How 4chan became the home of the elite reader - New Statesman

The members of /lit/, 4chan's literary subforum, love Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Nabokov. They abhor the gatekeepers of traditional publishing and the moral pieties that beset academia in the 2010s. They've created their own recommendation ecosystem in the form of homemade charts, huge Jpegs which serve as visual reading guides. "Start with the Greeks," the most famous one says, leading beginners through an annotated flowchart from modern mythological retellings to Homer and then, eventually, Aristotle. This advice is dished out to wannabe autodidacts on /lit/ so often that it has become a meme. ("I will not start with the Greeks," says a gun-toting civilian in one image, as soldiers surround his house and order him to read Plato.)

!bookworms !sophistry