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/lit/ - Literature

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4609517 No.4609517[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

>When reviewers and prize jurors tout a repetitive style as "the last word in gnomic control," or a jumble of unsustained metaphor as "lyrical" writing, it is obvious that they, too, are having difficulty understanding what they read. Would Mr. Cardan be puzzled to find them in the thrall of writers who are deliberately obscure, or who chant in strange cadences? I doubt it. And what could be more natural than that the same elite should scorn unaffected English as "workmanlike prose"—an idiom incompatible with real literature? Stephen King's a plain, honest man, just the author to read on the subway. But Master, he is no Latiner.

>If the new dispensation were to revive good "Mandarin" writing—to use the term coined by the British critic Cyril Connolly for the prose of writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—then I would be the last to complain. But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity is easy—the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks..

>> No.4609532

Who cares about critics? Stephen King will live forever, DFW will be a stammering fool soon forgotten by anyone not in Gen X

>> No.4609529

Pedantism is the preferred genre of teenagers. An example?

"demand concentration" means just "I don't like it".
It's fun how idiocrats claim they are high-culture vanguard.

>> No.4609536

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

>> No.4609625
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4609625

>>4609536
>that whole article

>> No.4609692

>>4609517
I would have enjoyed some examples

>> No.4609713

>>4609532
The chances of either of them being remembered in 200 years is slim, but at least DFW has a seed planted in academia.

>> No.4609736

>>4609517

To quote Wilde, repetition is what converts an appetite into an art. When people do not have anything more interesting to say, they blabber their guts out, just for the pleasure of it. If they could only stay quiet for a moment or two and contain those memories they have experienced, and then dye them with the intensity of other constrained notions associated with that very memory, stuff would come out more beautiful than before.

Only he who has elaborated his work in the darkness with all the care of the murderer who is plotting his crime, will create anything of merit.

>> No.4609738

>>4609713
King's been given some prominent awards, and so he'll probably be read by at least a few specialists interested in the literary culture of this period. I also suspect genre will continue to gain prestige as more and more writers continue blending it into literary fiction, so he may be studied as some writers predecessors.
Wallace has about as strong a claim, but I suspect he's going to be eclipsed by people like Saunders, Delillo, and Barthelme.

>> No.4609741

>>4609532
>implying the hoi polloi determine what books are remembered

have a look at this: http://www.kruegerbooks.com/books/best-sellers/index.html - note the abundance of no names and the absence of big names

>> No.4609747

>>4609738
>as more and more writers continue blending it into literary fiction

you mean writers like DFW?

>> No.4609748

>>4609747
Yes. I said he had as strong a claim.

>> No.4609768

>>4609738
Saunders doesn't touch DFW in merit or popularity, and Barthelme is already receding into the past.

Mainstream audiences have short memories. Some other popcorn lit author will come along and eclipse King soon after he dies. Wallace's name, meanwhile, will be preserved in the ivory tower of academia.

>> No.4609804

>>4609768
But the ivory tower itself won't last. Everything is going to change, and soon.

"And therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto the present considerations seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment."

>> No.4609817

>>4609804
If the ivory tower doesn't last, neither will anything that would lead to King being remembered.

>> No.4609818

>>4609532

>Stephen King will live forever

you don't understand how history works, nor is ad populum a justification of anything. fuck off.

>> No.4610047

>>4609517
>But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel.

This guy totally predicted Tao Lin.

>> No.4610088

>>4610047
I was thinking Franzen