Where does Toni Morrison rank among American novelists

lets be honest...no american novel can really be described as an epic besides Moby Dick

I love Morrison's work but she doesn't come any where near Melville

i don't know if you're kidding but i'd like to actually talk about this a bit.

i don't think that's really what one should use to gauge, but knock him off the list then. still have to deal with those other authors.

and its not really detracting from how good she is to say she's not the best. she's good enough to be talked about as *one of* the best. i say this as a black female american (in a class on morrison no less), not /pol/ or anything: i don't really think she's in the running for best american author overall because what she writes is so concentrated on black americans.

though what says is intersting, because its kind of the opposite. i agree that it actually does give her a lot of 'american' merit at the same time.

i really don't know who to pick. i kind of want to say faulkner but i haven't read enough of him and i haven't read melville or pynchon, or the other authors i mentioned recently enough to really talk about them.

so you call people memelords if they disagree

yet you try to say that because Morrison's black she automatically has wrote the "great american novel"

over something like Moby Dick....MOBY DICK, read Melville before you try to talk some liberal bullshit

Mason & Dickson

The Bluest Eye never gets any love. Hell of a debut novel.

just finished it actually

fucking great. liked it even more than Sula

ok...but does that make it as good as Moby Dick

They are discussing literature on the literature board, sweety.

Calm down with the race war mentality

why do people like this book? its just him talking about fucking whale anatomy for half of it, and the language he uses is so outdated and stupid, not to mention the plot is the epitome of dull and uncreative. he had no discernible talent.

>i agree that it actually does give her a lot of 'american' merit at the same time.
It's a bit like the popular claim that jazz is the characteristically American style of music.

It doesn't mean everything of course. Just because I think the black American story is unique and important doesn't mean I think everyone should read only black authors.

Sure, and so a novel that aspires to "American epic" like Moby Dick is important, too. But maybe that means epic isn't really an "American" form of literature. It's something we can respect and understand very well, and the execution of a classic form in the American hand is interesting in its own right, but in a different way than Morrison, I think.

It's apples and oranges I guess.

>so you call people memelords if they disagree
>yet you try to say that because Morrison's black she automatically has wrote the "great american novel"
Nope. Either you can't read what I've written to comprehension (in which case I seriously doubt that you appreciate Melville), or you are intentionally arguing in bad faith.

The Great American Novel is actually Huck Finn, because it focuses on a character seeking to better himself by taking himself out of society, rather than improving his status in society like in a European novel.

But, no, please continue with the extremely pointless shitposting

WTF is this...

many of the themes must go over your head if you didn't understand Moby Dick

says the person that tried to say Morrison was superior to Melville

ok...but does that make it as good as Moby Dick?

That's a tricky classification, though. You're making Huck out to be the king of libertarians, which is a pretty American ideology, but many Americans would rather prefer the narrative of improving one's status, I think.

You seem to have made a factual error, friendo.

wow what the FUCK

she taught at my university in the past...AHHHH

the other day at the library a librarian came up to me and told me she graduated(same uni) and morrison gave the speech...

hehehe... Jazz

yeah its the apples and oranges that makes saying any one of these authors is best. the diversity is...somewhat ironically...also american

This post is incomprehensible. My fellow, cannabis chuckles until I lose track of my hindquarters?

They'll choose that path because it's less resistance , but they'll still be fascinated by stories of self-reliant trailblazers. It's the frontier spirit.

>self-reliant trailblazers
Ok, what about, say, Robinson Crusoe?

i think Melville is superior to Morrison

problem?

oops lol. i meant

>...makes saying that any one of these authors is best difficult.

>hehehe... Jazz
this is a joke about someones reference to jazz and Morrison's novel titled Jazz.

and before that i was ranting about how she did things at my university while i was in high school.

this is the guy that thinks Animal Collective is deep.

Oh so if you disagree with someone they are talking liberal bullshit......

That similar imperative is there, but HF is a more mature and refined look at the psychology of the willful outsider.

Since most American narratives come in the form of hip-hop, and most rappers make songs about rags-to-riches capitalist ventures, I think most people will ignore those self-reliant trailblazers. Then again, black people don't read, so whatever

Leaving aside your slightly dubious claim that it constitutes "most" American narratives, while I'm not personally a big fan of hip hop, I'm under the impression that the establishment of authenticity or "cred" is equally important to that of present (or, sometimes, future) success.

Individual authenticity seems not dissimilar to "self-reliant trailblazing."

Yeah, I would put her in the top ten American novelists honestly.

this is like the great american YA

this is the great american novel

Except it's not American. It takes place in the ocean.

black women actually read more than any other demographic

"(The difference between black and white readers isn't large enough to be statistically significant.)"
theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/most-likely-person-read-book-college-educated-black-woman/357091/

They're also the widest demographic of college students in America. I never noticed until I read that.

The Great American Novel is more like American Pastoral or something pleb with lots of feels like Born on the Fourth of July or something btw

I dont right now know any American white males that read (in person). And almost every American white male I know went to college. Its a fucking disgrace.

Interesting. The Pew survey of 1000 Americans (an incredibly limited sample size to extrapolate to 330 million people, I note) that The Atlantic is editorializing explicitly states that the difference between black and white readers IS statistically significant.

I suppose data's only significant for The Atlantic if it confirms their worldview

Heh, Roth literally named one of his books The Great American Novel.

>Slate's Jacob Weisberg spotted the data point

Only answer in a sentence or two bc I'll look it up myself if the answer is long, but where did this idea of/obsession with the great american novel come from? Offense meant, it seems like some kind of thing only really dumb freshman english majors care about.
ok but the difference is still not by very much, people in Veeky Forums seriously believe only white men read (because they don't leave the house/interact with their peers if they do go to school I'm "guessing")

hey I just posted the first link on google

It's a trope

Veeky Forums also thinks they have total knowledge of everyone's reading habits, unless someone tells you that they don't read much or you find their regularly updated goodreads account full of only ya or manga or something you don't know

The idea of the "great American novel" is that it is something unattainable. Something that can't quite be defined or pinned down. People who unironically say "such and such book is The Great American Novel" aren't getting the joke. The context is that American literature was on the rise at a time when ideas about singular greatness in literature were being discarded. It refers to the rising hegemony of the emerging great power in a mocking, even self-mocking way. America didn't have a single national-hero author, a Shakespeare or a Cervantes. It had a community of ambitious, living writers who made waves but couldn't be equated exactly with the European tradition.

It's a bit of a riff on the "America has no culture" meme, but not so derogatory. It simultaneously acknowledges that American literature had become great, while highlighting the brevity of American history.

>mfw America was born too late to contribute to the pantheon of literature

>mfw just in time for the history of memes

Does anyone have that pic of most burrowed book from libraries per race where black people were the only patricians?

No it's not you rube. HF is literally written for children. RC is way more technically competent. Muh self reliance is a Protestant meme that predates America, its roots are European.

Profitable pomo meaninglessness is more appropriately American. Jeff Koons is the Great American Novelist and he doesn't even write prose.

>what is sampling
>what is statistical significance

1000 participants is enough, as long as their selection process was suitably random, which is the bigger concern. Pew has a fairly good reputation though, and given that this is buried in a report on an entirely different topic, there is no reason to believe that this is incorrect.

without the raw data, statistical significance cannot be shown either way, and I'm not going to hunt down the raw numbers and do the maths just to refute a fucking shitpost. with only the median and mean, and such small numbers in response, I'd be comfortable in saying that there is no statistical difference between the two. obviously showing this mathematically would require more work than either of us, or, if we're being honest, the Atlantic put in, but as no one is going to put in the work, we'll all have to agree to disagree.

you're an idiot.

>but as no one is going to put in the work
But Pew, who has a fairly good reputation, did put in the work. The lowercase c next to the mean scores of black and white readers denotes that they were found to have a statistically significant difference

well that's egg in my face, ent it? I wondered what that had denoted, but, the lazy faggot I am, said fuck it.

though under closer inspection, that c indicates statistical significance from the third line, Hispanics.

and now the both of us look stupid, while The Atlantic comes out the best of us.

pourquoi

for one, giving a shit about demographics and statistics at all is stupid. it doesn't matter if other people who happen to look a bit like you do something, because that has no effect on your doing anything.

and for two, you gave up and just went in for the ad hominem [sorry for the meme fallacy shit, but I calls em as I sees em.], signaling that you knew that your argument was wrong, despite the evidence supporting your position. any effort whatsoever would have shown you to be correct, but rather than put in the effort of clicking a few links and reading a few lines, you gave up, and I, a person who disagrees with you, put in the effort to prove myself wrong. you've failed at every prompt, even when success was all but guaranteed.

ergo, an idiot.

>I think a novelist from the 19th century is better than anything in the 20th century therefore she is not a great American writer

Does anybody really care about Nobel prizes other than the committee that hands them out and the people in a position to receive them?

I mean, it's just a golden pat on the back for some privileged fuckstain at the end of the day, like any other "award".

I brought it up because the same untrue things are said all the time on this board (only white people read, men read more).
You're signaling by using the word signaling that I don't have any reason to read the rest of your post because only spazs use that word that way. :-*

You have never read HF.

Is there anything more embarrassing than when someone loses it because someone else doesn't follow the Rule of Debate on literally Veeky Forums. Obviously the person who puts the least effort in is the one who is winning.

>America's roots are European

You don't say

/r/writing