Cormac btfo

>B.R Meyers is a dude, user.

Oh shit I take back my criticism. Guy made a lot of good points

Pretty much. Some points I disagree with but overall seems fine.

Some specific criticisms aren't inaccurate, but that whole hostility towards any difficult prose is ridiculous.

>At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing.

Oh no how dare readers have to think about what they're reading.

Steven Moore writes a cogent argument against this attitude in his book about the novel's history. You can read the whole intro on its Google books preview.

Thank you. Myers is a dolt, the literary equivalent of a first date you might bring to a good film complaining that "she doesn't get it" over and over again.

There's a difference between having to think about what you're reading because it's challenging in a thematically appropriate way and having to think about it because the author is masturbating in your face and you're not sure why.

It's also incredibly out of context and spoken my a madman in the story

i agree 100%
just started reading memoirs of hadrian, and it's incredible how this translation of an adaptation based on 2000 year old prose stands so fucking far above all the postmodern trash the critics shit themselves over

In principle I agree, but he chose his targets based on their popularity to bolster his arguments and not necessarily because they were the best examples. I don't agree with any of the DeLillo passages, McCarthy is sometimes self-indulgent and can be very repetitive with syntax but in general it is justified and works (though the example of the hangover being so cosmically described in All the Pretty Horses was pretty funny), and Auster isn't exactly considered a master prose stylist in most circles

I'LL NEVER GET Delilo. Maybe White Noise is an easy target but that book is dismal.

and i remember people praising white noise as his best work!
i'm starting to strongly suspect that all these glowing reviews are a massive sham, a great big club where everyone tacitly agrees to give good reviews in exchange for good reviews, so everyone wins, everyone gets paid
after all, it can't be the case that EVERY critic is full of shit, right?

When shit like ulysses was published 100 years ago contemporary writing is just going to become more and more incomprehebsible to a larger section of the general population until the only people who read and write literature will be a group of very well educated people who only meet online in the darkest depths of the internet on horribly obscure image boards; hidden behind walls of atrocity featured on other content surrounding it; only allowing the bravest free thinkers to enter.

She makes a good point about the literary establishments treatment of genre fiction as subordinate to the quote on quote literary. Beyond that she is kind of a debbie downer and a whiner.

Plebs have been squawking for centuries about how they can't read books by accomplished authors.

This is nothing new nor even worthy of note.

This. Vollman is especially guilty of it. Joyce too.

White Noise is a great book, you are entitled to your opinion, but just because it does not align with that of others does not mean that you are somehow right and only your opinion matters. There are plenty of books other people acknowledge as great that I do not particularly like, what I do not do in response to this is claim that there is a conspiracy ongoing to promote the book.

I don't think its particularly pleb to call for sincerity in both prose and content.

For instance, Roth's books are extremely readable prose that still is of the highest quality.

>quote on quote

You read genre fiction and it shows.

While I think this is a well written article that certainly backs up her main point, I think more recent contemporary fiction award winners like Marlon James, Han Kang, Paul Beatty, bob dylan, Chirbes, Ferrante and Tao Lin all aspire to sincerity in prose.

McCarthy is one of only a handful of Americans who've produced anything worthwhile since Faulkner's death. Dismissing him exposes one as a pleb of the highest order.

All the Pretty Horses and his work post Blood Meridian is not comparable to BM, Suttree, and Child of God. His newer stuff IS pretentiou re: prose style.

>In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.

I mean, this is garbage, but it's not garbage because it's "difficult," it just sucks.

You wonder how long the author spent writing that hot mess.

I kinda like the effort put into that wool metaphor.

Glad someone on here has read Beaty. Did you like The Sellout?

>blood meridian
>more offensive to native people than old westerns

what?

The article is so fucking true it hurts. Fuck this pretentious pomo New Yorker style. Fuck it so hard. I can literally hear the English literature majors straining to seem intelligent when they write like this. It reads like shit. Utter shit.

>inb4 hurr u a pleb

Nope. Being a lazy Po faced nu-person isn't necessary to write good books.

>literally

>As a kid out of Cheyenne life wound Mero in a wool suit, he had been unraveling since.

???

>long unfurling
>tight wound
>wool suit
>spooled-out

I mean, I get it, it's just really ugly.

All bad poetry is sincere &c.

calling something Pretentious is 100% projection and 0% valid criticism

fucking hacks all sitting around putting in all their effort to bring themselves and all the art that surrounds them down a few levels

wtf I love Veeky Forums now

Wowee muh Cultural Marxism really made me think

Calling something pretentious can 100% be a valid criticism. The only people who think that it can't be are those who aren't smart enough to tell when a work is over-inflating itself compared to when a work is actually intelligent

>I doubt McCarthy could explain any of this
>He just likes the way it sounds
So he can explain it.

He's a libcuck. The guy wrote an article about how North Korea is actually right wing, not Communist.

Calm down Mr. Edgy.

Iunno probably, I mean I enjoy McCarthy DeLillo and Auster but then again I'm not an english lit major so my thoughts on syntax probably aren't as sophisticated . I'm also not as well-read as this guy apparently is so I don't have a lot of dreck to compare it to

I don't think anyone actually thinks NK is communist nowadays. Or China. Which is strange, because they do think the USSR was.

they're right behind me :O

>implying socialism is pauperism
>implying both markets and planning are anything more than tools to develop the productive forces
>implying the base does not determine the superstructure
>implying the development of the productive forces can't take place under the alliance of the workers, farmers and entrepreneurs for the benefit of all
>implying the commanding heights of the economy are market-dependent in China

That sums most of it up.

Your sentences are unrelated to each other.

I thought the writer was a woman based on OP's

>she

and the androgynous ambiguity of the intials "B.R." not contradicting this, so I was pretty lenient towards this article. Then, it turns out the guy who wrote is it a dude, and there's no excuse for that. That guy is just a fucking idiot and writes like a chick.

pic related, the big faggy poopyface himself

fuck u

I agree. I posted this article before and specifically talked about it's approach to DeLillo and got no response as to why it was wrong.

What's great about it?

>Pretension

OR

>The democratisation of literature

I'll take pretension, thanks.

What this person is railing against is not so much pretentiousness as the mere existence of a hierarchy within literature. Should we draw a parallel with a ladder, the author is one of those who would fail to reach its highest rungs. Rather than aspiring to do so, they do away with the ladder.

Those who cannot climb, can only writhe in the muck.

the only honest answer in this thread. Everyone else acting like they're formal analysts, lmao at ur lives cucks

Was he being intentionally ironic when he made his article on well-regarded writing being pretentious and unpleasant to read pretentious and unpleasant to read? I think not.

I'm sure this article just triggers this board because most of Veeky Forums, being made up of people who want to read rather than readers, is easily impressed by the kind of parlour tricks Myers highlights. White Noise struck me as one long parlour trick, indeed - specifically think that Myers' point about DeLillo's tendency to be vague as a means of creating suggestions of deeper meaning when there are not is spot-on. But there's no addressing that here, just these weird projections about Myers being some kind of Khmers Rouge of literary criticism.

>The guy wrote an article about how North Korea is actually right wing, not Communist.

Then he is correct.

Most people think of North Korea as some last vestige of Soviet "communism" which is quite wrong. In reality, North Korea is most like the old Imperial Japan, a right wing nationalist military dictatorship.

When the Korean peninsula was partitioned at the end of the war, the USSR sought to prop a communist government like it was doing all over Europe. The problem was, unlike in Europe there was no far-left intelligentsia from which to draw in order to do that. Korea was a former colony of the Empire of Japan, and the best they could do was use elites from colonized Korea. They were more in the mold of right wing militarists, but at the very least they were anti-US.

The similarities between DPRK and Imperial Japan are numerous.

Benevolent quasi-devine father-leader? Check. The Emperor and the Kims, particularly Kim Il Sung, whose birthday is called "The of the Sun." Hmmm, sun. Sound familiar?

Sacred Mountain? Check. Mt. Paektu is DPRK's Mt. Fuji.

North Korea's "Songun" military first policy is an echo of imperial Japan's "Fukoku Kyohei" policy--or "Rich Country, Strong Army".

*The Day of the Sun

>calling something Pretentious is 100% projection and 0% valid criticism

So during every moment throughout history when someone called something pretentious it wasn't valid criticism? Literally every single instance?

You are triggered and in denial. Probably because you're pretentious as fuck.

He's trying to distance Marxism from its crimes, like a libcuck.

That's a stretch. Imperial Japan's cultural and monarchic roots were very deep and it grew pretty tall before the US burned it down. NK by comparison is a sickly little sapling that would fall over if it weren't tied to China's upright bulk.

It's not really a stretch. Korea's history is one of adopting foreign ideologies and ideas and going kind of nuts with them - the original "Hermit Kingdom" was so-called because it had withdrawn from the world to perfect Confucianism, seeing China as a corrupt, impure version of the original idea, and even claiming that Confucius had really been Korean. North Korea has done the same with both Imperial Japanese ideology and a very second-hand (like, extremely, Kim Il-Sung copied most of his speeches and ideas from Mao Zedong without really thinking about them) Marxism, blending them into the lovely, um, thing, that is "Juche/Songun". But the Marxism is a lot more shallow than the Japanese nationalist stuff.

And don't be so sure about how sickly NK is. Economically, sure, but the core of NK's appeal to its citizens is that it is "pure" Korea, as opposed to the compromised South, and I've spoken to many a Southerner who will admit that the North kind of does appeal in that sense. It's a much more Korean country than many non-Koreans assume it to be.

Fuckin lol

Your clauses are unrelated.

>Harry potter
>american

>twilight, 50 shades
>prose

There can only be one Manifesto…

mccarthy has difficult prose?
what the fuck?

A woman should write something good before women are allowed to comment on literature. Good thing not one will, they're incapable of individual thought. Cormac is the best living American author

It is quite bad though

agreed comrade pic related its me