#western canon

[blackswaneuroparedux]

One cannot expect every attempt at poetry to rival Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. But those poets, and their peers, set the measure: any who aspire to poetry must keep such exemplars always in mind.

Harold Bloom

#bloom #harold bloom #quote #literature #literary criticism #english literature #femme #books #reading #poets #canon #western canon

[eirikswood]

Brown Boy Beautiful and the Polychrome Antiquities

"Athens was never white but her statues, bereft of color, have conditioned the artistic sensibilities of Europe… the whole past has reached us colorless." (André Malraux). All of the marble sculptures, bronze statues, and ornamental architecture of ancient Greece and Rome were originally painted with many vibrant colors and elaborate patterns. Blank, unadorned sculptures became the norm of the western canon during the Renaissance, when the church sought to redefine its realm and its peoples under a single subcontinental identity built on shared classical foundations. This myth of paleness as divinity, purity, beauty, and authority is so pervasive that most of us absorb its message unknowingly as children and some of us never unlearn it (see Clark doll test, 1940 - present)

#greco roman #greco buddhist #classics #gay art #queer art #male gayze #oil on wood #western canon #art history

[alchemisoul]

"The fool is the breakthrough of the absolute into the field of controlled social orders."

- Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms

#george rr martin #asoiaf #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire #a song of ice and feels #patchface #jester #the fool #tarot #the tarot #sacred clown #literature #western canon #storytelling #game of memes #dank ass memes #dank memes #the night king #littlefinger #varys #tywin lannister #wise fool #joseph campbell #mythology #myths #symbolism

[grandhotelabyss]

Despite my carefully cultivated reputation for contrarianism, my answer to the first question is “not really.” When it comes to the canon, I’m pretty much a normie; the test of time is a real test. Back in 2017, all the literary bloggers were listing the books in their “personal canons.” I participated too, but introduced my take on the exercise by saying that I would only list formative works of nonfiction, particularly philosophy and literary/political theory, since my actual favorite books were so boring. I wrote, “Greatest writer of the modern west? Shakespeare. Greatest English novel? Middlemarch. Greatest twentieth-century novel? Ulysses. My favorite lyric poem, I tell you no lie, is the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’” Then I quoted Emerson (my favorite American essayist, by the way) from “Experience”:

[I]n popular experience, everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe, for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing of nature’s pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare: but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest books—the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton.

So I have no quarrel with the books you’ve listed. (Caveats: I unfortunately must plead ignorance on the classical Chinese and Japanese novels; also, I never went beyond Swann’s Way in Proust.) Some of the names you mention are if anything underrated or not rated in their proper dimension: do people understand how transcendently good Wuthering Heights and Villette really are, not just as the stormy romances the Brontës are known for, as if they wrote nothing better than the precursors to Rebecca, but as genuine spiritual and social testaments, the prose successors to Milton, Blake, and Shelley, Melville’s trans-Atlantic sisters, as well as ingenious formal inventions to rival Austen or Flaubert? (As for “the other guy” though, I started but did not finish The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The talent, it seems to me, ran in the blood only so much.)

If we must have controversy, since you mentioned Madame Bovary, I am ambivalent about Flaubert and his influence, though I should probably revisit him soon. (I read Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, and Three Tales in my 20s, in translation, albeit with not-incompetent though not-fluent glances into the French.) All that fussing over the sentence, all that inorganic technique—see GD Dess’s recent essay against “craftism,” as well as James Wood’s “Half Against Flaubert” (in The Broken Estate) and Borges’s neglected “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” (in Selected Nonfictions) which I quoted here almost a decade ago—to my mind creates an immobilized prose, paragraphs through which no breeze blows, even in post-Flaubert writers as talented as James, Conrad, and Nabokov, and even the Joyce of Dubliners. But Joyce, exceptional in this as in so many things, then transcended the limitation of this aesthetic by making perfected prose move as poetry moves—with a word-by-word drama that opens up the sentence—rather than as prose does in Portrait and Ulysses.

Must we rank? Should we rank? Ranking is inevitable, despite your apt objection to its listicle extremes. Why would we not want to know what the best is? If resources of time and material are scarce—only so many weeks in the semester, only so many pages in the anthology, only so many days in your life—then it’s a practical matter to know what comes first. We just have to be careful not to be small-minded about it. I think of Orwell’s judicious comparison of Tolstoy and Dickens as a model of how to think carefully in these matters, attentive to difference as well as to quality. (This can be extrapolated mutatis mutandis into areas where social biases like race, nation, class, and gender may enter, as nation and class do enter into a comparison between Dickens and Tolstoy.)

Does this mean that Tolstoy’s novels are ‘better’ than Dickens’s? The truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in terms of ‘better’ and ‘worse’. If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that Tolstoy’s appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier, Dickens can be portrayed on a cigarette card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes barely intersect.

My candidate for “best novel”? It probably has to be Ulysses since in its cyclopedic ambit it manages to contain all the others. But I acknowledge a spiritual dimension to experience that Ulysses is finally too secular, too satirical, to encompass, and this is found in Tolstoy and especially Dostoevsky.

#literature #literary criticism #literary theory #novels #fiction #western canon #james joyce #fyodor dostoevsky #leo tolstoy #charlotte bronte #emily bronte #gustave flaubert

[mylittleredgirl]

even if you're not a supernatural fan, if you've been on tumblr long enough you are, like, culturally. like cultural christianity in america except it's the cw's supernatural. you may never have watched an episode or set foot inside the tag but your regular life shuts down on their holidays and all of your world news is delivered through that point of view. something to think about

#while i'm making equivalences we could look at the comparable impacts of the bible on the western literary canon and supernatural on ao3 #edited to add: y'all i have never seen supernatural either that's the post #yes my brain has been rotted by this fandom but the call is coming from outside the house #that tumblr lyfe #containment breach #spn

[thepoetrycrow]

If we each gathered our height in chain and strung to it our faults, how much lighter could we make it before the year is done? Or before we have to drag it to Death and make that chain our tails?

Reading: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

#my thoughts #charles dickens #a christmas carol #ebenezer scrooge #jacob marley #western canon #literary classics #classic literature

[dwgill-quotes]

A few weeks ago, Kenyatta and I had dinner with another couple. They are old friends of ours, and like us, children of black consciousness. Kenyatta and the couple were talking about the beauty and wonder of Paris (I’ve never been.) They were contrasting that with all of the race critiques we came up on, some of which we still hold. And some point one of us said something to effect of, "You know you really gotta give it up. These white folks got done did something." When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote—"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs"—really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a "native" tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s "own." If you reject the very premise of racism—the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth—then all of humanity becomes "native" to you. And so empowered, I could—out of my own individual identity—create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Federalist Papers"

#quote #racism #literature #lit #ta nehisi coates #literary canon #western canon

[svsss-fanon-exposed]

Exposing SVSSS Fanon: 25/∞

VIOLENCE AS COURTSHIP IS A PART OF DEMON CULTURE

Rating: CANON

A nearly universal trope, especially in Moshang fics, is the fact that courtship is performed through violence in demon culture, and that the misunderstandings between the pair are because of cultural differences. The fact that demons mistreat the targets of their affection is canon, however, it is important for fans to note that this sort of characterization and worldbuilding is rooted in racial and ethnic stereotypes.

This is one of the most-requested topics I've ever written on this blog, and I took a long time to think about how best to approach the subject in a way that both keeps to the intention of this blog (referencing canon & providing quotes) as well as raising awareness to the very real problematic aspects of what is a well-loved and often-used trope in fanon that I don't think most western fans are aware of.

First, the canon analysis:

“If you hold unique feelings for a certain person, how can you make them understand your intentions?” Luo Binghe asked. Obviously, no one dared to tear down Luo Binghe’s facade and expose him directly, but this question was really very…unsuited to the demonic approach. After a long moment, not a single person had answered. In fact, the answer was so simple that any normal human could have given it to you. If you liked someone, you should just tell them. Unfortunately, there was not a single “normal” person on the scene—and aside from Shang Qinghua, there also were no “humans” either. Mobei-Jun thought about it. With the paths his mind was given to take, there was no telling how he had interpreted “unique” feelings. “Beat them up three times a day?” (7 Seas, Ch. 26)

Most of the fandom remembers this passage, and some may think that this is where the interpretation of violence as courtship comes from-- however, that is not the case. This passage might actually not refer to courtship at all-- while that is one possible interpretation, Mobei-jun could also be interpreting "unique feelings" to mean something different than "romantic feelings," since Luo Binghe didn't specify romance directly.

The "violent demonic courtship" idea actually originates much earlier in the novel, just after the invasion of Qiong Ding Peak:

In truth, Shen Qingqiu didn’t intend to tease; he thought himself very straightforward. The one who’d tampered with Luo Binghe’s dream realm was Sha Hualing. Though she did have some harmful intentions, her underlying motive was obvious. Naturally, she was driven by a young girl’s secret yearning for love. Otherwise, she would have directed her aggressions toward others, not specifically Luo Binghe. Demons were compelled to viciously bully the person they liked. Only if the object of their affections failed to die would the demon accept them. If their target died, that meant they were useless and not worth nursing any lingering affections for. (7 Seas, Ch. 3)

This, in fact, has somewhat more serious connotations than the way I have often seen it interpreted in fanworks-- it is not merely beating up a potential partner, but pushing them to their limits, nearly driving them to death, and it is certainly implied that it is not uncommon for the object of a demon's affections to actually die.

Now that the canonical basis of the idea has been established, let us move on to the second, and arguably more important part of this post: the racism.

I would like to add a disclaimer here-- I am going to discuss this in hopes of raising more awareness in the fandom, but I am not North/West/Central Asian myself, so I will only mention things in brief and somewhat generally-- if anyone who belongs to the affected cultures would like to make corrections, or more detailed explanations, or any other additions to this post on this topic, I greatly welcome that, as I feel it is an important issue that should be addressed.

In Chinese fiction, particularly fantasy genres like xianxia/xuanhuan/xiuzhen, but also in historical and wuxia fiction, there is a pervasive, prevalent tendency for authors to use racial and ethnic stereotypes against Central, Northern, and Western Asian cultures such as Mongolian & Arab cultures in their worldbuilding regarding the North, while stereotypes against Southeast Asian cultures are used in worldbuilding regarding the South. These stereotypes are most typically applied to villains and villainous groups, and are so widespread as to be ubiquitous within the genre. MXTX has used these tropes before-- notably with the Banyue people in TGCF, with adaptations of both TGCF and MDZS including design stereotypes, such as CQL's portrayal of the Qinghe Nie (combining their tendency toward violence and 'unnatural' cultivation method, with design traits typically associated with Northern/Central Asian cultures).

It is worth noting, though, that most authors do not intentionally use these traits as racist stereotypes in their worldbuilding, especially when regarding a non-human species-- in the same way that western fantasy authors use goblin and orc characters and tropes without realizing or acknowledging their racist origins and connotiations, these stereotypes have simply become genre tropes without that direct connection to their origins. Nonetheless, it is still worth noting-- and worth trying not to fall into the trap of leaning into stereotypical traits in fanworks' character portrayals.

Stereotypes include but are not limited to barbaric and brutish cultural traits, association with animals/having animal features, dark or corrupt magical/spiritual practices, certain types of braided hairstyles & other fashion choices, and originating from the far north or south.

Some of the prejudice and stereotyping of Northern Asian cultures likely originates from the fact that in the past, China was invaded and subjugated by peoples from the north (under Mongolian rule during the Yuan dynasty, and under Manchurian rule during the Qing dynasty) as well as having many conflicts with these peoples throughout history. In fact, the Qing dynasty only ended in the early 1900s, so some of this oppression is still in recent memory-- nonetheless, people belonging to ethnic minorities in China are still affected by this negative stereotyping today, so regardless of the origin, racism is still racism and should be addressed, and China today is a majority Han Chinese nation-- even if Han Chinese are considered a minority and affected by systemic racism in other places in the world.

Additionally, many tropes specifically applied to the southern demons, but also used for demon culture as a whole, are tied to stereotypical portrayals of Southeast Asian culture, which is rooted in a long history of Imperial China's invasion and oppression.

All of those stereotypes listed above apply to SVSSS' demon culture. Even in Mobei-jun's name-- 漠北 meaning "northern desert," which is the real-world name for a region in the north of the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

Therefore, it is important to remember that though violence-as-courtship in demon culture is canonical within SVSSS' setting, it nonetheless originates from harmful racial and ethnic stereotypes. It would be a good idea for fans to keep this in mind when creating their fanworks, and to treat the topic with sensitivity-- but I will leave any direct suggestions on how to handle this to those who are actually part of the affected groups.

--

(thanks to @flidgetjerome for additional notes regarding SEAsian stereotyping and author intent!)

#svsss #fanon exposed #svsss demon culture #mobei jun #canon #I don't know if I did a good job addressing the sensitive topics here so please feel free to correct anything I got wrong #or if I've overstepped anywhere #i just want to use the platform i have to bring this to the western fandom's attention since i don't think it's widely known #i will very gladly reblog any additions from fans who wish to weigh in but definitely don't feel pressured to do so

[scp035sdiscordkitten]

IM ALIVE !! I LIVE !!! sorry for the long ass absent, Ive been fixated on something and havent been able to draw my discord mod 035 and I couldn't force myself to draw him even though I felt like I needed to so I can post. But after all that, I finally have art of my baby momma 035 to feed you all :pray: Im not sure how often I'll be posting, but I'll do my best eat up western SCP-049, SCP-035, and my oc art :blush: not sure what demons possessed me to make me want to draw cowboy 049 and 035 but uhm its real now

#scp #scp 035 #scp shitposting #scp fandom #scp art #scp fanart #scp 049 #scp foundation #western #cowboy 035 #whys he a cowboy? #who knows #oc x canon

[phoenixmetaphor]

serennedy week 2024 valentine’s edition - day 6 - cowboy au

even more cowboy au comicsssss woooooo!

phoenix, did you draw a whole ass cowboy au and not draw a single cowboy hat? yes. yes i did. it’s not my fault the ganados took leon’s hat, ok?

the vague idea is that leon is under the impression that luis is a snake oil salesman. which isn’t an entirely wrong impression to have, but luis’s reasons, as ever, are a little more complicated. you get into debt with some bad people and they ask you to spread some weird tonics around and then bad things happen and you run away and start a new life somewhere, okay? and then maybe somewhere ends up under the influence of a cult! time is a circle. it’s fine. it’s whatever.

anyway sorry if things start looking like i exported them as low quality .jpegs, we are experimenting with anti-ai glazing.

details below

#my fanart #serennedyweek2024 #serennedy week 2024 #leon kennedy #luis serra #serennedy #infected leon #cowboy au #fan comic #resident evil #re4 remake #luis’s jacket is embroidered and not embossed which is why it looks Like That #if i had done color it would have been in super bright and obnoxious colors #alas i am already late as it is #what do i have against drawing luis’s jacket normal? everything apparently #yes i know i this a jumble of canon events #it’s an au okay i am allowed #anyway if you notice any continuity errors #no you didn’t #it’s high noon because it’s a western au and it’s permanently high noon #even in spain #you can tell it is a comic made by me by the comically huge close up shot of the eye #anyway i am going to pass out for 12 hours see you guys later!

[pasta-pardner]

spotify | john marston's revenge quest, set to music from 1960s spaghetti westerns.

Fun detail: the opening cutscene for Red Dead Revolver (2004) features an instrumental version of "His Name Is King". The lyrical version is oddly fitting for John, given that it's a song about seeking vengeance for a dead brother.

#red dead #rdr2 #john marston #arthur morgan #pardner playlists #pardner posts #tagging arthur in this bc even tho its a john-centric playlist.. its about the way john grieves arthur #y'all know me !!! im always a sucker for a revenge story!!! #so i cant help but dwell on johns attitude of ~i will throw away my chance at a future because i'm stuck in the past grieving you~ #like thats a banger. thats a good revenge story. the ultimate act of devotion is also an ultimate act of betrayal. #this is admittedly a kind of pulpy playlist and im embracing that. im a fan of 'horse opera' westerns and im attaching that to epilogue joh #anyways. all the songs on this playlist were released btwn 1966 - 1971 so its definitely a vintage vibe. #i tried to match that vintage energy with the graphic design. the cover art is screenshots of rdr2 that i've /heavily/ edited in photoshop #i wanted the images to look like those oil and/or acrylic paintings done for old movie posters #it took a lot of filter adjustments and paint-overs to get to this stage. i spent a lot of time on it. (please clap) #i initially wanted john to be wearing arthur's hat for this but . hdkhjdf ran into some difficulties sourcing usable screenshots. #i refuse to accept unmodded epilogue john as canon. i dont know what you think that thing is but that is not my son etc etc. #its jmrp or bust for me #most of the jmrp screengrabs i could turn into a workable composition featured the john hat so i just went with that. unfortunate but mehh #sidenote. plz click for quality bc a lot of the paint texturing in these covers gets lost in the compression #alight yall. have fun with the playlist !! lmk if u end up giving it a listen. #rdr2 spoilers #🤠 #art

[comradekatara]

wait. if haru is katara’s suki (her ek counterpart who is in a similar position, complements and tempers her personality, they first meet in book 1 but don’t have the time to start a real relationship, but then reunite during the western air temple arc and properly get together) does that make…. jet katara’s yue (her “first love” who died in her arms). yue sweetie i am so sorry………

#haruxkatara #jetxkatara #katara #haru #jet #yue #suki #sokkaxyue #sokkaxsuki #way too many tags…. oy vey #i guess technically aang is katara’s yue #since he also dies in her arms and like yue is part spirit #but like. jet ACTUALLY dies and she can’t save him #that parallelism is actually so evident #yue sweetie im so sorry AND katara i am so sorry #also yes i do simply believe that she and haru hooked up the western air temple #it’s canon to me because toph said so and toph is always correct

[alchemisoul]

"True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them of a false epic quality."

- Ernest Hemmingway

#so now you know who gets mystified

#ernest hemingway #writer #writing #author #western canon #mysticism #mystics #aldous huxley #satirist #satire #philosophy #quote #quotes #soundgarden #chris cornell

[godsfavoritelitlesilly]

He's got the prettiest baby blues in the Wild West.

#call of duty black ops cold war #cod cold war #russell adler #adler #adler cod #cod fanart #cod black ops cold war #cowboy #cowboy adler #cowboy au #western au #ik he has a canon skin #but i do what i want

[sassaffrassa]

commission for @out-there-on-the-maroon aka aunt_zelda, of a scene from a Western AU they're working on, which you KNOW i am hyped about🤠

i had far too much fun working on this one, ngl, people should commission me to make more comics, i love themmmmm

#the witcher #iorveth #vernon roche #western au #spaghetti witchers #comic #commission #my art #i maked this #cw noose #cw hanging #canon typical violence #the witcher 2

[newfrontierbackstage]

Howdy partners! Today I bring you something special for Valentine's Day: Some great fanart! This one was done by https://twitter.com/marcokunt so give them props for their incredible work!

#milo murphy's law #au #space western #balthazar cavendish #fanfic #space cowboys #vinnie dakota #mml #A New Frontier #New Frontier #Dakavendish #Non Canon #Fanart #valentines day