/lit/ - Literature

America is little baby, give it time to mature.

>>10376002
am*ricans are God's mistake

>60 hour work weeks
>A culture that pushs yanks to believe they can attain self actualization through work alone
>Only religion is profit/productivity, no spirituality
>Intellectually insecure, massively egotistical, general poor quality education
>General cowardice
>Identities being for sale makes them think just being born a certain way makes them interesting

Few of the reasons.

American art is about achieving things.
European art is about existing.

>>10376049
*gets shot*

WE DID IT !!!

>implying Whitman, Dickenson, Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville aren't just as good as a lot of European greats

>>10376002
You're joking, right? America is the largest producer of art in the world right now with Japan being second.

The ability to get things done is appreciated more than the intellect in America. The country was founded on these values. That's the reason why the literature here is overall much worse. But art excels here, because that doesn't depend on the intellect.

>>10376217
>american art
o i am laffin

>>10376002
Amerikwans were a mistake, that's why. Lab experiment gone awry.

>>10376086
Im glad you didnt say Cormac McCarthy but all that you mentioned are just toxic masculinity. Europe the home of the gays laugh at all you cowboys.

>>10376342
>See these tens of thousands of stories, animations, movies, music compositions, photographic pieces, comic books, illustrations, statues, video games, etc. that were made over the past century? They're all bad art because I can't think for myself and I explicitly read other people who are as informed about these things as I am.
It's time this joke of an opinion of yours finally got squashed.

>>10376217
Corporate madlibs is not art.

>>10376002
>No Moby-Dick

>>10376637
Your understanding of art is poor.

I'm not here to denounce US artists, I'm here just to say Mexico and Latin America as a whole prodece better artists, albiet not as often as you Inglés speaking scrubs.

>>10376002

because intellectualism is not nurtured in America, we are a country founded by superstitious extremely conservative puritans. Now we are a country ran by capitalist structure bent on turning the largest amount of profit from the masses in the cheapest most efficient means possible.

America was a mistake.

>>10376581
Why did you mention quantity in an argument of quality?

>>10376647
Moby Dick doesn't belong on that chart because it's actually good.

>>10376581
you have to go back, you’re not lit

>>10376002
Weak bait.

¿Perdón?

No tan rápido gringos de mierda.

>>10376722
First, OP said: "What is it about our land that does not produce artists?" This is a dismissal of thousands of artists who have labored for many thousands of hours over the course of more than a century.

Second, the amount of time and serious effort being sunk into this type of production for the duration it has been makes claims that it is all bad or not art seem stupid even to people who aren't informed. Because it is stupid.

I don't trust anyone who makes such claims when it comes to art. You clearly judge by what your peers think, just as poorly informed as you, who have adopted the sickly contemporary attitude that art must make you think, a preposterous notion. Art need not make you think. In order to be experienced as art, it must seize you emotionally via powerful drama, exaggerated forms, and sensual intensity.

Stendhal: "Passions are necessary in the judgment of art. All great artists have been passionate men." And he nearly fainted when visiting Florence for the first time, having been overwhelmed by his emotions at what he saw — have you had such an experience?

>>10376822
I'm experiencing some powerful emotions right now in the face of this preformative art piece you are doing in defence of comic books and video games. If the american cashgrabs you call art are sending you into fits of overwhelming passion I think you might have a problem.

>>10376405
>toxic masculinity
>Dickenson

>>10376008
Ireland only really started doing /lit/ in the last hundred years and it's leagues better than American lit. America has no excuse.

Because Europeans are massive faggots who like that sort of thing.

>>10376822
anime, vidya and capeshit is fucking gay don’t you ever compare it to firenze again, fagtron

>>10376850
>cashgrabs
Just confirming even more what I just said. As if the intent behind the production matters in the experience of art, and as if this is the sole intent behind it all, two bad assumptions. It's time to stop judging things which you know nothing about.

>>10376886
pleb and proud?

>>10376966
No arguments, nice

>>10376881
Arts is art no matter the medium

>>10376815
mods please

>>10377039
And what is this "art" you're talking about?

>>10376002
because you are a shitty society with about 200 years and no culture behind it.

>>10377114
>no culture
>posted on an American website containing boards for dozens of different cultural interests

>>10377130
a website that copied a japanese one. Keep telling yourself that you have something that isn't borrowed from other cultures.

>>10377150
>this site and everyone posting on it don't count because it was "copied" :^)
Compelling argument.

>>10376086
>Whitman, Dickenson, Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville

yre srsly comparing this to Proust or Kafka?

>>10377185
you actually count a site's culture where the most content is a joke as american culture? That says a lot about your country's culture alone.

>>10376877
I love Ireland but there is no one relevant beside Beckett and Joyce (Berkeley if you count philosophy)

>>10377208
You have an outrageously high opinion of Kafka.

>>10377251
Not all the content is a joke and it's just one little aspect of it. Nonetheless your statement was retarded.

>>10376002
It took less than one hundred years for America to produce a better novelist than Europe ever did

>>10377269
I said most content not all content. Now you can go and enjoy the american culture on this site that is cosplay and anime.

America, unlike Europe, does not have a developed culture.
Also if it doesn't make money, you don't do it in America. Consumerism and Capitalism there are the american gods.

>>10376002
America is a corporate fascist nation which hates inner-development and fetishizes false consciousness and faux-individualism and is secretly unbelievably collectivist and anti-creativity. Adorno wrote about this in the 40's you dumb nigger. That's why we don't produce anything, we are the source of culture industry

>>10377309
What’s the European Gods? bureaucracy? egalitarianism? nostalgia?

>>10377208
3 of those are leagues higher than Proust OR Kafka

>>10376815
bolano is almost as overrated as shakespeare.

>>10376808
>>10376815
He is talking about burgerland and you know it

>>10377405
faggotry
>>10377309
we have plenty of culture, you just don't bother searching it up. the wild west was never in Europe

>>10376002
>tfw European who prefers American literature

>>10376850
underrated post

Excuse me while I single-handedly save American literature.

>>10376711
You're mostly right, but the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony were extremely well-educated. If you have the time and interest you should read about them. It's a fascinating part of colonial American history.

>>10377321
>Adorno [German sociologist] wrote about this in the 40's
And how relevant that piece must have been and still be!

>>10376002
More history and a longer time to develop traditions and play off them.

>>10377257
Yeats, Shaw, O'Brien?

>>10376405
>Melville
>affirmation of masculinity
Read Moby-Dick you absolute pseud

>>10376086
melville is good
dickenson is good
whitman, thoreau are trash
emerson has his moments
literlaly cant compare to the best of europe has to offer
and i say this as a patriotic american

>implying America didn't produce one of the top 10 works of the Western canon less than 100 years after its inception

>>10378491
>Whitman
>trash

>>10376002
Literature in general sucked since about 1950.

I don't really get the comparison, historically. America didn't materialize out of nothing. It was settled by Europeans and existed as European colonies until the late 18th century. America then continued producing quality literature for at least a century. The literary heritage is shared.

>>10378520
It is. Europeans just like being tribal and shitting on America, not understanding how central American literature has been to both the modernist and postmodernist movements. Imagine modernism without TS Eliot. Imagine contemporary literature without Pynchon and DFW.

>>10378491
only someone dumb enough to be a patriotic american would say such shit

TS Eliot
John Dos Passos
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
William Gaddis
Cormac McCarthy

>>10376002
Writing decent literature in English is already an uphill battle. Combine that with the US being a culturelet focusing most of its productivity on mass production and mass consumption and you have a recipe for disaster

>>10378607
Eliot was an expat tho
>Walt Whitman
Try again

>>10379206
>Eliot was an expat
Like all good american poets really makes ya twinkle

>However, one must not look to the United States for what distinguishes man from other beings in creation, which is his excerpt from immortality and the ornament of his days: the letters are unknown in the new Republic, though they are called by a host of institutions. The American replaced the intellectual operations by the positive operations; do not impute inferiority to his mediocrity in the arts, for it is not on this side that he has paid attention. Thrown by different causes on desert soil, agriculture and commerce have been the object of his care; before thinking, one must live; before planting trees, they must be felled to plow.
>The primitive colonists, the spirit filled with religious controversy, carried, it is true, the passion of the dispute to the heart of the forests; but it was necessary that they should first march to the conquest of the desert with their axes on their shoulders, having for their desk, in the interval of their labors, only the elm they were squaring. The Americans have not traversed the degrees of the age of the people; they have left their childhood and youth in Europe; the naive words of the cradle have been unknown to them; they enjoyed the sweets of the home only through the regret of a country they had never seen, whose eternal absence and charm they had mourned for.
>There is in the new continent neither classical literature, nor romantic literature, nor Indian literature: classical, the Americans have no models; romantic, the Americans have no middle age; Indian litterature, Americans despise the savages and hate woods for they think they were designed to emprison them.
>Thus, it is not literature apart, literature properly so called, which is found in America: it is applied literature, serving the various uses of society; it is the literature of workmen, merchants, sailors, laborers. Americans scarcely succeed except in mechanics and science, because science has a material side: Franklin and Fulton have seized lightning and steam for the benefit of men. It was up to America to endow the world with discovery that no continent could ever escape from browser research.
>Poetry and imagination, shared by a very small number of idlers, are regarded in the United States as puerilities of the first and the last age of life: the Americans have had no childhood, they do not have not yet old age.
t. Chateaubriand from his memoirs from beyond the tomb, written around 1820 or something close to that

Do not expect any more good literature to come out of Europe in the near future

>>10379206
>Melville wasn't an American because he moved
Does that make Nabokov American?

>>10376012
GET ON THE GROUND
RECITE THE ENTIRELY OF INFINITE JEST FROM MEMORY OR I WILL FUCKING SHOOT

Seriously,why people here don't like gravity rainbow and infinite jest?

>>10379277
Much has changed since then. Jean Baudrillard, America:

>We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.

>>10380403
Because is trash.

>>10376711
people who don't know what puritans are should stop using the word. Fucking Joe Rogans.

>>10380403
we do, unfortunately /lit/ has been flooded with /pol/ and /tv/ entry level shitposters and outnumber actual contentposters about 5 to 1

>On the Road
>Moby Dick
>The Sun Also Rises
>Invisible Man
>Beloved

Alright Eurofags give me a better top 5 then. European novels read like philosophy and they lack the emotion that Americans have discovered.

>>10380500
Faust
Hamlet
The brothers karamazov
Divine comedy
Wether