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deromanus:

LITERATURE MEME | 2 movements - (2) dark romanticism

Dark Romanticism, also called American Romanticism, is a subgenre of literature that arose in reaction to Transcendentalism. Dark Romanticism involves sin, self-destruction, and often supernatural forces.

G.R. Thompson describes the movement as follows:

“Fallen man’s inability fully to comprehend haunting reminders of another, supernatural realm that yet seemed not to exist, the constant perplexity of inexplicable and vastly metaphysical phenomena, a propensity for seemingly perverse or evil moral choices that had no firm or fixed measure or rule, and a sense of nameless guilt combined with a suspicion the external world was a delusive projection of the mind—these were major elements in the vision of man the Dark Romantics opposed to the mainstream of Romantic thought.”

Notable writers include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
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dearestwatson:

a passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray, before & after censorship by Wilde’s editors

from The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition.
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wodneswynn:

American literature:  Does success have meaning?

French literature:  Does love have meaning?

Russian literature:  Does suffering have meaning?

German literature:  No.
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christianvillacillo:

Re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
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katiemcgrath:

Literary classics: United States
Sources: x x x
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chandelyer:

literature posters:  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
“As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.”
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romanticdaydreams:

I saw this on my professor’s door and I can’t even deal with the accuracy.
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star-anise:

systlin:

plantanarchy:

systlin:

sassafrasjungle:

mumblingsage:

blue-author:

the-goddamazon:

I’ve never read Ayn Rand.

I hear so much flagrant shit about her books. The gist I got was she hates poor people and blames poor people for being poor or something?

But there’s gotta be more to it than that. I remember Borders having Atlas Shrugged on fucking display for a while.

So SOMEONE is buying into her bullshit.

The thing is, her books aren’t explicitly about how awful poor people is. Her books are about how awesome her self-reliant True Individual heroes are, which is part of what makes them appealing to so many people who are young and impressionable.

It’s the implications of the philosophy that is being advanced in her books (and which she articulates in her non-fiction books) that leads to the “screw poor people” stuff.

And the thing is, the books aren’t even good at showing the thing they supposedly show. They all are supposed to be teaching us great truths about human nature, but they ignore what human nature is and show what Rand thinks it should be. It’s like reading some alien’s fan fiction, written based on garbled descriptions and wild imaginings about what human life is like.

For instance, the Fountainhead’s protagonist is Howard Roark, the only architect in the world who is a True Individual who Doesn’t Follow The Crowd and Thinks For Himself.

But his individualism and supposed great creative genius consists of… making the most boring buildings imaginable and then insisting that this is the only correct way to do it and anybody who disagrees or deviates from his vision is objectively wrong.

His approach allows for no creativity, no individual expression, no decorative flourishes, nothing cultural or artistic. He looks at a site, and then comes up with the most utilitarian building possible to suit the practical needs of the project given the site. His design is presented as being the objectively (or Objectively) correct design, and anyone else’s design is judged by how much it deviates from the single correct answer.

So if 100 architects all submit different plans, they’e all sheep for not having the courage to see the one logically right answer.The more their answers vary, the more they are sheep.

And she writes the story in such a way that all the art and expression in architecture for thousands of years is a corruption that leaves people feeling hollow and empty. Think about the most soaring and inspiring religious art in architecture. The most beautiful buildings. In her story, the idea that these places inspire anything but conformity in the viewer is a lie we’ve been forced to believe, but looking at Howard Roark’s cracker box buildings makes our spirits soar.

This might just be written off as bad storytelling, but it reflects how she lived her life. Rand led a circle of “free-thinking intellectuals” where one’s free-thinkingness was measured in terms of one’s agreement with the group; i.e., with her.

Did you see that ridiculous letter to Cat Fancy going around where Rand talks about how she doesn’t feel anything about cats, she reasons that they have objective value? That’s not her being silly (on purpose) or suggesting “My dear person, you don’t understand how much I like cats.” As part of her deep-seated belief that she is an objectively rational human being, she convinced herself that all of her tastes and feelings are deeply rational conclusions. 

So in her fable about individualism and the human spirit, the architectural flourishes that she finds silly and gaudy aren’t just not to her taste, they are objectively wrong and a sign of how oppressed the human spirit has become.

She even conducted her romantic affairs in this manner. When she essentially left her husband for a younger man (though I believe they stayed marry), she explained it to him that it was the rationally correct decision to make and if he didn’t agree then his whole life as an intellectual had been a lie. When her younger beau eventually dumped her, she made a similar declaration about him.

So this is the background of Ayn Rand: a woman who is as ruled by prejudice, superstition, and emotion as anyone else on the planet, but is so invested in the idea of being rational and objective that she convinced that whatever passion moves her must be the utter expression of pure reason.

And this woman has—as so many do—a deep suspicion of the idea that other people are getting something for nothing, and this suspicion leads to resentment. More understandably, she has a suspicion of anything that smacks of communism or government-backed redistribution from being a firsthand witness to the excesses of the USSR.

But rather than thinking about her feelings and where they come from, or examining her conclusions, she simply concludes that everything she feels is itself pure reason, and then articulates a philosophy around it.

And this gives us Atlas Shrugged, which is again about the triumph of the individual, but again in a very twisted way.

She takes the idea that all human beings are entitled to the fruits of their labor and posits that the only human beings who really labor are the people at the top of the capitalism food chain.

Reading the story, it’s apparent that she sees the world as a kind of steampunk AU where people who singlehandedly create unique and unreproducible technological breakthroughs are the drivers of the economy, not people who work and buy things, not venture capitalists and people who have inherited gobs of money and power.

True Individuals in Atlas Shrugged are people who are clever and brave and selfish (which is considered a virtue in her writing) enough that they should be rich and ruling the world, and the fact that they don’t is another sign of how corrupt the world is. This is why it resonates with so many people (and the particular people it does) so deeply: it tells them that they should be in charge, they should be rich, they should have everything, and the fact that they don’t is because of Moochers, Looters, and Takers (everyone else.)

Selfishness is a virtue, altruism is a sin, and anything done for the benefit of society rather than oneself is “looting” and the reason that the well-deserving supermen of the world are left with nothing to show for their awesomeness.

The title “Atlas Shrugged” refers to the idea that the titan Atlas who holds up the sky (or in many popular depictions, the world) suffers and toils silently for the benefit of the whole world with no reward might one day have enough of it and put his burden down, see how the world gets along without him.

Which sounds like a rallying cry for labor, right? But this, again, in Rand’s mind and in her bizarre AU fantasy that she calls a philosophical thesis statement, this description does not apply to the mass of human laborers whose work forms the backbone of our life. Those people are takers. Whatever they get is by definition more than they deserve.

John Galt, the “hero” of Atlas Shrugged, is a randpunk inventor who organizes a “strike” of all the other True Individuals, and the wheels of society grind to a halt without their benevolent greed. This is why Tea Partiers and the like talk about “going Galt” or wave signs around that say “Who is John Galt?” (which is Tea Partier for wearing a Guy Fawkes mask). The irony of ironies is that most of these people are working class, which means that they would not be seen as Atlas in her work but as Atlas’s burden.

But as long as they prefer to see themselves as the Bold Individuals Who Would Dare (if not for that darned government and immigrants and homosexuals and communists and witches), they’ll never realize that.

Sorry to the less-interested among my dash for reblogging such a long post, but Rand’s psychology (it’s…not really a philosophy, and my philosophy prof is the only other person I’ve ever seen pick apart her premises & reasoning so thoroughly) rarely gets examined in-depth, and I find it fascinating when it is…also, “randpunk” as a genre name. I kinda wish it existed. So we all knew what to avoid, but still. 

(I am reminded of this xkcd comic)

This is the greatest drag of Ayn Rand I’ve ever seen BLESS

This is a pretty decent criticism of Rand actually, a better one than my one philosophy professor gave. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to still read the books tbh just because they’re currently politically relevant. Though frankly actual Objectivists who have read the books and understand them are a veryyyy very small number so maybe don’t bother reading them idk I see some people going “oh, so this philosophy is why so many working class Republicans voted for Trump” but that is wildly overestimating how many people uhhhhh read books.

True. Mom had us read them because of this.

When I was looking for college scholarships, there was a $1000 prize listed in every directory for the best essay on The Fountainhead, so Rand fans are finding some good tricks to get kids to read her books.
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 My most recent favorite bit of advice in relationship to writing style has to be the concept behind Jimmy Chen’s narrative analysis. Chen says all writing comes from three possible categories: the head, the mouth, and the heart. 

Chen sorted well known authors into the above venn diagram by the primary style of their writing. Each style has its own charms and failings. Chen’s explanation is pretty concise: 

I think of all writing being from the head (pros: cerebral, conceptual; cons: didactic, dry), the mouth (pros: language, poetics; cons: empty banter, pure form), and the heart (pros: empathic, intimate; cons: sentimental, emotional)

Ultimately, you need to first identify where your style falls in the trifecta. Develop that style, and then push your boundaries. Find, if you can, a comfortable meeting between two or all sections. 
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Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans:

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

collapsedsquid:

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

I can’t read this right now but I’m Reblogging it to read it later because this is so up my alley you don’t even know and god, I hope they bring up the eroding ability to recognize reality and if they don’t BOY do I have some fun shit to talk about.

Mmmmmmmmm that’s the good shit.

I was going to write my thesis on the unique symbolism present in the writing of Philip K. Dick. In his best works he takes symbols that have standard meaning - bowls, cups, animals, deserts, giant faces staring from the sky - and subtly twists them, which gives his writing an aura of unreality and a feeling of confusion that makes a real impact on the reader.

Not only is he writing about his characters having trouble identifying or understanding reality, he was making it difficult for his readers to do the same. Was he having fun running madcap through his stories and fictionalizing himself or was he writing himself as he believed himself to be when he introduced us to Horselover Fat (a self-insert character)?

The visions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are modeled on a vision Dick had that compelled him to write the book.

I have a more difficult time reading Dick than I do other authors. I can throw down twenty Steven King tomes in a row, work through the entire published works of Gibson in a month, spend uncomfortable weeks with Octavia Butler’s nightmares. But my limit for reading Dick is two. I can get two books deep before I start to feel queasy when looking at the sunlight. Read enough Dick and you start feeling like someone has moved everything in your house one inch to the east. Something isn’t right but you can’t find out what and you can’t see what but you know it’s off and tell yourself to ignore that feeling because you’re just being crazy and paranoid. And yet you’re still sure something is wrong.

His use of language and symbolism to accomplish this is stunningly brilliant, and something I don’t think I’ve ever seen get the recognition that it deserves.

But it’s more than that and it’s worse than that.

Dick knew people. He knew their meanness and their smallness and their quiet little internal fears that could blow up into yawning maws devouring everything that opposed them. And he wrote about it.

And that’s terrifying.

We’ve been watching the viral growth of these kinds of petty fears and we’re stuck on shifting sand, trying to figure out if there’s a safe place to step next. We keep making jokes about “the bad timeline” and “what is this year” and we’re getting confused. Our heads are filled with cotton, we don’t know what to do next that won’t set off a worse explosion somewhere down the line.

I walked past a Chipotle the other day. There was a window cling on the front door that said “No Fake News! Queso at Chipotle!” and I had to sit down for a second.

A massive corporation that recently started a food borne illness outbreak because its minimum wage employees can’t afford to take a sick day is using a slogan that the president of the united states says when attempting to undermine the free press to sell melty cheese to millennials. This is so banal that you don’t want to do the “this isn’t normal” thing about a tiny window cling at a burrito restaurant but holy shit.

Is this even real? What? What?! Is the shitty president’s anti-news slogan REALLY something that got past a review board and made people want to buy bland food? How did we get here? What is this?

Did a guy whose primary fanbase is children get in a minuscule amount of trouble for profiting off a suicide victim last week? Did that guy’s brother try to take some of the heat off him by posting a clickbait video about losing his virginity for children to watch?

Did the president actually talk about nukes as dicks and claim his was better? DID HAWAII JUST GET A NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNING? Yeah, but that’s okay, it was fake (I mean it was real but it was a mistake). But the president’s dicknuke thing, yeah, that happened.

The website that harvests everyone’s data also promotes misinformation. The website where people are beset by verified neonazis is at least 10% robots. The website where everyone buys their groceries and sex toys and furniture and clothing is owned by a guy spending large parts of his fortune (made by underpaid employees and barely skirting antitrust laws) on immortality research.

What?

What?

A New Hampshire State Rep was responsible for r/redpill, a forum full of advice on avoiding rape charges and suggestions for gaslighting your girlfriend.

What?

People are voluntarily purchasing always-on devices for their homes and police are trying to make sure they always have the right to subpoena those recordings.

What?

Every computer made in the last ten years is potentially at risk of attack because it seems like we just may not really understand computers. (I 100% wholeheartedly, as a person who works with computers, believe we don’t understand computers.)

What?

Is this even real? How?

What?

Anyway, for the love of god, please hold onto the rocks underneath the shifting sand. Value history, value science, value truth and the seeking of truth. Our world has shifted one inch in the wrong direction. Everything is the same as it ever was, just in a wronger way, and we’ve got to hold on to the fact that things don’t HAVE to be this way, that we’re not being paranoid, that something is deeply wrong and it’s time to look for a way to set it right.

Anyway long story short I love PKD and this article is spot on, thanks for sharing.
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“Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul–it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to an “I don’t know,” and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know–the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar.”

- Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood (via reygf)
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“How does one hate a country, or love one? I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love for one’s country; is it hate for one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession… Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.” -
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness”

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“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?” “From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.” “You don’t want her to be happy and good?” “I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”

- Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (via moral-disorder)
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ENDLESS LIST OF MY FAVORITE CREATIVE WORKS: THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined. Won’t nothing help you then.
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hermicnes:

Literature:   Edgar Allan Poe + favourite works and quotes (insp.)
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robbieross:

the picture of dorian gray // oscar wilde
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casull:

“Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.”

—Page 50. House of Leaves By Mark Z. Danielewski
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ENDLESS LIST OF MY FAVORITE CREATIVE WORKS: THE SECRET HISTORY

It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?
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“Fighting was to John Keats like eating or drinking. He sought out aggressive boys, cruel boys, but their company, as he was already inclined to poetry, must have provided some comic and burlesque treats. For mere brutality — without humor, make-believe, or whimsy — didn’t interest him. Which might lead a person to extrapolate that boys aren’t truly brutal. Yes, they are, but they have rules and an aesthetic. Keats was a child of action. He’d punched a yard monitor more than twice his size, and he was considered a strong boy, lively and argumentative. When he was brawling, his friend Clarke reports, Keats resembled Edmund Kean at theatrical heights of exasperation. His friends predicted a brilliant future for him in the military. Yet when his temper defused, he’d grow extremely calm, and his sweetness shone — with the same intensity as his rage had. The scent of angels. His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous laughter. Moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes.”
- Fleur Jaeggy, These Possible Lives (via atreides)
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