/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21879225]

>Bloom thought that the three writers in the running for "best American novelist" were Hawthorne, James, and Faulkner
who do you pick, /lit/? Personally, I think Faulkner takes the title here

[Anonymous No.21879227]

>>21879225
Melville, Poe, Twain and Philip K Dick.

[Anonymous No.21879233]

>>21879227
>Philip K Dick.
I like Dick anon but he's not -that- good.

[Anonymous No.21879239]

>>21879233
Yes he is. He's the only modern novelist who explores interesting psychological, philosophical and spiritual themes in his books.

[Anonymous No.21879240]

>>21879225
Melville mogs all of them

[Anonymous No.21879251]

>>21879227
>>21879240
You guys really think Melville has a greater range than somebody like Faulkner (let alone James)??? All the dude wrote were adventure/sailing stories, one massive admittedly amazing novel, and then some really cryptic short stories and poetry. He wrote like, five novels in total, compared to Faulkner and James' 10+ novels each

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21879267]

>>21879251
You are trivializing Billy Buddy as “a sailing story”? By your logic even the only work you evidently read by Melville is but a “sailing story”.

[Anonymous No.21879289]

>>21879225
Steinbeck, Kérouac, Pynchon and Toole

[Anonymous No.21879305]

>>21879225
Holy fuck, they didn't have to make Bloom that ugly. He looked like shit his whole life but not that bad.

[Anonymous No.21879313]

>>21879251
>He wrote like, five novels in total, compared to Faulkner and James' 10+ novels each
Maybe those guys should have written half as many books, but made them twice as good.

[Bookie !!S4Nzgj8dP3d No.21879317]

>>21879225
I am divorced between Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. I lean towards Mark Twain because it's my opinion that Huck Finn is the greatest American novel, but then I lean back towards Steinbeck because I believe that he is the more prolific and consistent novelist, while Twain's talents showed more in his short stories and essays.

>>21879251
Melville wrote eleven novels, but at any rate, just as you could sum up Melville as a bunch of adventure/sailing stories, you could just as easily sum Faulkner as a bunch of fall-of-the-family stories. It's equally silly to do either.

[Anonymous No.21879321]

>>21879317
Steinbeck is for boomers. His works haven't stood the test of time.

[Anonymous No.21879325]

>>21879321
They were ahead of time

[Anonymous No.21879332]

Bloom never really understood Westerners or Western culture. He only ever projected himself onto writers and their writing.

[Anonymous No.21879334]

Of the three it would be Hawthorne. Poe was the greatest American writer. Melville wrote the greatest American novel. The greatest novelist is up for debate, but I would say it’s not Hawthorne though he would deserve consideration.

[Anonymous No.21879341]

>>21879251
Henry James and William Faulkner are overrated. They wrote a lot of good novels and no great ones. I’d prefer one great story over a million decent ones.

[Anonymous No.21879343]

>>21879251
How are confidence and Pierre sailing novels? You clearly haven’t even skimmed the Wikipedia on them…

[Anonymous No.21879348]

>>21879225
Very antisemetic picture.

[Anonymous No.21879358]

>>21879321
Yet his work remains more widely popular among the younger generations than Melville, Poe, James, Hawthorne, or Faulkner.

[Anonymous No.21879362]

>>21879358
Because he’s from California and they’re forced to read it in school.

[Anonymous No.21879369]

>>21879362
Children are made to read Hawthorne, James, Poe, and Melville the country over as well, but most students do not find them as appealing as Steinbeck.

[Anonymous No.21879378]

>>21879369
They’re not actually. I’m not sure when you graduated or if you even went to public school but the Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne is the only reading from the writers you just mentioned which is actually prescribed. Poe might be glossed over or a short story or two read. James, Melville, Faulkner, etc. are not read at all.

[Anonymous No.21879386]

>>21879225
Faulkner among those 3. Melville and McCarthy are both better.

[Anonymous No.21879393]

>>21879378
I supervise the creation of student curriculum for a living. The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart have been popular in American English classes for decades and still are. Bartleby, the Scrivener is still commonly taught in high schools. James, though less popular, is still prescribed by some. The Beast in the Jungle is popular. Faulkner occasionally appears, usually it is A Rose For Emily, but not often, but I didn't say that Faulkner was popular in schools in my previous post.

[Anonymous No.21879396]

>>21879225
OP is correct. if those are the three, the winner is Faulkner.

[Anonymous No.21879455]

>>21879393
Not in American public schools, you don’t. I granted that some short stories of Poe will be read and quickly moved on from. Otherwise, you could interview 50,000 high school graduates in any U.S. states and maybe 5 will have even heard of Henry James, William Faulkner, or Bartleby the Scrivener.

[Anonymous No.21879460]

>>21879225
>Bloom
Dropped.

[Anonymous No.21879471]

>>21879233
dick is not a fancy wordsmith and that's part of his charm. he's akin to hemingway in that regard. his books are intended to be read by young and mature books alike, with different things in there for everyone.
the overarching goal of dick is to shock people into freeing their minds and opening the doorway to doubt. all of his novels are metaphysical psycho-sexual nuggets wrapped around quaint americana plots.
I love that dick never expounds endlessly on the virtues of one philosopher or another. he never bombards you with lengthy passages of show-offy prose. he's a simple man with lofty goals, and because he wrote just so damned much he perfected it.
philip k dick is the greatest american novelist. I will stand by that until the day i die

[Anonymous No.21879473]

>>21879225
Once again /lit/ trying to pretend that Fenimore Cooper never existed. It’s a fact that The Deerslayer mogs anything written by some of the notables mentioned so far in this thread.

Hell, taking the corpuses of these authors as a whole I wouldn’t say Cooper’s a clear number 1 or even number 1 at all but Christ almighty at least include the bloke in the conversation.

[Anonymous No.21879490]

Henry James is the greatest of them all

[Anonymous No.21879495]

>>21879251
I guess choice is terrible now

[Anonymous No.21879497]

>>21879334
>Melville wrote the greatest American novel
Patently false. The greatest American novel must by definition come from a Southern writer.

[Anonymous No.21879505]

>>21879497
Southern literature is in general trash. Nabokov was right. Corncobby chronicles are not good just because they’re rusty and dusty southern tales.

[Anonymous No.21879508]

>>21879505
bait

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.21879512]

My argument against Melville is that while Melville is superior to all of these, the problem is the “American” aspect, while yes his work is tied to American industry and intensely to American culture, the mind of Melville and his characters is not very American in type, his prose style is plainly decadently self indulgently European and shares far more with Poe than the average critic wants to give credit, and his interior is again very European in type and it should be no shock due to how much he was studying French literature, even his rejection of transcendentalism and his exploration of various symbols such as what is the meaning of white, these are very orientalist and euro stances and modes to take. From clarel to confidence men to moby dick, the dudes got a euro-soul. In contrast I think hawthorn is the most aesthetically and principally American, and not simply written by an American living in America whose spirit does not cohere to America.

>>21879251
If you actually read his work you’ll notice he has a diversity of aesthetic modes, but even so multitude of novels doesn’t make the great novel.

[Anonymous No.21879513]

>>21879505
>William Faulkner (1897-1962), who came from an old southern family, grew up in Oxford, Mississippi.

[Anonymous No.21879514]

>>21879225
I can see that's Hemingway, Poe, Edith Warton, and I presume the negro is James Baldwin, who's the gray-haired jew?

[Anonymous No.21879518]

>>21879514
Philip Roth?

[Anonymous No.21879521]

>>21879514
Could be any of the latter-twentieth-century Jewish-American novelists: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Joseph McElroy...

[Anonymous No.21879523]

>>21879514
It's Philip Roth, but for some odd reason, Marcel Proust is behind Edith Wharton...Did Bloom think Proust was American?

[Anonymous No.21879529]

>>21879523
That's not Proust; why is he wearing a traditional sailor's outfit?

[Anonymous No.21879531]

>>21879529
If it's not Proust, then who is it?

[Anonymous No.21879534]

>>21879531
Dunno. I can see why you thought it was Proust at first but he's wearing a sailor's outfit and he doesn't have a mustache, that's just the edge of Wharton's gown

[Anonymous No.21879575]

>>21879455
Nah I read bartleby in school. You're being hyperbolic. My copy of jude the obscure is from ol high school

[Anonymous No.21879577]

>>21879348
Agreed. The truth is antisemitic.

[Anonymous No.21879587]

>>21879455
American literature was junior year and certainly covered Faulkner

[Anonymous No.21879591]

>>21879471
>philip k dick is the greatest american novelist. I will stand by that until the day i die
Agreed.

[Anonymous No.21879618]

>>21879393
This is ''spaghetti on the wall'', ''appeal to authority'', and nonsense. You compare short stories and poems from one author with novels of another. You conflate what children are forced to read with what they enjoy. You probably really do work in institutional education.

[Anonymous No.21879653]

>>21879471
>dick is not a fancy wordsmith and that's part of his charm.
It's how he fucked up ''Man in the High Castle'', though. The suggestion that the abrupt ending was induced by sloppiness and running out of material is bolstered by the overall sloppiness of the book. The abrupt ending needed to be accompanied with clean writing lest it be generally misperceived as it is. I do not recall anyone correctly understanding the abrupt ending. I would go so far as to say that High Castle should be edited. It deserves being better understood.

[Anonymous No.21879661]

>>21879225
Faulkner, Poe, and Melville.

[Anonymous No.21879665]

>>21879512
bigotry: the post

[Anonymous No.21879692]

>>21879653
i consider high castle to be one of dick's lesser works. i started it several times, finished it once and never had the urge to return. he has so much better stuff to get into, it makes no sense to me why people keep pretending like high castle is all he's about

[Anonymous No.21879826]

my pick is salinger. if one great novel counts, then i might pick harolds fav, nathanael west

>Faulkner
some suprisingly dull and cliched characters, especially if youre into southern gothic. and the prose is constantly posturing. also he has genuinely terrible short stories that are waay overrated

>>21879471
>>21879591
i love me some dick but hes clumsy af when it comes to exposition, the minutiae of the worlds can be too wacky for their own good, the horny i wont even get into, characters in general dont stand out enough, the language is often clunky (unlike hemingway, wierd comparison), the twists can feel redundant, etc.
>>21879289
>Pynchon
pynchon is so dull compared to pkd or burroughs or something but i havent read enough to judge. can anyone argue he isnt bloated?
>>21879490
>Henry James
someone post the quote collection

[Anonymous No.21879832]

Bloom believed in kabbalah, so what's his opinion really worth?

[Anonymous No.21879838]

>>21879692
>it makes no sense to me why people keep pretending like high castle is all he's about
I raised it because of how badly the sloppy writing damaged the overall work. Besides, if it were less sloppily written, and you had gotten more out of it, then maybe you would not be saying things like -
>i consider high castle to be one of dick's lesser works

[Anonymous No.21879853]

>>21879838
i know, but it's like saying i wish marvel comic book movies were better. I hate to make that kind of comparison, but high castle was a work that solidified dick's career by popularity. it was not his idea to write the novel, but i'm pretty sure something he did for his publisher. the fact that it was hurriedly and sloppily put together shows you just how much dick cared about that book

[Anonymous No.21879855]

>>21879512
everything you accused melville of getting from euros he borrowed from hawthorne, an american

[Anonymous No.21879865]

Gonna keep it five million with you.

It’s Melville, Gass, and DFW. Southern gothic be damned

[Anonymous No.21879894]

cormac mccarthy deserves a spot, i guess you guys are afraid to say it.

[Anonymous No.21879911]

>>21879227
Poe is more celebrated for his short stories and poems than his novels.

[Anonymous No.21879933]

>>21879853
>the fact that it was hurriedly and sloppily put together shows you just how much dick cared about that book
But almost all of his work except ''Voices from the Street'' is like that.
>i know, but it's like saying i wish marvel comic book movies were better
No, it is not. The Marvel movies are finely polished cinematic masterpieces that have no underlying value other than the political propaganda aspect. Dick's works are the opposite of that - valuable insight muddied within sloppy prose.
>but i'm pretty sure something he did for his publisher
Who was the original publisher?

[Anonymous No.21879935]

>>21879393
Bartleby and those Poe stories/poems are Teenage core, though they're as good when you are an adult. I recommend the other Melville stories, especially the remaining Piazza Tales, Billy Budd, and his short stories that end with Verse in the LOA edition of his poems, like Rip Van Winkle's Lilac. The Apple Tree Table is also great. Never really cared for James and Faulkner, myself desu

[Anonymous No.21879971]

>>21879855
Hawthorne was closely tied to the transcendentalist movement, and even married a transcendentalist, along with being close friends with all of them, and related figures like Longfellow, whereas Melville explicitly rejects all of this in The Confidence Man with the section of the Emerson and Thoreau stand-ins. Pierre could also be seen as a rejection or breaking apart from Hawthorne, compare the scenes with Delly to The Scarlet Letter for instance.

Pierre, Redburn, and Confidence Man (beginning in New Orleans for instance) all showcase his French exoticism, while most of Clarel is about feeling uniquely un-American, capitalized by the character Ungar in section four being a half-bred Native who fought for the South (despite despising the South) who complains about democracy and the stupidity of American masses, trying to make a living for himself in Egypt post-Civil War, along with Sections of his Timoleon collection being essentially odes to Europe and Ancient Greece/Rome, all showcasing his lack of feeling 'truly American.'

The only Hawthorne work that could be compared to this is The Marble Faun (which I admittedly haven't read yet) on the premise alone, written while he was in Europe for 7 years and published when he returned to New Hampshire, which was written well after Pierre and Confidence Man and Moby Dick. Blithedale, Seven Gables, and Scarlet Letter are all characteristically American novels.

[Anonymous No.21879972]

>>21879855
Not him, but where even would the line be drawn? I had a teacher tell me that there was no such thing as ''american'' culture. Any example one could conjure would just be refuted with, ''No, those are all examples of european culture''. No rock or patch of dirt wrote ''Moby Dick'', Melville did. Otheranon adhered Melville's style to the soil of Europe, and does not allow that an ''american'' novel can share nature with its obvious european roots. One could make the argument that any ''american'' novel is inherently ''european'' on strict adherence to the fact that they were all written in a european language. I smell a tinge of ''no true Scottsman'' in the whole affair.

[Anonymous No.21879987]

>>21879971
>>21879855
Not to Mention Israel Potter beggining with a dedication to the Queen, and being a book about a man getting trapped in England his entire adult life only to return to America on his death, the parts with Benjamin Franklin and Paul Jones clearly show his confliction on the topic as he venerates both men, but clearly shows how America did absolutely nothing to help the man Potter who loved it so much. Most of the book is also in England, and essentially a sea novel, I guess closer to Irving (who essentially wrote for the English) than anything.

[Anonymous No.21879993]

>>21879972
American literature is transcendentalism/Whitman and its influences, extended to like Twain who produced Hemingway, and Jack London who was basically a precusor to the American vulgar realist travel types like Kerouac and Bukowski.

[Anonymous No.21880002]

>>21879251
Even if Moby Dick was all he wrote it's the epic of America and I think that alone puts him in the top three at least. Not basing that off of personal preference.

[Anonymous No.21880016]

>>21879993
>American literature is transcendentalism/Whitman and its influences
Says who?

[Anonymous No.21880029]

>>21879618
I'm not conflating what they enjoy with what they're assigned. I'm pointing out of the literature which is often put in the curriculum, students to respond better to Steinbeck, and Steinbeck remains a popular author among students after they graduate high school relative to other authors they are assigned.
>>21879935
>Bartleby and those Poe stories/poems are Teenage core
I know. That's why they're assigned.

[Anonymous No.21880035]

>>21880016
Says Emerson.

[Anonymous No.21880044]

>>21880016
I mean it's obvious, it's something that propped up sort of on its own. Irving was basically a collaborator with Walter Scott and clearly English/Scottish literature to an extent, I'd say the same for Fenimore Cooper, and Poe was sort of his own thing in the gothic vein of de Quincey, while being critical of Longfellow and Emerson in his essays, whereas the main school of American thought was centered around Emerson and transcendentalism, which influenced Whitman and his free verse style, which is the dominant strand of poetry that exists today, not Melville writing odes to Greece and Athens or long epic poems in tetrameter, as for novels Mark Twain's rejection of the 'Henry James/Thackeray' English style of writing and wanted to be more fun influenced Hemingway, who clearly influenced Salinger and Fitzgerald, so while I dislike both of them Whitman and Twain are the 'great' American novelists, insofar as they have the most noticeable impact on the evolution of American literature and poetry, with Emerson and Hawthorne sort of being the underlying and moral cause of both of them.

[Anonymous No.21880065]

>>21880029
Teenagers would naturally gravitate towards those works than highly sentimental garbage like Salinger, or essentially blog posts like The Sun Also Rises. Those works have a much higher degree of creativity with simply better prose. Nobody reads Hemingway or Salinger for their language it's the relatability aspect, even though kids absolutely despise Salinger, whereas Bartelby and The Black Cat or Raven offer a sort of exoticism that is better appreciated and more enjoyable than trying to exalt a bunch of mundane social problems. Also, those problems are contained within Bartelby and Raven anyway (the tediousness of bureaucracy, and the grief/loss of life/youth), whereas Salinger is just 1-1 with what he says.

[Anonymous No.21880143]

>>21879971
Wikipedia says Hawthorne was explicitly against the transcendalists.

[Anonymous No.21880149]

>>21879225
>>21879240
I recall Bloom saying that he regards Moby-Dick as a prose epic rather than a proper novel, so it would be excluded from this ranking.

[Anonymous No.21880154]

>>21879832
In his poetry book, he’s at pains to suggest every other poet was in reality an atheist or a gnostic despite all evidence to the contrary in either case. It’s really very obnoxious.

[Anonymous No.21880157]

>>21880143
He married a transcendentalist and was friends with them. This is probably after 1852 when he wrote that Franklin Pierce biography and moved to England. Either way, he was clearly friends with all of them and lived with Longfellow at one point. He may have had a 'falling out.' I'm not even criticizing Hawthorne as a writer, he's very good.

[Anonymous No.21880160]

>>21879575
>>21879587
You both went to good suburban schools. 90% or more of public schools will never touch either, except maybe in AP courses.

[Anonymous No.21880161]

>>21880044
>not Melville writing odes to Greece and Athens or long epic poems in tetrameter
Assuming your assertions to be true, where DOES Melville fit?

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.21880165]

>>21880143
Busy to elaborate but tldr Hawthorne is a moderate on transcendentalism and flirts with it but doesn’t fully buy into it, Melville is pretty harshly against.

When I get a chance I’ll rant in the thread some more.

[Anonymous No.21880167]

>>21880157
Just because they’re friends doesn’t mean he agreed with them. Wikipedia lists Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe as the three explicitly anti-transcendalist authors and reading Hawthorne’s fiction that seems to make perfect sense.

[Anonymous No.21880185]

>>21880149
>appeal to authority
>appeal to the authority of Bloom

[Anonymous No.21880193]

>>21880167
Poe and Melville definitely are against it, Hawthorne was jaded because of his experience on the commune and wrote Blithedale because of it.

>>21880161
You have to understand Melville spent the last 3 decades of his life self-publishing poetry that nobody reads, and even to this day people do not 'like' Confidence Man and Pierre, all we really mean when we say Melville is Moby Dick and possibly Bartelby, and MAYBE Billy Budd/Benito Cerino. He's really a fringe figure if you take away that one book. I don't think he's that influential desu. Again, this isn't a knock on Melville as I absolutely love his writing.

[Anonymous No.21880223]

>>21880193
>You have to understand
>even to this day
>all we really mean
>He's really a fringe figure
>I don't think he's that influential
>this isn't a knock on Melville
None of that addresses my question. Assuming Melville to be not an american author, where doe he fit?

[Anonymous No.21880229]

>>21880160
No, I went to the high school on the poor side of town. We had cops in the hallways, and my senior class was 60% as large as my freshman class.

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21880238]

>>21879512
I’m not sure how Melville is either decadent or self-indulgent.

[Anonymous No.21880251]

>>21880223
He is a fringe figure who lived in America that didn't influence the proceeding tradtion of what would become of American lit. There is nothing of Confidence Man, Pierre, or Clarel in Hemingway, Twain, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Salinger, etc. and their entire style is completely antithetical to that. Maybe Typee is proto-Jack London at best, but that's hardly indicative of what Melville became.

He's obviously an American author, but the point is he is stylistically not in the spirit of what American literature would become, or in the transcendental spirit of the time. You can't just take most of his work out of context and say he's the Greatest American because he lived in America, when half his works criticize America and later on reject its entire ideals. I also don't view the distinction of American and general English literature to be that important anyway, obviously the transcendentalists were inspired by Europeans as well, and Hawthorne is closer to say Thackeray than Hemingway, but I consider those writers the foundation of what would become of American lit.

[Anonymous No.21880257]

>>21880238
Pierre is literally a decadent novel, about essentially his father's affair with a French woman putting a curse on the family.

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21880267]

>>21880257
I wouldn’t say most of Melville falls under that movement though at all

[Anonymous No.21880347]

>>21879933
You need to read the interviews where Dick talks about his book publishing woes. Here's him directly explaining that high castle was begrudgingly written at a time when SF sales were low and he was trying to appeal to yuppie californians.
https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/philip-k-dicks-final-interview/
>I decided that I’d better tell her I was working on a book so I wouldn’t have to polish her jewelry all day long. We had a little cabin, and I went over there with a sixty-five-dollar portable typewriter made in Hong Kong — the “e” key was stuck on it. I started with nothing but the name “Mister Tagomi” written on a scrap of paper, no other notes. I had been reading a lot of Oriental philosophy, reading a lot of Zen Buddhism, reading the I Ching. That was the Marin County zeitgeist at that point, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching. I just started right out and kept on trucking. It was either that or go back to polishing jewelry.
>When I had the manuscript finished, I showed it to her. She said, “It’s all right, but you’ll never make more than $750 off of it. I don’t even see where it’s worth your while to submit it to your agent.”
>I said, “What the hell!” And The Man in the High Castle was bought by Putnam’s for $1500, which isn’t a great deal more than she had prophesied. It did get tremendous reviews. Part of that was due to the good fortune that it was picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club. Had it not been picked up by them, it would not have won the Hugo Award, because the edition would have been too small.

[Anonymous No.21880366]

>>21880347
(same person) kind of funny if you consider dick just shit that book out, sold it to putnam for 1500 bucks, and then they exploited it to hell and loaded it full of awards

[Anonymous No.21880496]

>>21880347
If those Marin folk were sharp enough to understand the book, they would have shit bricks over it. The absolute state of retards. Good for him for pulling that one off.

[Anonymous No.21880532]

>>21879933
>value
the value of any piece of art is ultimately in its craftsmanship and its originality, that is to say its beauty, as much as the deaf insist its in "insights", since there are much better ways of conveying truth, and since reducing a works value to the truths it conveys reduces it to something irrelevant to its experiential appeal, which is more akin to enjoying music. dick is original as hell, and influential as hell, but he wrote for money and the works suffered for it. the problem with marvel movies are that they arent original.

[Anonymous No.21880549]

>>21879332
This, his sensibilities are too jewish to trust his judgment on anything regarding a WESTERN canon. He has no conception of European history and therefore can't really understand European literature and, by extension, American literature in relation to a Western canon.

[Anonymous No.21880720]

>>21879225
I read The House of Seven Gables and I liked it but I wasn't particularly impressed with Hawthorne anymore than with someone like Poe. Is there something I'm missing?
>>21879251
Moby Dick alone puts him above the rest. Regardless, you completely mischaracterized his work. If you think he mostly wrote sailing/adventuring stories then you haven't read him. He had more range than Faulkner and I say that as a fan of Faulkner's.

[Anonymous No.21880761]

>>21880532
>the value of any piece of art is ultimately in its craftsmanship and its originality, that is to say its beauty
Nah, there is more than enough of this to go around. It's the good ideas that are lacking. I would have preferred that he had done a better job on the prose, but alas, it was not to be. I would rather suffer his shitty prose than the finely polished Marvel movie, or even a finely polished movie based on Dick's work. I understand your disagreement.

[Anonymous No.21880781]

>>21880549
Maybe he should have stuck closer to home.

[Anonymous No.21880786]

Matthiessen

[Anonymous No.21880817]

>>21879529
>>21879534
Could be Pynchon, one of the major omissions of that list who also wore a sailor’s outfit in that one famous picture of him, and perhaps has his face partially obscured to reflect his reclusiveness. I don’t understand the context for this picture though because Bloom was very fond of Pynchon, when did he make a list of 12 most significant American authors?

[Anonymous No.21880824]

>>21879225
Can we at least all agree that the greatest American novel is definitely NOT Nathaniel Hawthorne?

[Anonymous No.21880828]

>>21880761
well it depends on what you mean by good ideas. like i said, i do think the marvel movie problem is originality, or, a lack of good new ideas. but i assume thats not what you mean by ideas? aside from the artistic value of how bonkers and engaging his shit was, and the pulpy page turner pace, what pkds stories could be claimed to convey are very convoluted and confused cosmologies, which his exegesis conveys better, or at least without the pretense of narrative getting in the way, no?
>or even a finely polished movie based on Dick's work
why?

[Anonymous No.21880857]

>>21880828
>what pkds stories could be claimed to convey are very convoluted and confused cosmologies
This does not hold true for Androids or High Castle.
>why?
Because all of the ones with which I am familiar deviated so heavily from his original intent. Do you happen to know how the TV show for High Castle closed? I could not hold past the boredom to finish it, but I harbor doubts that they could capture the ending that Dick did - or even that they would want to do so.

[Anonymous No.21881267]

>>21880817
The comic is in regards to some book Bloom published in 2015 where he explains why those twelve authors are the greatest American authors ever.

[Anonymous No.21881305]

I do not care for Faulkner

[Anonymous No.21881343]

>>21881305
He insists upon himself. (Unironically)

[Anonymous No.21881373]

>>21879225
Not including Melville or Fitzgerald is pure copium

[Anonymous No.21881427]

>>21879471
He was a speed-addled hack with nothing to say writing young adult stories for cash.

[Anonymous No.21881617]

>>21879471
I like Dick but it is an insult to compare him to Hemingway, who mastered his own minimal prose style

[Anonymous No.21881730]

>>21879225
I think melville, james, twain, faulkner, steinbeck and hawthorne are probably the greatest american novelists, but I would legitimately put willa cather up there as well.

[Anonymous No.21881737]

>>21881617
Hemingway sure mastered that shotgun.

[Anonymous No.21881741]

Pic related is the true triumvirate.

[Anonymous No.21881757]

>>21880817
He was fond of him because they were friends but Bloom was also a bit of a /lit/-like Classics reading NPC. He maintained contemporary novelists weren't meant to be compared with classical writers just yet.

[Anonymous No.21881802]

The best American novelist is such a boring argument because none of the works inspire much devotion. Everyone is at best and 8.5

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21881817]

>>21880044
This is absurd. Is Eugene Onegin a work of Russian literature? Academics including Nabokov agree it was heavily influenced far more by Western Euro literature and culture rather than Russian, so perhaps we should exclude it from the canon of Russian literature?

[Anonymous No.21881853]

Absalom Absalom is the American novel don't @ me you wild niggers

[Anonymous No.21881924]

>>21881737
And dick did not quite master the vehicular murder suicide

[Anonymous No.21881955]

Melville should be up there too imo. That being said, the best is still Faulkner regardless.

[Anonymous No.21881957]

>>21881817
I don't care about the Russian of canon literature or Nabokov or even the canon of American literature

[Anonymous No.21881996]

>>21880549
t. incel

[Anonymous No.21882558]

>>21880857
>This does not hold true for Androids or High Castle
Likewise, i think youre overrating the insights to be found in them because of the artistry
>Because
doesnt sound polished at all. thoughts on blade runner?

[Anonymous No.21882577]

>>21879225
Melville
Mark Twain
Gene Wolfe

[Anonymous No.21882578]

For this category it's James.

Gaddis overall.

Best poet is Dickinson.

Best playwright is Miller.

Best TV writing is Vince Gilligan.

[Anonymous No.21882581]

>>21882558
>thoughts on blade runner?
The only thing that I can imagine is that Hollywood made Blade Runner in order to make sure that no one did a film version of Androids. Blade Runner has so much that is not in the original work and is missing so much of the original work. IF no one had told me that they were related then I might never have made the leap to realize that they were supposed to be complementary. Likewise, the TV version of High Castle has a ton of stuff that is fully fleshed out that is not even brushed upon in the book. The book screams through to the end. The TV series is a long drawn out affair. Simple devices that Dick used get drowned in the clutter of the TV show, if they appear at all.