Take English course in college

So what's the terrible book: Gatsby? Huckleberry Finn?

Moby Dick

he already said an american novel e

>assigns shit American novel
you said american, is that because you dont respect american literature? expand unless you want to be discredited as an irrational bigot

You're complaining about studying Moby-Dick? Jesus Christ. Go better yourself, you ignorant toad.

>literature for the past 70 years
>implying there's been a piece of literature written in the last 70 years

Bullshit. You're kidding me right?

name the nation you think has had better literature in the past 70 years

hey guys, did you know that you don't have to reply to every thread you see?

when you reply to a shitpost on this website, it goes all the way to the very top of the catalog!

to prevent this from happening, you can type 'sage' in the options box, or, better yet, ignore the shitpost

you'll get the hang of it eventually, good luck!

Japan quite frankly. Even china.

Whether you think its good or bad is irrelevant. It's influential. That's why you're studying it in an academic setting.

american lit is saved from being a laughingstock by the grace of one william gaddis alone, which elevates it to top 3

if gaddis didnt exist american lit would rank well outside of the top 10.

I hope you're trolling, you daft, ignorant fuck.

Embarrassing. Gaddis isn't even among the top ten American authors.

Take your garbage somewhere else

>being this pleb

excluding poets, the only ones who can contend with gaddis would be melville, faulkner if you go for that kind of stuff, james, flanflan, and maybe the cornfather if you consider him a full american.

shoutout to gass and cather for doing some good work as well, but not quite at the level of the aforementioned.

Who is?

The adults are talking dear, back to your room. DFW and Pinecone are waiting for you.

user you're really venerating Gaddis, I'm curious if you find any American(s) more or commensurately as skilled as Gaddis.

Do you sincerely believe that Gaddis eclipsed Faulkner, Melville, or Eliot?

>Eliot
>American

i consider eliot british

i find it difficult to compare gaddis and melville and i venerate both. i cop out by categorizing gaddis as the best 20th century author and melville as the best 19th

i confess i dont understand faulkner, but i look forward to reading more from him to hopefully get better insight here.

also i guess i didnt make it obvious, but my reply was specifically targeted towards the "last 70 years" mentioned in the post i was replying to. more accurately it'd probalby be the last 50 years - in any case gaddis is clearly a generation (or more) after the likes of faulkner and o'connor, and i firmly believe he's the best american lit has to offer from the past 50 - 60 years. (recognitions was 1955, JR 1976)

I thought you were going to say Go Set a Watchman or something, Jesus user.

Don't prematurely make up your mind, while you may not enjoy the book aesthetically, that is to say find the writing beautiful in and of itself, to dismiss studying it an academic context is an absurd delusion.

re Eliot being British: that position is tenable, but the reason I am disposed to cast him into the American tradition is because he was born, raised, and educated in America, the two points being the most important. It's the same reason why I wouldn't classify Ada by Nabokov as a Swiss work.

I, of course, agree that J R and The Recognition are wonderful, and I personally find TR significantly superior to J R. However the rest of his work, i.e. ACGothic, AFoHOwn, AAgape are not even in the same artistic hemisphere as Faulkner's work. And there are legitimate problems with J R, 40 percent of the book is pulp, how much did Gaddis really say in 800 pages? Is this not a problem?

Faulkner's work, and the virtuosity of his work towers above Gaddis

the differnece is eliot consciously broke with the american tradition very early, making frequent trips to europe in his early 20s and essentially settling permanently there by 25, versus nabokov who moved over when he was essentially "artistically mature"

i disagree strongly regarding JR being pulp, and i urge you to give it another chance. two main points-
1. gaddis intended the book to feel like a whirlwind of sound and motion to mimic the frantic pace of corporate america/wall street. in that regard, the book's excess and maximalism was necessary to properly portray a sense of constant motion
2. the various subplots and interconnections, usually explores and occasionally abandoned (by design) was crucial to make the book more than just a "simple" critique of greed and excess through a financial lens, but to move it into an examination of the very underlying fabric of american society, of which financial greed was but one symptom of many

i find JR to be the better constructed work, but in terms of visceral impact and reaction TR is indeed superior. if anything, however, i would argue your critique of JR is better applied to TR, in that it could've used some level of excision and stronger editing. one must remember that TR was gaddis' first work, and to create a masterpiece that has flaws borne not of deficiency but of virtuosic overflow is something im very much willing to overlook for a FIRST BOOK.

re: >how much did gaddis really say in 800 pages
im not sure how familiar you are with the quirks and intricacies of various "sections" of american life (corporate america, high academia, suburban governments/communities, urban (really metropolitan) communities, wall street, art/music scene), but having non-insignificant exposure to all of the aforementioned, gaddis is without a doubt the most frighteningly prescient author i have ever come across. he nailed the traits of contemporay american society 50 years in advance, just by observation and insight into the peculiarly particular qualities of american society, and managed to extrapolate it into something that's highly relevant today. i think he said far more than you're giving him credit for.

i simply cannot agree with you re: agape agape. its a masterpiece, albeit one that requires the reading of gaddis' entire oeuvre and some level of understanding/resonance with his obsessions to appreciate.

>Gaddis intended the book to feel like a whirlwind of sound and motion to mimic the frantic pace of corporate america/wall street. in that regard, the book's excess and maximalism was necessary to properly portray a sense of constant motion

My dispute with this is a difference of degree, not kind. I am (perhaps naively) willing to assume that if Gaddis sporadically concatenated another 800 pages consisting solely of "HOPPIN' WITH FLAVOR," and "well, yes, ahm, you see," and "No boy, look at this here bond, here you see, with this here other ..." to raise the total page count to 1600 you would be willing to accept my appraisal of J R as garrulous, too pleonastic. Why could this theme not be imparted with 700 pages, 600 pages, do you think the 100th description of the fetid apartment was necessary? From my perspective 80 of these did not bolster his point. Sorry to bablbe on this...

>the various subplots and interconnections, usually explores and occasionally abandoned (by design) was crucial to make the book more than just a "simple" critique of greed and excess through a financial lens, but to move it into an examination of the very underlying fabric of american society, of which financial greed was but one symptom of many

I disagree with non of this

Re your willingness to over look artistic overflow in his first work: I strongly agree, which is why I am more critical of this excisive failure (IMO) in J R

Re "how much did Gaddis say": I'm not dismissing his lucid elucidations of these facets of American life and society, I am, however, critical of what I deem the banal and bombastic baggage he unnecessarily brought along with them

Again, sorry for the verbosity

funny you bring up
>difference of degree, not kind
because im fond (admittedly often facetiously) saying that i discount arguments arising from differences of degree, and consider only differences of kind. in application here, i suppose i would hide under a cop-out of "artistic license." i.e. gaddis chose, very deliberately, to incorporate this precise amount and pleonasticity to convey what he deemed the "proper" extent of repetition. he had added or excluded 100 pages either way, i don't feel it would've made a meaningful difference to me. i think it's meaningless to pose the 1600 page hypothetical, given that it's so far removed from the final product. i might have a better answer for this, since i've never really thought about this point and always implicitly accepted whatever amount of excess gaddis chose to impart as the correct amount.

Here's a "quote" you might like user, from one of my favourite authors, Barth, I unfortunately don't have the book with me and it is hard to find online some I'm paraphrasing, re differences of kind and degree:

Water gets cooler, and cooler, and cooler, and then it's ice. You are aging, aging, aging, and dead the next step. Differences of degree lead to differences of kind. (From The End of the Road)

>he had added or excluded 100 pages either way, i don't feel it would've made a meaningful difference to me.
user, don't you think this is at odds with this:
>[I have] always implicitly accepted whatever amount of excess gaddis chose to impart as the correct amount
You more of less capitulated that you agree The Recognitions could have used some trimming.

Gaddis is a genius, but I think criticizing his "efficiency" is quite legitimate

very interesting quote ill be on the lookout for it. not too familiar with barth, only read lost in the funhouse. the counter, of course, is that there is a discrete transition from water to ice (a phase change, which has strict scientific definitions) that makes the quote a bit misleading by trying to draw a continuous transition here; similar with aging/dying i suppose.

i don't think
>he had added or excluded 100 pages either way, i don't feel it would've made a meaningful difference to me.
>[I have] always implicitly accepted whatever amount of excess gaddis chose to impart as the correct amount
are inherently contradictory, though i can see how that can be read. my critical position has generally been to accept the text in front of me and to assume it is the correct one - and to focus efforts on how to interpret what is, and not what could have been. had gaddis presented me with a manuscript that's 100 pages longer or shorter, i would've used those texts as the basis of my thoughts on the text, and would not have entertained notions that it would've been longer or shorter, since it's a "non-issue" for me.

I kind of like Steinbeck.

Right, my point is that there is an analogous state change from 'as many pages as Gaddis needed,' to 'more than he needed,' and the difference of course, like cooling water further and further, is some number of pages ... one more, and one more, and one more, and alas! More than required.

Also, If you're going to pick up some Barth try the Sot-Weed Factor, an absolute favourite which rarely receives love on here.