/lit/ - Literature

>>21747028
Is this a dig at Pynchon?
t. haven't read him and based on the excerpts posted here, never will

>>21747028
She doesn't know anything about literature and this can be clearly seen in her article praising Bob Dylan as the greatest American poet since WWII.
She reads novels for social commentary, not for writing. And the contemporary British novel (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie etc.) is SHIT compared to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, McCarthy, Barth, and yes in this case even DFW and Roth.

>>21747067
>seething pynchonchud

>>21747028
In the 20th century, the British novel was lackluster compared to the American novel. The American novel will suck this century. When a society gets complacent, this is reflected on the cultural output.

>>21747028
"Thing"

- woman

She's right that the novel was tied to old European culture, same as classical music. A Marxist would say that it was tied to bourgeois culture, and that the novel is the natural form of self-expression of the ascendant bourgeoisie, but that's only part of the story, because the "ascent of the bourgeoisie," of a middle class, was a European phenomenon. Most other cultures have never gotten past the phase of imperial-administrative theocratic despotisms, with varying degrees of laissez-faire policies. This is true in the main of Persian, Islamic, Indic, and Chinese civilization. Europe is the only part of the world that developed something like "sphere sovereignty," or medieval corporatism, from which Habermas' "public sphere" could emerge. The novel was the form of self-expression of a reasoning, autonomous, "Hegelian" middle class, but the notion of such a class as the ideal citizenry was a European creation. This notion was a fusion of classical aristocratic conceptions, Christian moral conceptions, and distinctly "Faustian" (post-classical European, culturally "Latin-Christian") habits of mind, like the Germanic love of freedom noted by Tacitus. It was historically and ethnically contingent. Its floruit was the period spanning the 17th-19th centuries, its greatest challenge (as Marx understood) was the TRUE extension of "middle class-ness" to the mass of plebs, the integration of the mediocre and "unformed" rabble. Hegel had an entirely different understanding of this challenge than Marx, and tried to thematize it with a kind of social emanationist cosmology in wihch the State and Civil Society harmonize with one another -- Marx rightly notes that this was an unusual betrayal of Hegel's philosophy of sublation, as it "freezes" society in a "balancing act" rather than sublating the factors into a true synthesis. But this only goes to show how much Hegel properly understood and cared about the preservation of European civil society and the middle-class aristocratic republican ideal: he was willing to bulldoze nature itself in his natural philosophy to subordinate it to his dialectical logic but not willing to reduce civil society in the same way. It's the only meaningful exception he ever made in his autistic scheme to subordinate everything to his dialectical logic. Marx sees this as sloppiness but it is actually the noblest thing Hegel ever did. Because Marx misunderstood this and tried to "fix the error" or "finish Hegel's work" by sublating the opposed pair State and Civil Society into a final, "properly Hegelian" communistic triadic unity, he actually fell short of Hegel's vision. Hegel of course saw the possiblity of forcing things in this way, but stopped short, out of humility, out of genuine awe for the irreducibly concrete and undialectical achievement that is (now: was) modern European consciousness.

>>21747166
Now we live in a post-Marxist, not a Hegelian world, which is a roiling soup of distinctly non-European oriental-style imperial-administrative despotism ("managerial late capitalism" etc.) governing over a distinctly non-European oriental-style world-mass (pleasure-seeking post-national post-ethnic post-particular post-anything "individuals" who seek rights, now understood merely as "universal privileges" [a contradictio in adiecto] from managerial states). The European novel was the form adequate to the European civilizational type prior to its failure to integrate the challenges of mass civilization. The form adequate to modern, pseudo-morphological ""European civilization"" (global mass civilization wearing deracinated European ideals of liberty and equality as a papal-pharaonic tiara) is not the novel, which presupposes a tacitly accepted differentiated relationship between author and audience (author as hero on stage, readership as chorus of those who understand the author and thus could potentially be on stage if they had something to say but don't deserve to be on stage presently, anonymous mass of mere audients who have varying levels of understanding and should reman passive and quiet and aspire first to be like the chorus), but the social media "post" (mass of undifferentiated mentally retarded spastics screaming for attention to throngs of equally mentally retarded spastic losers who also want attention but not for any reason of merit, just because everybody in the teeming larval mass wants attention and only a few are "lucky" enough to receive it). When the social media oriental despotic mass society talks about novels or even pretends to write and read novels, it is pseudo-morphological, it's like a feudal lord in the late 9th century calling himself a Roman emperor and thinking his fortified burg is more or less the same thing as imperial Rome was at its height.

If you want novels back, break free from this mass civilization living in the husk of European civilization, and get distinct European civilization back. Get Hegel's balance of State and Civil Society back. Read Treitschke's vulgar Hegelianism which is, because it actually understands Hegel, superior in its roughness to any far more scholastically "sophisticated" left Hegelian (crypto-anarchist-utopian-totalitarian) readings of Hegel:
https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/treitschke/politics01.pdf
https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/treitschke/politics02.pdf

>>21747166
>>21747170
Don't care. Didn't ask. Plus, umm you're Chinese

>>21747166
your writing is not good enough to warrant so much of it. not reading all that

>>21747166
She said British culture. She never mentioned “European culture” (there is no such a thing, there are European cultures, which is different).

>>21747175
She's talking about the British novel but it's really a British and French co-creation, because bourgeois consciousness is a British and French co-creation. The Germans join in around 1750 with the Sturm und Drang, but in the 17th-early 18th century they were just imitating French models. There are some notable exceptions like Cervantes obviously but for the most part this is the case. Marxist histories of the novel, as a subset of the history of bourgeois consciousness, will bear this out - Marx himself always identified Britain and France as the two "high" bourgeois/capitalist nations, with Germany and the rest of Europe catching up.

There is definitely a distinct European consciousness but I respect your right to Boasian anthropological pluralism or whatever, it and you are symptoms of the mass society ("we're all just individuals seeking rights from states! That's what Locke began and Marx finished articulating!") described above, it's the one-sided pseudo-morphological appropriation of European Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment is only one aspect of Europe's distinct consciousness, and now a non-European civilization is appropriating it like an island cargo cult still wears the rags left behind by European explorers and still calls their headman "Admiral."

>implying novels have to say something about the dynamics of a society
Maybe go study sociology or politology instead of fiction, dumb cunt.

>>21747028
> paying attention to women
> taking the things they say seriously

Just stop.

>>21747190
Spain created the modern novel in the early 1600s but that’s not the point. She’s talking about specifically the place of the novel in British culture compared to American culture.

>>21747028
I wouldn't worry about it..

>>21747028

Paglia just says things. Some of it is good. But if you've read anything from her you realize how frenetic and unreliable she can be

>>21747028
i love this little dyke like you couldn't believe