/lit/ - Literature

>American literature
Thoroughly second rate.

Most people in my country are barely literate. And nobody reads untranslated fiction.

>>14081171

>>14081171
It’s great. I love Melville, Faulkner, Steinbeck, McCarthy, Poe. Anybody who says they dislike “American literature”, given its wide scope, can be easily dismissed as a contrarian dilettante.

People in my country don't know nothing about Melville but they do know Moby Dick.

>>14081205
he's french though. I doubt you read his work on the French revolution.

Poe has a surprisingly strong international presence

>>14081171
Macedonians think Moby Dick is about a big white pig paddling around a lake.

There are good writers and great books, but – not unlike English literature – it really doesn’t compare to German, French, and Russian literature.

t. Finn (I feel like I have a pretty objective view because none of the language is my own)

Mention 'American literature' to people and they'd be most likely to name Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby. They would be unlikely to be able to name the authors though.

Hemingway is the opposite: people may know his name and be aware he was a writer, but they'd be unlikely to be able to name any of his books.

There isn't a strong feeling either way (France). The literate public will have read or heard about Melville, Poe, James, Faulkner, Lovecraft (although often in le spooky tentacle manner) and the big crime writers.
To learn literary English, the great gatbsy is often given as a high school exercice, more rarely Hemingway but his fame is dying along with early boomers. Salinger is entirely unknown though. You won't find his books outside a specialized library. I learned through /lit/ that he was the high school meme in the USA.
Note that only novelists are considered. American poetry might as well not exist at all. Same for playwriters. Writers like Whitman, Longfellow, Hawthorne must have, combined, sold 10k books in France over a century.

>>14082351
the french don't like whitman? that makes me sad to hear, as i feel like the funkier side of french philosophy like deleuze explicitly references him and elevates him as a wonderful thinker, if in the sort of characteristically patronizing way that the french seem to look at any other country's national heroes

to be fair, anglos are even worse about this. my american high school curriculum at least gestured towards a world canon of literature outside of america/britain that mainly included post-colonial writers (mainly, i suspect, because of their impact on american academia) but mentioned cervantes, goethe, dostoyevsky, and tolstoy, people i take to be national heroes in their respective countries, while leaving out proust and flaubert in favor of the trendier sartre and camus, who i would consider the french fitzgerald and hemingway (if you'll allow the sort of clunky analogy)

>>14082227
German and French are in their own tier at the top. I'd put English above Russian though

>>14082390
>the french don't like whitman?
Don't like is overselling it in the current year. They simply won't know he's there. Of course that still means the French contemporaries didn't like him. By the way I didn't really like him either.
You are correct in the absolute worst taste in 20th century Frenchmen from amerimutts. Part of it is lazyness, overhyping writers that are easier to translate in English. Part of it (especially in terms of non-fiction) is, as you say, typical of current academic biases. That's true in terms of literary styles, esthetic trends, politics, etc. I still cringe about foucault being the number one most cited man in us academia.

>>14082430
yeah, i always wince when people ask me what great philosopher america has produced, but at least we didn't produce some half-baked pseud like foucault that we have to be reminded of by everyone every ten seconds.

Steinback and sometimes Hemingway are usually assigned at school. Other than that only the cognoscenti would be aware of Faulkner or Melville.

>>14081171
> Melville
No.
> Hemingway
Oh yes, he was super fashionable with hipsters in the 1960's. (Though I don't think today people read him non-ironically anymore.)

>>14082461
I don't want to start a /pol/int/ discussion but let's not pretend Americans didn't produced some of the worst of the worst. Franz Boas, Skinner, Butler, etc.

Melville is seen similarly to Nabokov. Most will know his major work by name but fewer will know his name itself.

>>14082538
boas and skinner are literal whos outside of their fields and i'd be shocked to see impact indices that placed them even in high B tier. you've got me on butler, though.

>>14082549
Skinner is the sibgle most cited psychologist in the world, even though it's largely people trashing him. Granted that's still an academic point of view but I wouldn't call him literally who.
Boas is a more scholarly reference if we talk about his name but his ideas are all pervasive and we're all spread from America. Even soviet social scientists fell for the cultural only anthropology through him.

>>14082576
I think that you’re shitting on Boas because you think he started cultural relativism, but his version of it was much more nuanced than whatever Jordan Peterson tells you it is.

>>14082592
>Jordan Peterson
Kevin MacDonald is probably the reason Boas is disliked on 4chan, and regardless of apparent nuance Boas just made shit up

>>14082604
He was mainly a critic of phrenology and tautologous evolutionary schema who asked for more investigation into matters of human culture and history instead of acceptance of general models. Like he was wrong about a lot of stuff and no one respectable calls themselves a Boasian anymore, but come on. The man’s primary contributions were to call for less shit being made up than a proliferation of bullshit on his own. Are you confusing him with Geertz? Cause that’s the true charlatan of American anthropology who actually managed to have international influence for the quality of his prose.

>>14082616
He said among other things that you can't tell what race someone is from their skull(completely false) and that culture is what drives differences in behavior, not genes(radically unproven)

>>14082631
You can’t reliably tell what race someone is from their skull shape, though. He did multiple studies demonstrating this that have not been disproven.

Culture driving differences of behavior is radically unproven, but the point was to open up a study of culture to see if the premise was true. The real problem here is few fold and my biggest gripe with him and cultural anthropologists: 1. He and everyone else who still calls themselves such doesn’t have a working definition of culture in the first place. 2. Relating a group dynamic to individual behaviors as such is dumb and we need resolution of the Wilson/Dawkins schism in evolutionary biology before we start touching this in the much more abstract and understudied realm of human behavior, extending into symbolic action, that culturalists uphold. 3. The people who say genes do this stuff often don’t know genetics or if they are geneticists they don’t directly study human behavior, but they have an unproven quantitative process so they wow retards who prefer made up numbers to well researched words.

All that said, Boas in his own writing and teaching basically just opened up the question of whether we should look somewhere besides the disproven sciences of physiognomy and phrenology to understand how humans work. Its current practitioners are also dipshits who can’t accept the reality of genetic variations in populations having any impact so they make themselves look foolish while human evolutionary “biologists” (social scientists that actual biologists laugh at) just stay sure of their equally retarded but quantitative frameworks and so impress normies.

>>14082662
The synthesis of accepting the science while understanding it serves a social function itself (ie the only non retarded position in this argument between two completely fucking stupid camps) is held by New Materialists. You should read latour. He hates postmodernists for the right reasons and has some interesting insights about science, even if Sokal was too dumb to finish his shortest book and so erected him as a strawman. We Have Never Been Modern is a fun easy read. Avoid the actor network theory stuff.

>>14082662
>You can’t reliably tell what race someone is from their skull shape, though
Yes you absolutely can and it is done all the time in forensics. He didn't prove anything, the entire field of anthropology is riddled with these guys literally making shit up and lying.

Why are you scare quoting human evolutionary biology? Do you think we aren't animals or something, regardless of the complexities of culture it is ridiculous to just deny the field itself

>>14082351
>Salinger is entirely unknown though. You won't find his books outside a specialized library.
Wait, frenchfag here (40yo), I had to read the Catcher in the Rye in high school - isn't it a little more common than you say ? (I had really good teachers though)

>only novelists are considered. American poetry might as well not exist at all.
Agree.

>>14081171
>Is Melville or Hemingway even known in your countries?

south american here, i attended a private bilingual school so yes, but english literature was more prioritize than american lit

leaf here. and yeah we're the same as you guys so we know it all, once our academia(and the general public) can be bothered with something that's not post colonial semi-autobiographical literature.
we read catcher and gatsby in high school. most people who read here are well read with the Americans, mainly cause there's so few good Canadian authors. timothy findley is ok, same with that life of pie guy, but it's really nothing compared to our buds down south.

we only learn about our country's literature here
and that's all most people "learn"

>>14081171
Brazilian here. Moby Dick is one of those novels that everybody knows by name, but few know who write and even less have actually read it. Id' say Hemingway is more popular, if only because he is easier to read.
But most people here don't read anything besides the shitty national list of school books. The common brazilian reads about 2 books a year on average.
I'm a medic, and even among my circle of friends and coworkers is hard to find someone who enjoys reading.

>>14082201
What article is this from? Sounds interesting.

Here in Mexico when people think of English literature they refer to the British. However, Moby Dick is kind of known in pop culture, we know the story is about some nigga who tried to hunt down a big whale without the strong symbolism in mind and references to the Bible.

>>14081263
The sad emo-goth teenager that discovers Poe is not confined to any arbitrary border, anon.

>>14082430
In your opinion, who are the best French writers of the 20th or 21st centuries, Pepé Le Pew?

>>14081171
Bong here. Sadly we skip over most of the American classics and look at The great Gatsby and to kill a mockingbird if you are in a bad school

These and Cormac McCarthy. Me personally if I got round to it would look for works that demonstrate American optimism and spirit.

It's a happy sight to see that mark twain isn't memed as a great writer on the international stage

>>14083567
https://globalvoices.org/2017/08/30/macedonian-moby-dick-translator-ognen-cemerski-42-was-a-meticulous-linguist-and-engaged-educator/
Just googled: "macedonian translation of moby dick"

>>14083761
Excluding non-fiction, you have the following for the XXth century.
>Céline
>Proust
>Gracq
>Péguy
>Annouilh
>Apollinaire
>Bernanos
>Queneau
>Barbuse
>Mauriac
>Montherland
>Claudel
>Cocteau
>Drieu la Rochelle
>Gary
>Morand
>Gide
>Giraudoux
>St-John perse
>Valéry
Top five are the first five names if the list is too autistic for you.

>>14082227
>>14082395
>German
I assume you're including Austria under the title of 'German.' Germany's literature is shit.

>>14081171
melville is okay, too bad he was a faggot. oh well, mediocre anyways. hemingway is garbage lmao most american lit is shit, i like poe though.
t. italian

This thread reminds me one of the reason /lit/ isn't as good as it could be is the inordinate importance that American and generally English-language literature has due to the fact everyone can read it.