or perhaps even older.

I peered at the photograph on the ID comparing it to the man. They were clearly the same. The clothing in the photo looked just as anachronistic. Even the background of the photo felt like something from a forgotten decade, a pull-down painted backdrop of the college rotunda. His photo beamed at me, and so did the man himself.

Some of the faculty had such ancient IDs. So, I decided to search him up in the system. I tried his last name, which was short an unusual. No luck. I tried his ID--

When I entered his student ID the terminal flashed. The screen inverting for a moment. I gave it wack, as I'd seen the head archivist do, and this seemed to clear it up... but the record I was now viewing was curious and incomplete.

His name had been entered in the wrong field, which is why the search failed. His first name was just an initial. I attempted to correct this but the system wouldn't accept my changes.

I scanned the book. And handed it over to him. He smiled, thanked me, and it seemed very sincere. Whatever else he was, whoever or wherever (whenever) he'd come from he seemed like a nice person, at least.

I watched him leave, and then leaned over to the window hoping to see him go out through the main exit on ground level below.

But he never came out. Instead the golden light began to rapidly fade. The library returned to normal... the charm that hovered over the place was gone.

Maybe he was just a quirky grad student with a thing for vintage clothing construction, a very old ID, uncanny ageless looks, and great timing with lighting. (and he could have left the library via the tunnels. )

I tried to look at his record in the system again, and NOBODY could edit it. Not even the head archivist. It kept changing itself back. Edits wouldn't stick. To this day, I can't shake the feeling that something more was going on.

I never saw him again.

If you are wondering, the book was "Physics and applications of secondary electron emission"

[revelisms]

is "where did you get your vocabulary" a normal thing to ask? 😭 i admire your writing so much but i can't for the life of me figure out where to go with my reading to get on your level. where do you take that from! what are your like. core inspirations, i'd say?

(much love ❤️)

Ahghk omg thank you so much?? ;-; 🖤 What a high compliment my word, but also I've never really thought about this, so this is a great question!

My tastes are a weird mix with most things, and the reading list is no exception. In general, though, 1800s - early 1900s literature has had a big stylistic influence on me, and I've found I reach more often for English and Irish works. There's something about the linguistic flow of that era that I really gravitate to - it feels partially-academic, partially-conversationalist, and still a bit classical in its roots (ergo: archaic). Tolkien has been an evergreen staple on my shelves; I also tend to nose around Hardy, Yeats, Whitman, and Heaney for inspiration.

Other (and slightly more modern) favorites are Pablo Neruda and Tom Hirons for old-feel poetic lyricism, James Baldwin for emotional rawness and character writing, and Thomas Harris for atmosphere and plot structure. I'd say these are more what I'd *like* to aspire towards in terms of language/style.

Aside from those, I do subconsciously spend a lot of time "getting into characters' heads," so to speak, while trying to find an avenue to translate my own experience through that - so there's always going to be a heavy dash of character voice thrown in there, as well, where I'm trying to reconnect my interpretation with the source material.

TL;DR - If I had to put a pin on it, it's some mashup of Victorian-to-Modernist lit? When I'm in a prosey mood, the more surrealist and metaphorical inspiration I can reach for, the better :-)

[wretchedvulgarian]

forgot about my self-imposed tradition of judging the paternal merits of classic lit characters so assorted modernist boys it is

Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye): Seeing him with his little sister, yes I think he would be a good father when he grows up. I think he would be really careful not to just outsource the raising of his child like his parents did with him

Zooey Glass (Franny and Zooey): He totally has fun uncle energy but idk about dad energy

Frederic Henry (A Farewell to Arms): *spoilers in this one* He is technically a father but he really only seems to care about Catherine and not the baby at all so 😬 but maybe if he’d actually had a kid to get to know he would be an ok father but that’s all the credit I’m giving him

Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises): He would definitely do the classic dad activities with his kid (fishing, watching sports, etc.) and I think one on one activities like that are really meaningful for a kid. So yeah I think he would be a good father if only he could be…

Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby): I don’t really have any opinions on this man idk why I put him on this list. Seems like the kind of dad who wouldn’t say much to his child except to drop a bit of cryptic wisdom every so often that haunts them for the rest of their life

Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby): Seems like the kind of guy to forget he has a baby until they like pull on his pant leg one day as a toddler and are just like 👁️👁️ and Gatsby’s like “oh old sport have we met?”

Stephen Dedalus (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man): I love him dearly but no he’s got too many of his own problems

[srahpaulsons]

Sarah Paulson | English lit professor

Paulson is a distinguished professor of English literature, known for her expertise in 19th and 20th-century British, American and feminist literature. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. Deeply committed to teaching and mentorship, she has developed a number of popular undergraduate and graduate courses, including "Feminist Literary Theory," "The Modernist Novel," and "Literature and Social Change." Her students praise her for her passionate teaching style, intellectual rigor, and supportive guidance.

Professor Paulson has also been a vocal advocate for diversity and inclusion within academia, working to ensure that the literary canon studied reflects a wide range of voices and perspectives. She serves on several university committees aimed at promoting equity and has been instrumental in organising symposiums and lectures that address issues of race, gender, and sexuality in literature. Outside of her academic career, Paulson is actively involved in theatre, both as a performer and director. She has participated in numerous productions, bringing classic and contemporary works to life on stage. Her involvement in theatre enriches her teaching, as she incorporates performance theory and dramatic literature into her courses, providing students with a dynamic and immersive learning experience.

[eraserheadbabyfever]

had to take a post modernist lit class in college and i disliked every single story except 1- about an older woman who wrote letters for her near illiterate maid to a man she is in love with. and the maid and the man get married and it's like, devastating, but also bittersweet because the man learns the truth and theres this moment of realizing he's really in love with the other woman because it's the letters that made him love her, but he has to stay married out of duty to the maid- wracking my brains to remember the title/author, anyone know?

[hayleylovesjessica]

I got a couple books today! Regarding the Delmore Schwartz book, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his collected poems earlier this year, prompting a resurgence of interest in his work and something of a critical revaluation of it. I'll get the poetry later. First, I wanted to explore his fiction. In particular, his short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," the eponymous story in this collection, is supposed to be a modernist classic. With Debby having more or less calmed down in my immediate vicinity, I drove out to my local Barnes and Noble, from which I had ordered the book, and I picked it up, as it came in earlier today.

Also, after finishing Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch a couple weeks ago, I am now in my dog lit era. I wanted this Penguin Classics book with Jack London's The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but I didn't want the most recent edition, which is in the terrible 2019 PC design. I made a point of finding a nice copy of the book in the old 2001 PC design online; plus, as an added bonus, the older edition features an introduction by James Dickey, the poet-novelist best known for Deliverance. Anyway, the book came in the mail today, but I don't think Potato is impressed, LOL.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Lewis Carroll?

Not sure—will have to revisit. I never quite understood what he was doing, except in some very broad literary-historical sense: exposing the myth of Victorian childhood and helping to create modernist adolescence, deconstructing realism to pave the way for the likes of Kafka and Borges in fiction itself and poststructuralist theories of language and representation, etc. I've also heard rumors there's something mathematical happening in those texts, which would really be unfortunate from my non-mathematical point of view. And the less said about those photographs, the better. I think I only read the first Alice book, to be honest, and as an undergraduate.

Of my usual go-to critics, I believe only Nancy Armstrong has treated his work at any length. I quote from "Sexuality in the Age of Racism: Hungry Alice" in Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (1999), where Armstrong puts the matter in dystopic Foucauldian terms of the kind that make academics say things like "only middle-class white people exercise self-restraint" and think they're being anti-racist, but it's nonetheless a fascinating lens on the novel that puts it rather in something like the Great Tradition:

Childhood according to Carroll turns out to be the condition of lacking the very kind of power that subjects exercise over objects, the power to classify, to evaluate, to consume with discrimination. The acquisition of literacy is what empowers subjects to keep objects in their place. If Alice fails to distinguish herself from working-class and native women whenever she gives way to appetite, then she reestablishes that distinction in a more decisive way as she begins to crave this power more than she craves objects themselves. In bringing us to this conclusion, however, Alice’s misadventures bring us to the very heart of a contradiction. We must recall that objects in the story tend to come engraved with the invitation to consume them. “Eat me” or “drink me,” they say. Her compulsive response to a marmalade label indicates that writing in fact creates the appetite that Alice must control through reading and recitation. How, then, can appetite originate inside her body if it originates in writing? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland defines the heroine’s development as the acquisition of a peculiar kind of literacy that embraces this self-contradiction. Put another way, Alice herself embodies the fantasmagorical spiral of desire and restraint that women would soon experience in relation to a world made of enticing objects. Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole reveals an appetite for marmalade. Because she has the literacy of the ruling class, however, Alice has acquired an appetite for rules well before her adventures begin. And even though something that seems more like an aversion to books prompts her adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s story is ultimately a struggle to possess the kind of taste that comes with literacy.

I was never exposed to his work in childhood. It's strange, considering his enormous influence on those Dark Age British Invasion comics I read so avidly: Morrison's Arkham Asylum with its Mad Hatter exposing the whole story as a dream of Batman's, Miracleman with its "Red King Syndrome" doing something similar for that early work of Moore's. Then there was the kid-lit pornotopia of Moore's Lost Girls, which I dislike, but that came later. I conclude with a disturbing page, perhaps the most disturbing page, from Morrison and McKean's Arkham. Unlike Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I first read this at the age of seven:

[brechtian]

hi!! sorry to bother u. im applying to university rn, and i was wondering what your opinions were on doing a double major in theatre + english? ik it differs wildly between universities, but im curious to hear general opinions 😭 many people are recommending me against doing it

Hi! I’m a theatre/English double major, and I had a great time :) it’s not too difficult to double major at my school (I also had a French minor) so I’m graduating in four years easily. There’s a lot of overlap in English and Theatre (they pair nicely), and I feel like doing both gave me a better understanding of the other. They’re two different artforms that are moving on a somewhat similar timeline, so it has personally been very fun for me to learn about things like why Beckett is usually considered a modernist fiction writer but a postmodern playwright. Being an English major let me go into theatre classes with a textual analysis skillset that applies in even more ways than one would expect (I’m just like, way ahead of most of my peers at script analysis which has rly had an impact on my performance, design, dramaturgical, and directing capabilities), and I bring my theatre knowledge into my English classrooms alll the time (an interaction from my 21st cent American lit class last week went: Me: I might just be an insane theatre freak— My Prof: You are definitely an insane theatre freak), and like part of my final English capstone paper spoke about how The Waves by Virginia Woolf is playing into and subverting the stageplay format. Genuinely, if you are passionate about it and double majoring at your school isn’t impossible, I really strongly recommend it. I’ve had such an insanely positive experience and it has made me both a better theatre artist and literary scholar ❤️

edit: also you being my tumblr mutual and sending this ask lets me very enthusiastically support you double majoring in theatre/English like that’s all I need to know to firmly believe you have the drive & skill & taste to do it 😌

[scotianostra]

Edinburgh Park Heads

W S Graham.

Doesn't this one have great character? Or is it just me?

William Sydney Graham, known to his friends by his middle name, was born in Greenock, on 19th November 1918. He was educated at Greenock High School, leaving in 1932 to become an apprentice draughtsman before studying structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow. In 1938 he won a years bursary to Newbattle Abbey College, which was very close to my High School in Dalkeith.. Sydney became interested in poetry, he initially looked to Joseph Macleod for mentorship around this time. He began publishing in the early 1940s, including a collection brought out by the great Glasgow printer and publisher William Mclellan, who did so much to encourage and promote contemporary Scottish literature.

According to Poetry Archive Graham was neglected in his own lifetime but his reputation as a major modernist romantic has been growing steadily since his death. The verse on his plinth is an extract from a longer poem, and as per usual I prefer another of his poems. And it is probably due to me having vivid dreams from time to time and trying to make sense of them. My dad has featured in some, and I had a difficult relationship with him, I think my two brothers will no doubt feel the same. However my dad tried to reconcile a bit during his later years, he was a great grandad to my sisters laddie, Stephen. He got on well with an ex girlfriend that I used to come up with when I lived in Somerset, she loved dancing with him at the club. Anyway the last line of the poem is what resonates most with me, or perhaps it is because he also spent some years in the South West of England, in his case it was near St Ives in Cornwell, anyway the poem is called To Alexander Graham, which I assume was his father's name.

Lying asleep walking Last night I met my father Who seemed pleased to see me. He wanted to speak. I saw His mouth saying something But the dream had no sound.

We were surrounded by Laid-up paddle steamers In The Old Quay in Greenock. I smelt the tar and the ropes.

It seemed that I was standing Beside the big iron cannon The tugs used to tie up to When I was a boy. I turned To see Dad standing just Across the causeway under That one lamp they keep on.

He recognised me immediately. I could see that. He was The handsome, same age With his good brows as when He would take me on Sundays Saying we’ll go for a walk.

Dad, what am I doing here? What is it I am doing now? Are you proud of me? Going away, I knew You wanted to tell me something.

You stopped and almost turned back To say something. My father, I try to be the best In you you give me always.

Lying asleep turning Round in the quay-lit dark It was my father standing As real as life. I smelt The quay’s tar and the ropes.

I think he wanted to speak. But the dream had no sound. I think I must have loved him.

[5chatzi]

Okay I'm going to send you some partly-solicited recs for queer literature and classics because I have a decent amount of exposure to both~~

My qualifications include a degree in English and now being halfway towards my MLIS lol this is what I was made for

For queer lit, sometimes it depends heavily on your own orientation, like bi people want to read books with bi representation, etc. But those preferences notwithstanding, here are some generally quality titles:

Zenovia July by Lisa Bunker: A trans girl solves a cyber crime. Mystery, YA, contemporary setting, trans rep

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: a gay man who lives a boring government-worker life travels to an island in order to monitor the family of magical children who live there. Fantasy, found family, adult fiction (it has some kid's book vibes but does contain mild sexual content and mild swearing), gay representation.

Ace by Angela Chen -- nonfiction, part memoir exploration of what it means to be asexual, for the author personally and for society generally.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo -- a Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco comes to terms with being a lesbian. Historical fiction, adult fiction (or might be YA?? There is what I'd call mild sexual content), lesbian representation, AAPI representation

Jeanette Winterson is a queer author whose work I generally like!(don't have specific title recs though) (I have read The Passion, and she has a couple biographies shelved in the queer library in which I volunteer. The Passion is not very explicitly queer from my memory but it is very good regardless.

For classics, here are titles that I personally Actually Enjoyed Reading and found relatively accessible:

To Kill a Mockingbird (and I also like the film-- I should have added that to my answer to your ask)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is my absolute favourite classic novel, but I won't pretend it's for everyone, or that it's especially accessible. It's written in a heavily Modernist style that involves a quite lyrical, non-linear plot. But the prose is breathtakingly gorgeous and it has a really moving anti-war message.

Also, Orlando by Woolf as well, and this one is also queer! Features a genderqueer/trans/otherwise gendernonconforming character.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is very long, but it's a mystery, and I found it engaging. The section narrated by the character Marianne is the best, and I headcanon her as asexual or possibly a lesbian.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker is what I would call poignant, and it's fairly short. Be warned that it contains some SA content, racism, and AAVE dialect that could be hard to understand.

Macbeth or Twelfth Night or King Lear are my favourite Shakespeare works to recommend. But with Shakespeare, it's better if you can see a film or live performance, since just reading the script can be difficult to follow.

Little Women!!! God, I love Little Women. Honestly not sure how that wasn't the first one I thought of.

Oh thanks so much for the thorough response!

I’ll admit most of these are wildly outside my normal genre, but I’m always willing to try new things.

I have read Macbeth in school but it’s been ages and I am pretty sure I’ve read Little Women but I can’t remember it would have been a long time ago. Oh and To Kill a Mockingbird. I think everyone has read that in school but don’t think I’ve read it since.

I’m gonna write them down and check them out and see how it goes. I pretty much exclusively read non fiction so should be interesting 😅

[lligkv]

I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a job—they all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is bad—because retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commit—"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arrière-garde—which favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and future—while he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.

In these communities—products of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's span—"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to it—the title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....

There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-lit—though likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)

Still, we're all here trying to articulate—to make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.

But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another Künstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lie—in working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"