What do I have to read (or pretend to have read) in order to come off as a true highbrow patrician reader.I’m not talking about impressing the normies, but rather gaining recognition within truly well-read circles. I am talking about the kind of authors and works whose mere mention commands respect.Material with which I signal that I belong to the literary elite and set myself apart from the plebeian masses.>inb4 le pseud and deceiverI know. That's the whole point.
>>25533435Depends what crowd you are going for. If you wanna impress modern faggots then read a bunch of anti-racist feminist intersectional slop that empowers marginal voices.If you are a man and actually want to read impressive literature, then all you need is Homer and Flashman.
Any pre-WWII long novel nobody here has read
>>25533435Just read P&P and Great Gatsby a lot.
Just read the New Yorker?
>>25533435I'm sorry but you're not going to be able to fake your way without at least a little erudition. Should at least learn one foreign language (which is surprisingly easy). FYI learning one language other than your native is not considered erudite, it's fairly within normie territory. A knowledge of at least three or four languages is within high brow territory. Reading every opinion to ever fall from the pen of Ezra Pound is just about the quickest way to fake erudition, considering how much ground he covered. If you understand 50% of The Cantos you can fake your way through any intellectual conversation.
>>25533440>>25533435>f you wanna impress modern faggotsObviously not talking about those people. They are cattle.I am talking about people who have dedicated their lives to literature. I hesitate to cite a specific example because, nowadays, even literature professors quite often fall into the category you mentioned first. Let’s just say the group I am meant to impress consists of a select few who have grasped literature with an objective depth far surpassing that of the average Harvard or Oxford lit prof.>f you are a man and actually want to read impressive literatureI don't. First and foremost, I want to impress. Not on a superficial level, though.>>25533450These suggestions are actually leaning heavy towards the kind of midwitcore I'm trying to avoid.
>>25533457Thanks for the honest answer. I'm somwhat well read and speak German and English fluently. Also some French and very little Russian and Polish. So I guess I don't have to pretend all the way if that makes sense.However, I would like to emphasize that my explicit aim here is not to find literature that I enjoy, or that moves or inspires me, but merely to use it as a cultural instrument in order to ascend into higher (or rather deeper) social spheres (ontologically speaking, not economically).Nothing more, but nothing less.
>>25533435Cultural refinement is degenerate. Being stuck to the past is degenerate. Wanting to be a patrician is degenerate. Seeking money is degenerate.
>>25533474You can spare yourself the moral judgment. It doesn't affect me. If you think what I’m asking for is degenerate, then so be it.
>>25533435https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/plus167598967/Stefan-George-Das-geheime-Deutschland-gibt-es-noch.htmlAre you a schöner jüngling? Sounds like you wanna get groomed by pederasts hehe
>>25533476Ok retard. Stay in the past.Keep seeking fulfilment from artificial ideals that no longer exist.Be like literally everyone else.Be the exact reason why modernity sucks.
>>25533484>Are you a schöner jüngling?Yes.>>25533484>Sounds like you wanna get groomed by pederasts hehe.Presenting pederasty as something bad just shows your mind is operating on a modern framework. George was unfathomably based.Coercing heterosexual schöne jünglinge to let them fuck you just by reading poems takes some significant talent.
>>25533486Whatever.
>>25533496George was an ascetic and never had sex, let alone something as revolting as gay sex. You should know that if you want to be erudite. The libido was more important than the consummation.
>>25533500Sure thing, pal.
>>25533435I roam in well-read circles, and I can tell you that you will never impress them. That is not how these people work. In genuinely cultivated circles, acquaintance with the Western canon is simply assumed. It is part education, part inheritance, part accumulated leisure. The object is less to impress than to avoid revealing yourself as a pleb. Non-exhaustively:If you do not know Suetonius, Horace, Quintilian, Plautus, Seneca, Archilochus, Pindar, Sappho, the tragedians, Lucan, Polybius, Tacitus, Plutarch, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Longinus, you already smell slightly of the common room rather than the library. More importantly, know actual works: the Odes, Satires, and Epistles; Pharsalia; Annals; Parallel Lives; The Peloponnesian War; On the Sublime; Aeschylus’ Oresteia; Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Theban Trilogy; Euripides’ Bacchae, and Hippolytus.Whatever comes afterwards should reflect actual intellectual curiosity. Assuming you are an Angloid, serious French and German reading helps. Read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes, and Gottfried von Strassburg. Then Hölderlin’s Hyperion and late hymns, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea, Büchner’s Lenz, Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, Trakl’s poems, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and Broch’s The Death of Virgil.In French: Racine’s Atalie, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Huysmans, Proust, Valéry, and Julien Gracq. Knowing Les Chants de Maldoror earns more credit than saying you have read Camus.Italian literature cannot stop at Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Leopardi’s Canti and Zibaldone, Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Pirandello, Gadda, Lampedusa, Calvino, and Manganelli.Then range sideways. Read The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Mahabharata, al-Maʿarri, Rūmī, and Ibn ʿArabi. Russian literature should extend to Leskov, Bely, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Platonov, and Grossman.For the twentieth century: Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, Bernhard’s Correction, Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Hugo Claus, Harry Mulisch. For living or near-contemporary conversation, know DeLillo, Hollinghurst, Krasznahorkai, Cartarescu, Tokarczuk, Fosse, Murnane, Szalay, Aramburu, and Obreht.But the real giveaway is whether you can say why Phèdre is formally terrifying, why Leopardi is philosophically more dangerous than Schopenhauer, how Hölderlin Germanised Pindar, etc. You also need to show you know something niche, like the history of the equitable lien
>>25533515>Kleist’s Michael KohlhaasNta but I've read that in school and it fucking sucked.
I just read what harold bloom tells me to read.
>>25533515Genuinely good recs and advice. Thanks, fren.
>>25533515This post kinda leads me into thinking that the right way is to purposefully stick with Coleen Hoover and Stephenie Meyer. If you can’t win - oppose!
>>25533515This guy knows his shit. I would be very interested to know the favorite works of someone so well-read. I am also curious about the following: would you say your literary expertise has enhanced your reading pleasure overall, or has it been detrimental?
>>25533524He's literally describing a summer of erudite bookishness lazily flipping through paperbacks on a Sorrentian beach or two frozen winter months holed up in a cozy fire-lit room in Gstaad.If that is enough to make you want to throw in the towel you have no business trying to be an intellectual. Stick to pickleball and wine-tastings with the rest of the hoi polloi.
>>25533467What could you mean by ontologically?
>>25533457I know three languages, it doesn't really give you respect unless it's 4. I speak spanish, french and english. In Europe a third language is normal, (in Spain most trilinguals have a "villager" language to be fair).
I just realized people that beg for recommendations constantly aren't actually reading, but seeking ways to superficially emulate crowds and subvert them internally.
>>25533532I don't care for social status for it's own sake or for profit but I genuinely want to be respected by the kind of person I aspire to be seen as.
>>25533545We all do. Literature is merely a cultural Überformung of the sexual drive.
>>25533547Probably don't want to misuse a frankly technical word by dropping it too casually then
>>25533435Obscure nobel prize winners
>>25533554Please go on and explain how I used it in the wrong context if that's what you're implying.
>>25533558For free?
>>25533559Clown.
>>25533553>We all doNo, I behave transparently and authentically, and that makes people angry, which now doesn't seem very surprising.
>>25533515>Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombeI think that's enough French works to get you the highest levels of literary street cred there is
>>25533515In translation or original language?
>>25533529I had to google what pickle ball is
>>25533529>the hoipseud
