Yup. Exactly. It seems to be a good read, if you can get past the odious protagonist... Which I couldn't. I wanted to beat that whiny little shit senseless.thebobmaster said:
Why is this a literary classic? (not really a rant)
- Thread starter thebobmaster_v1legacy
- Start date
Recommended Videos
That's actually the brilliance of A Brave New World. In 1984, the control mechanisms were obvious and brutal - one could immediately see what was wrong with such a world. But, I had read fully half of A Brave New World before I really began to understand the horror of that world.hamster mk 4 said:
On the surface, it seems to be ever teenage males fantasy. Sex and drugs are casually available and can be enjoyed without repercussion. Lives are lived in relative leisure for anybody lucky enough to be in the top two classes of society. So long as you were an alpha or a beta, all you were really expected to do was reproduce at some point and consume.
But as I kept reading, I began to realize what the problem was. It wasn't the class based system where children were intentionally brain damaged in order to create clear class distinctions. It wasn't the fact that hedonism had become the order of the day or consumerism dominated the lives of the population. The problem was nobody actually had any capacity to choose. All of the important decisions were made for them through subliminal programming, and as such even the mighty Alpha's who supposedly ran the world had no more capacity to choose than the massively brain damaged Deltas.
Sure the savages had nothing resembling a society as we know it today - at least they still retained the capacity to choose.
I'm not going to stand on a soapbox and say this makes it a good book or anything. I can recognize that Huxley didn't present a terribly clear or overtly interesting plot or characters. The book did however provide plenty of content for discussion and argument, and for that I'm grateful. That, and it has an opening line that haunts me still - "A squat grey building of but 34 stories." What the hell kind of opening line is that?
*EDIT* I just caught a snippet of conversation about Farenheit 451, and noted that someone said that strife was non-existant and this came merely at the expense of art and literature.
I think someone must have either had poor reading comprehension skills or stopped reading halfway through. The book ends in a nuclear war. I'd hardly call that free from strife. In fact, one of the key moments in the book is the fact that nuclear warheads are literally en-route and people are still just watching TV and chatting on their video walls about inspid bullshit.
You're entitled to your opinion, I'll grant you that, but for the record I feel that you are utterly wrong. I don't feel any real need to give any reason as to why I think this since there has been no real effort thus for to cite reasons why it's insipid bullshit in the first place. I'll avoid the usual rhetorical fallacies here, but I will point that 1984 IS part of the English canon, at least in the US.HT_Black said:
I also liked Farenheit and A Brave New World quite a lot - I see no reason why they can't peacefully coexist.
And you're entitled to yours; I'm not trying to incite conflict, but I can't help but feel that it's rather redundant and slow-paced when compared to the hundreds of TOTALITARINISM R BAD! stories that have been told since then. Plus, and perhaps this is because I've never been exposed to any of the 'real' stuff, it seems to border ever so slightly on softcore pornography...Eclectic Dreck said:
Honestly, alien dictatorships are more fun than big brother, and Winston is more interesting when replaced with a mute physicist.
Just thought I'd clear up that particular clusterf**k (my argument and its critics).
Thank you kind sir,
H.T. Black
I'm glad to know I'm not alone in this world.berethond said:
OT: I don't know if it's considered a literary work of art to everyone else but I had to read it for school and the whole time I asked myself in frustration "WHY??!?" and that was "The Power of One" and the fucking "Joy Luck Club." But the book that I have to read for the upcoming year is even more retarded. One of the books is about some slutty black girl who talks in the basic black dialect for the south, and me being a writter reading that stuff litterally gives me a headache.
I'm not understanding the hate for TKAM. I thought it was pretty good, if only because of Atticus. The same goes for R+J, but mostly because I was reading into it as Romeo was a stalker and Juliet was a rebellious teen, which is likely.
I've enjoyed most of my required reading. One year my summer reading was Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men, the next it was Native Son and The Catcher in the Rye, all good books in my opinion.
That said, I hated the LotR trilogy. Not the plot or the characters, mind you, just the way it was written was terrible. Tolkien would go for pages describing backstory in the middle of some important scene and forget about the plot entirely.
However, I did enjoy the movies.
I've enjoyed most of my required reading. One year my summer reading was Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men, the next it was Native Son and The Catcher in the Rye, all good books in my opinion.
That said, I hated the LotR trilogy. Not the plot or the characters, mind you, just the way it was written was terrible. Tolkien would go for pages describing backstory in the middle of some important scene and forget about the plot entirely.
However, I did enjoy the movies.
This is what I don't understand. You achieve the same end no matter who runs the dictatorship in terms of the effect on the people, so that much seems irrelevent. What's more, one kinda expects aliens to be assholes when they show up, because honestly when AREN'T they the villian.HT_Black said:
And people always try and insinuate that Gordon Freeman is an interesting character when in fact he has absoltely no interesting characteristics. Freeman has no personality of his own, and his character is only explored in the sense that we know he is unnaturally good at shooting people. I'd go so far to say, the only personality that he has is assigned purely by the player, which is likely the reason he's so effective. Since no one bothered trying to countermand one's own opinion of the man, my reactions to the events and characters around me become Gordon's reaction. Ths works quite well in a video game, but almost certainly won't work at all in any other media.
Good point, I concede. in that case, I'm more interesting than Winston. I'm not saying 1984 is bad, I've just had the same moral explained to me in ways I prefer to it, and as such, I don't think it deserves its reputation as a classic; but perhaps that may be because it's lacking that key video game element of interactivity; I prefer Half-Life 2 to 1984 for the same reason I prefer Bioshock to Atlas shrugged.-- they might not be as 'intelligent' and might not have as good a reputation, but I enjoyed them more despite that...Eclectic Dreck said:
...Someone should discuss that point somewhere...
PS: The Silmarillion.
all the classic literature i hated, i never felt like it deserved to be stripped of it's status as classic literature.
i was unaware anything tolkien wrote was ever considered to be a "classic", and the more i think about it the more incredulous it sounds. no, just no. they're not classic literature.
i was unaware anything tolkien wrote was ever considered to be a "classic", and the more i think about it the more incredulous it sounds. no, just no. they're not classic literature.
What is this bullshit even supposed to mean? Calm yourself, young grasshopper. Literature, like all other art, is subjective. Why I even have to say this, I have no idea. But please, bear that in mind the next time you post. It'll save you some trouble with the mods.OuroborosChoked said: