Thoughts on this?

Things like this are a logical consequence of identity politics.

>10 years ago: "identity politics is good and needed"
>now: "this is a consequence of identity politics, identity politics is sad"

reminder that these are the same people and that their opinions and ability to do politics is bad

Why did he use an Asian name and not a black name or something?

>use a black name
>don't write about being black
it's a question of credulity

serves them right for Pearl Harbor

The ones that moan about racism are the truly racist ones. More news at 11.

Also, the "cultural appropriation" attack against him is laughable. The whole world has been "culturally appropriating" white culture for well over a century now. This entire incident is actually STILL just white culture. Impudence and underhandedness are a repulsive combo.

>The ones that moan about racism are the truly racist ones
>This entire incident is actually STILL just white culture (...) Impudence and underhandedness
What a tick, I think YOU may be racist

>The ones that moan about racism are the truly racist ones.

No I'm pretty sure thats the people who say nigger and kike a lot

What if you use 'Jew' as a pejorative?

what if you only say it sometimes.

It's racist to pin anything to an entire race and hate the race for it, like people who go on about "white privilege" and "cultural appropriation".

There's a different way to use it?

Anyone can have a white name but whites have to have white names. What?

#notallwhitepeople

I hope David Wong is the next in line.

Cheating is fine when the losers do it.

I live in Poland and I knew a 100% (99%?) white guy whose surname was "Il" like in "Kim Jong-il".
Also Yi-Fen Chou did nuffin wrong

why is the headline not "publishing industry under fire for publishing asians too often"
never mind i know the answer to that one

but how was this information revealed? it's not mandatory for a writer to reveal themselves

never mind
also
>2015

lol bald

are you that dense?

bECAUSeEHIWTE MEN ARE NTOT OPPRESsedkE

the weird thing about this is he took a name from a person he knew from his personal life.

>europeans cant have asian names
American retardation. Just ignore it. Their toxic country will eventually consume itself.

sup stupid

This shit is more pervasive in western europe desu

All literary awards and all awards for that matter, are empty simulacra, events that exist only to circularly affirm their own relevance. Nobody cares abou literature or film, but people still care about identity politics.

you sound like those people who say, "what are you complaining about? slavery ended 150 years ago."

>women used male names to avoid publishing discrimination
>fine
>white man used asian name to avoid publishing discrimination
>racist scum
Really fires the nuerons

I just want to exit the Calvinist morass of never ending guilt and get to the part with nietszchean affirmation. Leftists sexually get off to guilt and black people/trannies like ta neshi coats get off at being victimised. I just want out of this game

>how dare he exploit our politically correct microcosm of nepotism
>rrrrRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

it's not really a double standard. gender discrimination was an industry-wide practice well into the 20th century. read Woolf, A Room of One's Own. whereas today, one unaccomplished white guy decides to trick his way into the system. btw, no one called your literary hero a "racist," he's just a mediocre writer with shoddy ethics.

>be a girl
>pen name is male
>don't want to change penname
>having a female name is advantageous in the current climate

I think it says way more about the literary community, in that they're much more willing to accept sub-par work as long as it's from a minority, than it says about the writer.

Well if he's a mediocre writer he shouldn't have been published in the first place. This just shows how exploitable the publishing industry can be. Undeserving people of all identities are becoming published without any merit behind them.

How did changing his name get him into the industry then?

You must be high in agreeableness.

>not making an androgynous multi-ethnic pen name to keep people guessing
Start with the Greeks

I'm thinking of just saying screw it and making a name made up of random non-name words like an indie punk band. Something like Space Beetroot.

it was a tiny poetry publication (like...7 readers) with some sort of ethnic/minority theme.

Keep kidding yourselves white men are victims /pol/, its your heart attack

Seinfeld already covered that one.

Do you honestly believe white men can't be victims? Are you really that retarded?

Criminally underrated.

>Muh ethics!

Oh please you people have been undermining aesthetics and meritocracy for years with victim hood based criteria and then you complain about ethics! Remember, even Woolf was a good old Tory with a healthy contempt for the wogs. You openly admit it isn't about aesthetics but about redressing past identitarian grievances, about 'ethics'. This man was robbing a righteous victim of his place in the collection. It was never about poetry. You are just another managerial shithead busy body high off his own guilt. I suppose your dick gets hard whenever you get the chance to chastise your 'fellow white people'.

I did some research on this last year. Sherman Alexie (editor for Best American Poetry 2015) said he was intrigued by the fact that a chinese woman wrote a poem so centered on greek mythology, western culture, and christianity--as if this was an outsider's perspective on the whole circus. of course, the outsider perspective as reading and misreading is lost entirely when the author reveals it to be a hoax. to answer your question, the editor read the poem in a better light due to his assumptions about the author.

i think our fascination with the individual merit of the """Text Itself,""" and regardless to the facts of its composition or its author's origins, is an idea that is fundamentally at odds with the current literary marketplace. when you say that work should be judged on its own and not in relation to the author, you ignore all the real instances of author-based judgment. we use author names as guarantees of quality and style, historical and ideological units, and conceptual unities. You read a Stevens poem with different assumptions and critical biases than an Eliot poem.

i think that for texts to be judged solely on "literary merit" we'd have to go back to pre-Chaucer days when literary texts were anonymous and traded around the fireplace or over a drink. and that's just not gonna happen, writers want money and recognition, and publishers need that stamp of quality that is a name.

if your contention is that white men are being systematically shut out of publishing, please get a grip. certain publications are catered to minorities, yes. but the majority of published authors are still white and male

poynter.org/2012/why-88-of-books-reviewed-by-the-new-york-times-are-written-by-white-authors/176705/

theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/04/research-male-writers-dominate-books-world

if you think that minority-catered publications are a form of "victimizing" white men, you have a fantastically low bar for victimization and general butthurt

please tell me of all the great white male authors, bearers of the torch, our generation's last bastion of "aesthetics and meritocracy," who have been stymied by the far-left / marxist / jewish / publishing conspiracy.

bitch please. The writers of our generation are DFW, Bolano, Franzen, Knausgaard, etc. The white male is doing well for himself. check yourself before you shrek yourself

>yes. but the majority of published authors are still white and male
Because the majority of authors in the West are white and male. Please show me a publisher that publishes ONLY whites and or males.

(((They))) won't publish white men. I myself have considered writing under a Jewish female pen-name to get published

>i think that for texts to be judged solely on "literary merit" we'd have to go back to pre-Chaucer days when literary texts were anonymous and traded around the fireplace or over a drink. and that's just not gonna happen, writers want money and recognition, and publishers need that stamp of quality that is a name.
Or just New Criticism, which is fucking overdue for a revival.

Why don't we send them back to Africa, where they would be if it weren't for slavery? Surely they would be better off, since it's so racist here?

>using your own initials is 'male sounding'

The publishing industry is part of the liberal managerial state and consumed by its ideology. You see the fact white people are still getting published as a social, 'ethical' problem to be solved. The texts themselves don't matter, books could be blank for all you care. It's about empowering the victims, being representative of our diverse and vibrant society. You are the kind of man to clap at free verse slam poetry events about fat shaming. I think art and literature are dead and have been dead for a while. They are downright impossible in this society of ours. The smugness with which you reference Virginia Woolf and talk about muh legacy of institutional discrimination- priceless!

Authors should be assigned a random hexadecimal pen-name for their first few books. After being published three times you can switch to your real name.

...

So they were perfectly okay with publishing his stuff until they found out he was a different race? That sounds pretty racist.

Overdue for a revival because of political reasons? The philosophical reasons should suggest that New Criticism is never coming back.

>but the majority of published authors are still white and male

And how many of them were first published less than ten years ago?
A) white male authors are objectively better on average than others, thus more popular, thus "dominate" published work
B) but most of them got their foot in the door in the 70s, 80s, and 90s when "positive discrimination" and virtue-signalling were not viable financial strategies
C) thus the white males who entered the industry 20+ years ago are more popular and successful than the affirmative action hires who are being groomed as their replacements, but new white male writers are still being shutting out of the industry.

Conclusion: if nothing changes, the old white males (gurrm, Steven King, Terry Pratchett, etc.) will die off and be replaced by undeserving minorities and women whose work will not be economically viable and this will result in the industry conducting an about-face and letting white males in again, and the market will correct itself, but this whole idiotic experiment will cause severe damage to both authors and industry, prevent an entire generation of writers from ever getting off the ground, and set back western literature for several decades.

>please tell me of all the great white male authors, bearers of the torch, our generation's last bastion of "aesthetics and meritocracy," who have been stymied by the far-left / marxist / jewish / publishing conspiracy.

How would we know who they are? The gate-keepers of our culture are preventing us from reading them

>I love 2471A3's work, hopefully xi publishes xir fourth book soon

>white male authors are objectively better on average than others, thus more popular,

This is pretty funny

You're racist for thinking it's about race

i couldn't give my next shit about who replaces grrm, king, and pratchett. they are mediocre writers who pander to the lowest common denominator. then again, you sound like the kind of person who reads mediocre writers

Name a non-white female author who rivals Steven King or George Martin in popularity

>Overdue for a revival because of political reasons?
No, not at all. I don't disagree substantially with most of your post. But, I do think there absolutely is value in assessing a work on its own merits without relation to the author, climate, etc. These things are all valuable - and you could say essential to the complete analysis - but the work also exists in and of itself.

I feel like nowadays these is a total abandonment of that even when you're learning how to read and study literature. I also feel that abandoning that often removes the individual reaction and thoughts of a single reader in favour of a consensus, background-influenced opinion which it's easy to pitch as objective. New Criticism is definitely the school I relate to most as a reader whenever I'm looking at something to take it apart.

>The philosophical reasons should suggest that New Criticism is never coming back.
???? Would you explain this more?

Please, enlighten me with all the women and minorities you read who are good

King and Grrm are shit but their popularity is what was relevant to the discussion re: muh top 88 authors being white males (for such an enlightened intellectual, your reading comprehension leaves a great deal to be desired).

Show me a field of the written word in which the top five white males do not/did not (90-95% of actually good writers are dead) produce superior quality work to the top five equal opportunities hires.

i know you said nonwhite to avoid the obvious answers, HP, twilight, and 50 shades. but honestly, why the fuck are you talking about genre trash? as if popularity = quality. on Veeky Forums of all places.

What? I was laughing more at the link between popularity and objective merit

This is why I believe fascism is the solution, the all consuming cult of the victim, the shrieking, the snivelling, the squealing pathetic victim threatens to engulf everything and destroy civilisation itself. NeXT thing you know, they are just going to wheel out a snivelling transgendered autistic mixed race lesbian on a wheelchair while the public claps and apologises profusely for their incorregible bigotry. This is how art dies.

The closest thing would be purveyors of literal feces like Rowling and Meyers but considering their works as books is a bit of a stretch

Harry Potter and Twilight are still books, user.

That was what the initial post to which I responded concerned, but if you want to move the goalposts then reveal all the non-white and/or female authors possessed of objective merit.

i find it funny that you're trying so hard to talk about "popularity" and "superior quality work" in the same breath. you're just all over the place. truly the meanderings of a crippled mind

btw, i doubt you have read any minorities or women, since you have such a hard time thinking of the "good" ones and hence need them to be "revealed" to you. so try Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Jay Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

>inb4 "they're old!"
age and greatness go together. you have a much wider pool. if you wanna take this counterargument, gimme a "good" white male under 40

>btw, i doubt you have read any minorities or women,

Sylvia Plath, Jennifer Egan, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, all absolute emperor's new clothes shit. Hanya Yanigahara is an amazingly bad joke.Virginia Woolfe is extremely overrated and subpar. All of the 19th and 18th century female writers are overrated.
>Inb4 they're old

Well we are talking about barriers to new authors so it is actually appropriate to ask for proof that the current crop of affirmative action hires deserve to be hired, but we can play the "what about these writers from half a century ago" game.

>I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

Hahahahahaha next

>virginia woolfe
>overrated and subpar
opinion descarted

>if you want to move the goalposts

I can't move the goalposts if that was literally my post first. Like I said, it was funny that you link popularity and objective merit.

"merit?" you sure sound spooked.

>poetryfoundation.org/poems/48635/book-of-isaiah-part-i

Also typical sophomore English major pseud shit that I could find in Veeky Forums's creative writing critique thread

The goalposts were set by whom I responded to, take it up with him

who are you quoting?

>www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42751/boleros-14

Pretty shit, but no more than most post-1920 poetry, certainly better than the two women. Still shit though.

>No, not at all. I don't disagree substantially with most of your post.

You're replying to my first post. I think a kind of formalism is valuable in terms of having multiple approaches to a single (body of) work, as is social, etc. But there is a kind of magical thinking required to pretend that a work can be completely separate from author and the rest (the outside), especially one that relies so heavily on language which can't ever be pinned down as meaning only ever its referent. These idealised states can't really exist. Or rather, there are problems in the nature of an isolated aesthetic judgment that contradict its claims to truth.

>Ralph Ellison
>Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis.

Thought he was ok until that eye-rollingly bad line. 90% of black authors are mentally incapable of writing about anything but being black, and about 60% of female authors are incapable of writing about anything but being female. At least gay authors have proven themselves capable of writing about topics other than bum-piracy.

I would cut Ellison slack for failing to buck the trend were the quality of the writing worthwhile, but it's really not unless you compare it to semi-verbal gruntings such as "we real cool", which is a pretty low bar.

I appreciate that you suggested poetry though because I wasn't going to sit here and read four novels just for the sake of argument.

Getting published isn't the end goal here. I know plenty of people who are published, even some with actual published novels, who never made a dime doing it, and as far as they know nobody has ever read their word.

The end goal, of course is to actually gain readership, and make some money doing it.

This guy is just using a dumb trick in order to get his shitty stuff published, which in itself is fairly worthless thing. So whatever.

Only if by western you mean the northern countries, France, Great Britain and Germany. If by that you men "Western Europe", then yes, we're at an agreement.

this only shows how stupid readers are

what if an asian used a white pen name

Woolfe does nothing that Joyce and Faulkner don't do better, and I don't even like Joyce and find Faulkner very hit-or-miss, but they do what I don't like better than Woolfe. She's not terrible, just highly overrated by people like (you).

Yeats and Hardy were pretty much the last good authors that set out to write "literary" work. It has been, however, a steady decline, in poetry at least, since the romantics, with very few exceptions.

Keeping all this in mind, and approaching texts on the terms of their authors, it is still the case, as I have said, that white men write better modernist and post-modernist dreck than anybody else.

It's the only way for heterosexual white guys to get published nowadays.

Is it really magical thinking when all you have is the book, or whatever text, in front of you though? That's all you have. At first, at core or whatever, that's what you're using. Anything else is outside it.

I actually do agree with you when you say the idealised state of this kind of analysis can't really exist. But when you concentrate to heavily on ' the outside' you can also get into a sort of feedback loop of authenticity between the writer and the reader that starts to become wholly separate from the text and its merits. Look at the contrition the YA market goes through on its books that deal with (or even mention) a minority audience. The author is attacked on the credentials of their identity; the reader is questioned on the credentials of their identity.

To pick out the YA market and readership is an extreme example but the strains of that kind of thought exist at all levels, and I feel they're given credence they really shouldn't be. A text-centered analysis lessens that. I'm not a complete purist about it and I think you ultimately should use the context in fully analysing something. But often now it feels like bringing it back to the author's identity is the immediate go-to and even the object of the analysis.

(I also feel that - at least sometimes - when it's the really good stuff all the cues you'd take from reading into the background are there and *are* the text anyway. An example for me would be like Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok's 'Girlfriend' poems. You read into it and you get the exact background, this happened here, this there, one thought this and the other this. But it's all really only detail: the essential stuff is already there in their respective poems.)

France, GB, and Germany are, what, 210 million people out of an EU population of 500ish million? Throw in another 20m for Scandicucks if you want to be fair, and we're looking at almost half the EU population living under radical identitarian leftist regimes and cultures. Just because traditionalism thrives in Montenegro and Liechtenstein doesn't mean that Europe is better off than America in this regard. It is also worth noting that these ideologies took hold first in North-Western Europe. You had a convergently evolved "sexual revolution" at the exact same time as we did, in Germany, France, Sweden, etc.

Why would an Asian want to reduce his or her odds of being published?