tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6632813196384907322.post7423191458024530158..comments2024-01-16T04:13:38.751-06:00Comments on Fine, I'll start a goddamn blog: It was even worse than I thought: some lit criticism I wrote ten years agoAnn Sterzingerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11771539913173138647noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6632813196384907322.post-20761102922412745392013-01-16T15:19:20.674-06:002013-01-16T15:19:20.674-06:00Thanks, Karl. I put that last line in because I wa...Thanks, Karl. I put that last line in because I was still trying to cling to the forced illusion that anything matters.Ann Sterzingerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11771539913173138647noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6632813196384907322.post-79439760143745085872013-01-13T12:04:34.903-06:002013-01-13T12:04:34.903-06:00Dostoyevsky is a buzz kill and a nay sayer.Dostoyevsky is a buzz kill and a nay sayer.bronstein72https://www.blogger.com/profile/16721012118570546091noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6632813196384907322.post-87963526066139650852012-12-31T11:15:03.165-06:002012-12-31T11:15:03.165-06:00An interesting essay. There are at least five thin...An interesting essay. There are at least five things wrong with it.<br />1.) You say American fiction "didn't pick up speed until the bourgeois novel."<br />Really? Like, what? Henry James?<br />What distinguished American letters in general (see Whitman, or the Beats) from European lit was that American writing was populist. It took itself out of the stuffy drawing rooms of England into the world. The giants of U.S. lit, Melville, Twain, London, Upton Sinclair, Norris, Dreiser, Steinbeck, were hardly bourgie writers. The question is when this changed and why.<br />2.) The problem isn't realism per se, but the narrow realism that "literary writing" has inflicted upon the reader. Washed-out, homogenized, putting craft over content and the sentence above meaning and ideas.<br />The greatest novels ever written, after all, were realist (see Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) but they were also nothing like the withered version of literary realism today. <br />3.) You glance at the rise of litfiction over the past sixty years, but you don't put this into proper context. Why did populist fiction have to go out of favor circa 1953? Why did George Plimpton and others begin to offer a distinctly non-populist brand of literature? Why did critics like Philip Rahv fall out of fashion? Why did the direction of criticism here undergo a sea change? Was there a worldwide ideological struggle taking place back then? Maybe worth examining.<br />4.) As this essay is ten years old, it can be excused for ignoring recent happenings. You want fantasy? Genre? Well, we've got it. A tsunami of wizards, hobbits, vampires and zombies. It must encompass 98% of the market. Young girls in Minnesota are selling millions of copies of such mindless trash. (See Amanda Hocking.)<br />Even sci-fi, which you laud-- even at its best (see Asimov)-- has always been escape or substitute for discussing the actual happenings of a civilization. America is large enough to provide as much material for the intelligent novelist as any imagined space galaxy.<br />5.) Your conclusion remains as irrelevant and meaningless as when you wrote it. "--put yourself in your chair and spin your yarn." This means absolutely nothing if no one reads it. It'll be as significant to its time as the tracts of the Essenes were to their time-- dug up in the dusty sands of a dead sea 2,000 years later. You have books. I have books. All God's children have books. With ebooks, this is almost literally true. Writing itself has little value. The trick remains how to announce that writing. If it's any good, how to get it out there.<br />*************************<br />Just my inflation-adjusted 0.2 cents worth! King Wenclashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13709139159194279478noreply@blogger.com