/lit/ - Literature

>>3562445
Get rid of Joyce. I haven't read Beckett, so I can't comment. Add Plath.

>>3562448
you'd get rid of Joyce, but add Plath? Are you a retard?

>>3562448

It looks like they dragged Bloomy out of his coffin and bunged him in the microwave.

>>3562451
Does he say exactly why he cites Joyce? Is it because of his aleatory SoC bullshit?

>>3562456
He'll be dead within a year. You can tell by his earlobes.

>>3562457
>SoC
what?

>>3562448

Add Natsume Soseki and Lu Xun.

why is he much thinner? did he have chemo or something?

>>3562465
Stream-of-Consciousness

>>3562472
>Soseki
I agree.

>Lu Xun
He's good. Is he among the best of the 20th century? Not a chance.

Bloom's scope will, naturally, be Eurocentric, which is fine. I understand where he comes from. But if we're going to talk about the greats of the 20th century, pace Bloom, then you need to include Lispector, Mishima, von Doderer, Borges, Musil, and Fuentes for starters.

Pynchon Borges

>>3562457
No he just listed him

>>3562445
he lists the authors at 4:58

Sorry for being pleb, but who the fuck is Proust and what is he most known for?

>>3562534
An early 20th century French writer, wrote the longest novel ever written: In Search of Lost Time.

>>3562534
that's pretty pleb, little buddy. you probably should have just typed his name in google because you just humiliated yourself

I know he's old, but he isn't much of an orator.

>>3562541
>anonymous humiliation

I'm okay with that

I'd consider adding Woolf. Other than that, I wouldn't change anything.

>>3562559
That lady is a credit to womankind

>>3562559
Hmm. I'd be a bit sceptical about that. I liked To The Lighthouse, but A Room of One's Own seemed like an odd melange of essay and stream-of-consciousness.

i would add céline

>>3562534
>>3562541
>>3562557
Not many people know who he is, which is weird. It's not like you are in the minority (at least in the real world) for not knowing of Proust

>>3562559
Lispector>Woolf

>>3562557
you still know you suck though

seconding borges and mishima, throwing in salinger(for everything except rye), and also including bulgakov. the lack of females is disconcerting so virginia woolf and dorothy parker are my nominations in that department.

ah!!! but, my dearest monsieur and friend, is it not peculiar that monsieur Bloom does not name the very Self of himself?

maybe I am mistaken, monsieur! however, in case of the slightest faux-mistake posing as one I would like to propose the follow:

monsieur Bloom's self, is the peak of Al-peaks, the frosty mountains of Freidreich, the oaks of Woolf, the very greatest writer of the 20th century! splendid, no? such magnificient stories, n'est pas?

but monsieur, do you not concur? for veracity and reverence - peut-être, mon blonde bête, peut-être..

>>3562599
Salinger is terrible

Hermann Hesse was a pretty cool dude

>>3562599
>salinger
>not even comparable to joyce and proust...
>for everything except his best work


you retarded, son

>>3562768
You think Frank & Zooey even comes close to the heights of Ulysses and the Search?

I'd replace Kafka with Orwell.

>>3562448
Is it cool to hate James Joyce now?

George Orwell
JRR Tolkein
JD Salinger
JK Rowling
John Steinbeck
CS Lewis
Gabriel García Márquez
Kurt Vonnegut
Douglas Adams
Ernest Hemingway

>>3562933

My opinion btw

>>3562933
le epic ruseman at work

>>3562502
he admires Musil a great deal, his only reservation being that Musil's masterpiece was left unfinished, and I don't think he would deny the significance of Borges. He doesn't seem to have quite as much enthusiasm for Fuentes as you do, though

>>3562599
Dorothy Parker wrote a bunch of cute little witticisms but she's not very interesting otherwise

>>3562933

>JK Rowling
>Douglas Adams

>>3562621
jesus christ you're obnoxious

>>3562445
Switch out Beckett for Musil and Kafka for Borges.

Harold Bloom says you have to learn Greek, Latin, Spanish and Italian if you want to understand Western literature

>>3562961

Not a ruse. I know some choices aren't the hoity toityest but this is why:

Orwell: Wrote Animal Farm + 1984, both extremely interesting books which together sold more than any other 20th century author.

Tolkein: Wrote Lord of the Rings, which REVOLUTIONIZED all of Fantasy--you can separate Fantasy books to pre-Tolkein and post-Tolkein.

Rowling: Harry Potter. Absolutely the most successful book series of 20th-21st centuries, people are crazy about it. Even adults. Its Pottermania and left a huge mark on my generation and generations to come.

Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men; Grapes of Wrath; East of Eden. He wrote a lot of shit too, to be sure, but these books in particular shaped American literature and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature even.

CS Lewis: Narnia, is there any more classical kids books outside of Harry Potter? Nope. Also his work on Christianity, like Mere Christianity.

Gabriel García Márquez: Another Nobel Prize winning duder. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. I know I'm getting lazy here but they are good books.

Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Fucking hilarious. My little bro read it and he liked them just as much as me.

Ernest Hemingway: Badass as fuck. Completely shaped American literature. Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Farewell to Arms, the Sun Also Rises.

>>3563013
Pecuniary success =/= literary merit

These may be obvious choices, but Faulkner, Pynchon and Fitzgerald would probably all be in my top 5. Haven't read much Joyce or any Proust yet so I can't comment.

Faulkner

>>3562994

Douglas Adams might be a bit debatable and my own bias talking but JK Rowling is not. I cannot think of a single book series of 20th century which has more power or sheer cultural relevance. Even if you dislike her style, she certainly did something right--maybe it was magic?

>>3563006
Why is German and French missing? They're more important than Spanish.

>>3563013

Ernest Hemingway: Completely shaped American literature.

[citation needed]

In what sense did he 'shape' anything except himself? Name his literary ensuants.

>>3563013
>Ernest Hemingway: Badass as fuck. Completely shaped American literature.

this is the only part of ur post that offends me

>>3563024
b/c Don Quixote is in the Spanish language, duh.

>>3563024

Spanish is more important because of Don Quixote

>>3563028
normen mailer. maybe carver? i dunno..

>>3563016

Well considering that the 20th century saw much of literature needing to compete now with radio, TV, movies and the internet; having a book worth buying isn't always a common thing.

>>3563029
>>3563028

Yeah, man. Let's 'good-cop-bad-cop' this motherfucker.

>>3563028

Wikipedia agrees with me, also I forgot he won a Nobel Prize as well:

>Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Come on its Hemingway. He was the only guy in English class I liked reading. That alone puts him on my top 10.

>>3563013
actually you're a lot wronger about Steinbeck than you are about Hemingway

>>3563044

He definitely influenced a few prominent writers. I'm just opposed to putting him on that inceptive pantheon that properly belongs to Emerson ('Emerson is God', Bloom) and Whitman ('you found the new wood', Pound).

>tfw Harold Bloom is actually totally equipped to speak authoritatively about American literature

>>3563058

OK well unlike with Hemingway, wikipedia's not really backing me up in terms of Steinbeck's influence. It does however say this:

>Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's impact: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American literature."[8]

>At the time of publication, Steinbeck's novel "was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read."[11] According to The New York Times it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940.[1] In that month it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.[1] Soon it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2]

Grapes of Wrath is a good book and its honestly the FIRST book I think of when I think of the 1930s. Read that book and tell me we aren't repeating history.

>>3563006
Does Bloom even know German? He says that Musil loses much in translation.

Remember the Steiner/Russian definite article fiasco? Steiner and Bloom are two peas in a pod.

>>3563057

'Completely shaped American literature' is a big, bold claim. He's an important writer, I'm just reigning in your hyperbole. I reckon those plaudits really belong to Whitman and Emerson, as I just said on >>3563065 that post. Those fine fellows gave America a literary voice.

With a lazy, puerile bastardisation of second-wave British Romanticism, in a manner broadly indicative of your kindergarten country's deplorable mien.

No one gives a shit about transcendentalism.

>>3563090

Don't be dumb. Emerson is the father of American thought.

>>3563084
Bloom does grudgingly admit that Wordsworth is a stronger poet than Whitman..

>>3563100
Nah, that title probably belongs to Mill

>>3563102

"...he has a certain flavour it is true, the smell of virgin forest is in him, and of the wooden shack, a kind of primitive colonialism, but that is a long way from being civilised." - Joyce on Whitman

Our man also said, "In my history of literature I have given the highest palms to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley."

And if it's good enough for the guy whose novels we endlessly post, without ever discussing or reading, then surely it's good enough for us.

>>3562933

Also before anyone asks this is my top 10 of the 19th century (alphabetical):

Jane Austen
Charlotte Brontë
Lewis Carroll
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alexandre Dumas
Victor Hugo
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde

And 18th:

William Blake
Daniel Defoe
Denis Diderot
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thomas Paine
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Laurence Sterne
Jonathan Swift
Voltaire
Mary Wollstonecraft

>>3563120
I get annoyed when people circlejerk over the romanticists. I think Donne was the greatest English poet of the 16th and 17th centuries.

>>3563120
>Woodsworth
>Highest anything

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Stop it, you're hurting me.

>>3563122
pretty mainstream edge right there. nobody can criticize you and it says nothing about your taste.

>>3563122
high school girl tier

>people saying Salinger doesn't belong there
>they've never read An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls!

>>3563125

Well, that period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did produce an inordinately high number of exquisite poets. All at once, you have several poets interacting with one another who could - arguably - hold their own with Donne -

For instance (and I reckon I'm being pretty conservative here),

>Wordsworth
>Shelley

Are definitely on par with Donne, or anything poetry in English has to offer. And they're closely followed by several poets who you could easily make a good case for putting on the highest level

>Keats
>Coleridge
>Byron
>Blake

And, just below them,

>Clare
>Southey
>Hunt

I mean, come on, that's just remarkable. Who were the other notable Metaphysical poets?

>Marvell - undoubtedly great

Who else? Cowley? Southwell? Neither of them wrote a 'Don Juan' or a 'Kubla Khan', did they?

>>3563122
I really did not like Gulliver's Travels. Is there anything better of Swift's?

>>3563170

That Martinus Scriblerus thing he did with Pope and their club is pretty funny.

>>3563148

'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' is the only argument anyone needs to defend Wordsworth.

Besides, we all know Coleridge and de Quincey were the highest!

Kubla smokin' dat dank shit, braaaahl

>>3563170
That essay on farting. That essay on eating babies. That essay on...

>>3563170
I hear A Tale of the Tub is supposed to be pretty good.

You may need to read some essays about Gulliver's Travels to fully get it because since its a satire you kind of need to see it in historical context to understand some of it. Also I loved Gulliver's Travels simply for the last book in it.

>>3563182
Pope's Peri Bathous is the real Scriblerus treasure, though it gets a lot of steam from Blackmore's unique genius.

>>3563187

Is that the one where the books fight?

>>3563187
The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus is also supposed to be what inspired Nabokov to write Pale Fire.

Or something a long those lines. Maybe it was Scriblerus' annotations for the Dunciad which had something to do with it.

Or maybe a story in the Memoirs inspired Lolita... something about that. Nabokov took some sort of inspiration for his books from Pope and Scriblerus. Just what is was I can't think of, but my professor started talking about it and I'm a little upset I can't find what exactly it was on google right now.

>>3563189
You're thinking of Swift's Battle of the Books. Peri Bathous is a satirical tract based on Longinus' writings on the sublime. Pope cites many extremely hilarious examples of bad early 18th century poetry. Everyone loves bad poetry, of course, and Pope's commentary is so pristinely bitchy that one can't help but love it.

>>3562809
You have poor reading comprehension

>>3563185
Swift is such an appalling asshole to religious dissenters in A Tale that it leaves a bit of a sour taste, but it has moments of pure scatological brilliance. He has a wonderful disquisition about the fraudulence of the Eucharist where a man insists stalwartly that a crust of bread is mutton and another excellent passage where dissenters are pictured as farting into one another's mouths.

>>3563122
Dude. Dude. Dumas over George Eliot? Or Flaubert? Or Lautreamont? Or Robert Browning? Or Melville? Or Anthony Trollope? Or Thomas Hardy?

>>3563169

mah_nigga.jpg

>>3563223

Explications such as yours validate the reaction I continually have to Swift - 'there is brilliant satire here, I'm just not contextually equipped to appreciate it'. But I encounter similar issues in Pope and Byron and find myself enjoying their work far more.

There really is something to be said for the formal appropriateness of poetry, especially rhyme-heavy poetry, for satire. If Swift had used couplets I might make more of an effort to accrue the knowledge a deeper reading of his texts demands.

Kind of proud that I would have picked those four.

>>3562621
>mon blonde bête
that is not even french

>>3563234
I don't think A Tale, Gulliver's Travels, or Swift's poetry require any more contextualization than Pope or Byron. If you're basically familiar with the ancients vs. moderns debate and the religious issues produced by the English civil war you're pretty much set. I find the average Swift to be as funny as Pope's heights.

>>3562621
Please stop trying to be French.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/nabokov_reads_lolita_names_the_great_books_.html

1) James Joyce’s Ulysses

2) Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

3) Andrei Bely’s St. Petersburg

4) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time

>>3563250

He's definitely more witty in a lot of ways, but Tale of a Tub is one of the most dense texts I've ever read. Nothing in Pope even comes close.

>>3562445
I wonder why, even with Bloom, who reads and teaches poetry, "writers" means writers of fiction. I'm familiar enough with Bloom's preferences and likes and dislikes, and I know that he would point to Eliot (begrudgingly), Stevens, Celan, Yeats, Valery, Montale, and (especially) Crane as the greatest poets of the 20th century. Surely Yeats or Stevens has given as much as Kafka or Beckett. And I say this as someone who adores both Kafka and Beckett.

>>3563250
Swift references political events contemporary to him in pretty much every work, and to get the references you need to have an idea of what they were.

>>3563253
>>3563258
A basic acquaintance with religious and literary debates of the age is all that's necessary, and any decent edition is well footnoted anyway. Compare that to the remarkable density of The Rape of the Lock (cf. Wasserman's "Limits of Allusion in 'The Rape of the Lock'" or Neil Hertz's great response).

>>3563023

First you'd have to establish the grounds for best writers. Are we talking prose? Ideology? Symbolism? Or just imagination? Of which Rowling of course lacks none. However, I would hardly consider her one of the "best writers" on any other criteria.

>>3563267
>A basic acquaintance with religious and literary debates of the age is all that's necessary, and any decent edition is well footnoted anyway.
You've been reading Swift lite bro.

>>3563256
he says "not in verse but in prose" before he lists the writers.

>>3563276
Alright then. Thank you.

i actually immediately regretted posting her name in a league of 20th centuries greatest(would replace her with faulkner in retrospect), but i would defend as her more than just witticisms. she has fairly astute observational humor in her short stories (her poems are mostly nothing more than occasionally clever limericks) but i find a great deal of delightful satire and sometimes she even does good character psychology. aside from that was just trying to get some more female representatives up in this testerone-filled bitch. if i had read any toni morrison maybe i could have picked her. just bought her first novel the other week we'll see how it goes.

>>3563273
Admittedly I'm not deep in the game, but I'd hardly call it 'lite.' Swift really is not that elusive.

>>3563267

Tale of a Tub has four separate sets of footnotes IIRC, some of which are from Swift pretending to be Swift, some of which are from Swift pretending to be the people he is lampooning, some of them from Swift later on, etc. It also has a preface, a note supposedly from the publisher but actually from Swift, and a bunch more "extra" material like that, completely apart from the whole story/digression thing.

Aside from that, there are all sorts of specific allusions that even somebody acquainted with the main themes wouldn't get without explication. Even when it came out there were guides written for it; not even the contemporary could really "get" it.

>>3563303

*contemporary reading public

>>3563297
Since this is a Bloom thread, Bloom's got a general Critical Views book and a Critical Interpretations specific to Gulliver's Travels. Try going through them. That you think he's not elusive is more to do with his sharp and subtle wit than anything.

>>3563303
Pulled out my Oxford Classic's edition for reference. There are two primary sets of footnotes. The first are from Swift, the second are from William Wotton, who was mocked in the book but provided explanations of allegory that Swift incorporated. The prefaces and digressions are more or less clear in context. I am not a specialist in the 18th century but two weeks ago I read A Tale of the Tub in a graduate seminar with several Swift specialists. There are subtleties, but the main points are not subtle.

>>3563331

The "Wotton" notes are by Swift, too. And I was wrong, there are only three sets of footnotes.

I feel like we're splitting hairs, and this is unproductive, so I'm bowing out.

>>3563344
It's a more or less pointless conversation. Wotton notes are a mixture of material from Wotton's critique and Swift's adaptations of that critique, though.

>>3563331
Tale of a tub was written to impress Lord Somers and is meant to be obviously pro Whig. It's not really that similar to his other works because of this.

>>3562472

>not Kenzaburo Oe

>>3562621
spirit of danton, save me from my imitators...

>>3562448

>add plath

Your retarded idea of removing Joyce aside... Plath wrote one novella and like three books of poetry and all of it was pretty juvenile and mediocre lol

>>3563446
you forget, monsieur, that plath had a woman's touch

>>3562445

WHy is Kafka on the list? He isn't a good writer in terms of aesthetics, prose, or anything like that, he just puts some absurd ideas on paper.

Becket does the same but he can at least write some witty banter....

>>3563514
confirmed for infernotiers pleb

>>3563463
you can't quantify 'a woman's touch' like you can the rest of literary criticism

>>3563528
>you can't quantify 'a woman's touch'

a woman's touch is measured in lost wages.

>>3563531

>>3563528
ah, monsieur, stop it you'll give me a stroke

>>3563013
>Steinbeck, Hemingway

Dude, all american literature is not but a series of footnotes to Huckleberry Finn.

>>3563120
... I just... I just don't understand why people jack off to Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all that classic jazz. I mean, they are great for their time, but do they really match the sophistication of modern literature?

>>3563545
shakespeare is honestly underrated
wordsworth is meh
spenser would blend right in here and /pol/

>>3563554
Underrated? Wtf? Every novelist ever has called shakespeare the greatest of the great greatest ever.

>>3563545
perhaps because, monsieur, a modern reader can read as much sophistication as he likes into all that classic jazz, whereas modern literature gives sophistication away free, carte blanche, without toil, and without the awkwardness and delicious alienation of historical distance.

>>3563574
...you know, I usually think of you as a troll, but I kind of like what you just said. Makes sense.

>>3562554
The best academics usually aren't good orators, given how much time they've spent in solitude working their arses off.

Hence Chris Hitchen's reputation as a kind of overrated fraud.

>>3562566
It was an essay (technically a lecture). And it's one of her minor works. You need go no further than To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves to get the best out of Woolf.

If it weren't for the unfortunate Samurai sword incident, Bloom would have to give props to Stephen King.

>>3563251
>>3563425
I actually like monsieur guy, even if he's trying really hard to be French (I'm French btw). The friendly and somewhat witty way he speaks is refreshing, and a good change from "DURR PLEB".

>>3563895
Well, Hitch was a shit polemicist. He was clearly intelligent, but most of his arguments resulted in name-calling, or calling the opposing party retarded.

>more babble

Add Faulkner and Vonnegut.

>>3562445
Joyce is a hack who can't write characters for shit.

Namedropping Joyce automatically disqualifies you from life.

>>3563972
Why do people like Joyce? The only thing I can tolerate from him is The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Can someone tell me why Kafka gets constantly mentioned as one of the best writers of all time? He isn't bad by any means but what about him raises him above other good writers?

>>3563975
Because
>MUH EXPENSIVE LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

>Beckett inferior to Pynchon
I don't know about that, cowboy.

>>3563023
>a woman
Therein lies the crux of your fallacy, anon.

>>3564033
woop-see-daise
>>Pynchon inferior to Beckett
is the cowboy I don't know about.

>>3564011
stem newfag detected

>>3563975
>Why do people like Joyce? The only thing I can tolerate from him is The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Because people value their belonging to a subculture more than they value good literature.

People like Joyce because liking Joyce automatically gives you membership to the effete-modernist-intellectual-with-a-touch-of-old-world-class club. The writing itself is completely immaterial.

>>3564067
>(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntro
varrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

>>3562445
It's weird to see Bloom cite Kafka and Proust, I wonder if he has read them in their original language?

>>3564085
Bloom doesn't even read books in English, he just skims them quickly, for quicker and more effective namedropping.

>>3563082
bloom's first language was yiddish, which is mutually intelligible with german, so I would say he has a solid grasp of the language

So who's the best poet of the 20th century?

>>3564108
>having Yiddish as a first language

Why would you do this?

>>3564112
I firmly believe that Plath was the best confessionalist by far.

>>3564037
>>>/r9k
>or any other shit board

doesn't look in the eyes of the interviewer

this is a dead man

Who's going to tell us to read the classics once Bloom dies?

>>3564130
Terry Eagleton? He's much more credible than Bloom, anyway.

>>3564132
eagleton's lost tenure at pretty much every single institution he's been in. I also know someone that's accused him of plagiarism successfully. he's pretty awesome in a lot of ways but he's lost a lot of his credibility

>>3564088
Maybe, but my guess is that he actually enjoys reading books, and that it may even be one of his hobbies, and that, being 82, he might have had enough time to even read all of these books. I even think his opinion might be unusually valid, if you'll permit me such lunacy.

>>3562569
there you go

why didn't anybody mention Fernando Pessoa?

>>3564180
>my guess is that he actually enjoys reading books, and that it may even be one of his hobbies, and that, being 82, he might have had enough time to even read all of these books.
You guess wrong. Read his interviews -- he "reads" novels at something like 100 pages a minute. He hates reading and wants to spend as little time doing it as possible.

>>3564180
>enjoys reading books

"To enrich mind or spirit or personality" is what Mr. Bloom believes the sole goal of reading should be, and his five principles of reading well are:

1. Clear your mind of academic cant.

2. Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read.

3. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

4. One must be an inventor to read well.

5. Good reading should involve the recovery of the ironic."

>>3563013
>nobel prizes as an argument
please.