Re: American authors, why do Europeans tend to favor Poe, Melville, Faulkner, and Whitman but /lit prefers Pynchon, DFW, and McCarthy?
I don’t agree that /lit/ prefers the latter but if we prefer the latter more than Europeans it’s because we’re mostly Americans or other native English speakers and those writers are much more uniquely American in their style and thematic elements. Poe was very influential in France at least. I don’t think Whitman or Melville were particularly influential but the sort of poetry and novels they wrote are much more similar to European poetry and novels than anything Pynchon and McCarthy wrote. Pomo lit in general is a largely American phenomenon.
>>23816024I don't really give a fuck desu.
>>23816038how is faulkner not distinctly american
>>23816024Americans love Melville, Faulkner, and Whitman. The American academy tends to disparage Poe, and it is because he was seen as a sloppy thinker in a time when anglo author-theorists (Henry James, T.S. Eliot) were pursuing effects that made this quality anathema. For a similar sort of reason, Pound also did not like Milton. Bizarrely, Poe never received a critical revival in American letters - he is still seen, if with any seriousness, through the eye of Valéry.
>>23816088The South is the Confederacy. Not America
I saw a comparison that Poe's status in America is like Pushkin's status in Russia. In that a lot of the big greats absolutely loved him moreso than a common reader. Is this accurate?
>>23816106The opposite, if anything. I can't think of an American great who praised him.
>>23816132Melville
>>23816141What did he say of Poe? I've done a search, and the first results tell me that he only purchased a Poe collection for his wife:https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1960/p1968203.htmI certainly could have missed something.
>>23816024Poe is just thought of as a kind of gothic horror author, not as a writer of serious literary fiction. ESL people of course would have a hard time understanding actual literature so they go for the easy stuff like Poe and Stephen Kang.
>>23816153>hasn't read poe since he was forced to read the masque of the red death in middle school
>>23816089>Many admirers of Edgar Allan Poe have bristled at young Henry James’s pronouncement that “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” Indeed, James may be among the first of those critics who, like Paul Elmer More and T. S. Eliot, stigmatize Poe enthusiasts as chronically immature. From his high humanist perch, Paul Elmer More looks down on Poe as “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men.” Eliot’s point in “From Poe to Valéry” differs from James’s but it certainly springs from a Jamesian sensibility. Eliot contends that Poe had “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty. The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights.”KWAB.
>>23816024Because /lit/ is full of pseuds.
>>23816159>implying masque wasn't real literature
>>23816132>Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him.Whitman
>>23816159Help me out. Name some examples of Poe's "literature?"I've onlyr ead things like Cask of Amontillado, Telltale Heart, Murders on the Rue Morgue and so on. ANd peoms like the Raven, Annabel Lee and the Bells. All great stuff for elementary school and middle school maybe, but I'm curious as to what secret works of Poe are out there that I have somehow missed out on.
>>23816166>>23816166> Henry JamesHis style is bloated and inelegant. His stories are dull too.>Paul Elmer MoreWho? I lost interest when it said "humanist".>T. S. EliotBad critic and worse poetEven if all of what was said is true, nobody reads him because he's deep, but because his styles in both prose and verse are undeniably beautiful.
For me, it's Hawthorne.
>>23816178ThisPseuds and pretentious snobs. /lit/ is where hipsters ended up.
/lit/ and /v/ share the idea that enjoying anything or taking pleasure in it is wrong. Books and vidya must be dense, grueling experiences or they aren't worth it.
>I repeat once more my firm conviction that Edgar Poe and his country were never upon a level. The United States is a gigantic and infantine country, not unnaturally jealous of the old continent. Proud of its material development, abnormal and almost monstrous, this new comer into history has a naive faith in the all- powerfulness of industry, being firmly convinced, moreover, like some unfortunates among ourselves, that it will finish by devouring the devil himself. Time and money are there held in such extraordinary esteem; material activity, exaggerated almost to the proportions of a national mania, leaves room in their minds for little that is not of the earth. Poe, who came of a good race, and who, moreover, declared the great misfortune of his country to be its lack of an aristocracy, expected, as he often argued, that in a nation without an aristocracy, the worship of the beautiful would but corrupt itself, lessen and disappear; who accused his fellow-citizens, in their emphatic and costly luxury, of all the symptoms of bad taste that characterize the parvenu; who considered Progress, the grand idea of modern times, as the ecstasy of silly idlers, and who styled the modern perfection of the human dwelling an eyesore and a rectangular abomination; — Poe, I say, was there a singularly solitary brain. Believing only in the immutable — in the eternity of nature, he enjoyed — a cruel privilege truly in a society amorous of itself — the grand common-sense of Machiavelli, who marches before the student like a column of fire across the deserts of history. What would he have written, what have thought, if he had heard the sentimental theologian, out of love for the human race, suppress hell itself; — the rag-shop philosopher propose an insurance company to put an end to wars by the subscription of a half-penny per head; — the abolition of capital punishment and orthography, those two correlative follies, and a host of sick persons writing, with the ear even close to the belly, fantastic grumblings as flatulent as the element which dictated them? If you add to this impeccable vision of the True, — an actual infirmity under certain circumstances, and exquisite delicacy of taste, revolting from everything out of exact proportion, an insatiate love for the beautiful, which had assumed the power of a morbid passion, you altogether cease to be astonished that to such a man life had become a hell, that such a life speedily arrived at an untimely end — nay, you will admire his enthusiasm for bearing with it for so long a time.
imagine thinking that Poe, Melville, and Faulkner weren't Pynchon and McCarthy's primary influences
>>23816220Favorite Hawthorne story?
>>23816024Really interesting question, and I have no idea. One that I have experience with an really confuses me is France's love of Faulkner --considering he wrote about the South which could easily come across as somewhat uncultured. I did a study abroad in Paris for one semester and TSatF and Absalom seemed to be held in the same regard as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I think no one cared about the typical Pynchon/DFW/Corncob type books, which was eye-opening for me as my taste in lit then was pretty much the meme trilogy and other books in the top 100 /lit charts. Probably this anon >>23816038 got it right about those books, I assume.Here's an article I found about Faulkner and France.https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/mar/19/william-faulkner-france-telerama
Cooper is the best american author but nobody talks about him
Updike, Roth, Didion and Bellow are the most influential Americans in my cunt. Nobody reads the doorstopper pomo stuff, the victoriana isn't an influence on anyone todayt. euro
>>23816269>TSatF and Absalom seemed to be held in the same regard as Ulysses and Finnegans WakeAs it should be
>>23816088He is but in a different way than the others.
>>23816234Baudelaire was based beyond belief for his boner for Poe
>>23816250Probably Roger Malvin's Burial
>>23816151He said Arthur Gordon Pym was the inspiration for Moby Dick.
>>23816132HP Lovecraft
>>23816024Is this a thing? I'm euro and would consider American literature very mid-tier if not for Melville and Whitman (never read Faulker). Harold Bloom agrees with me.
>>23816269Yeh I first heard of Faulkner from his being mentioned in Godard's breathless randomly. I would have guessed it was the strength of his translations that appealed to the French.
Why are all you fags pretending that Faulkner isn't a great writer?
>>23816024> why do Europeans tend to favor PoeBecause Baudelaire translated his works.
>>23816215>His style is [SHITTY OPINIONS] Not the point.>his styles in both prose and verse are undeniably beautifulHe is not Keats, for whom 'beauty obliterated all considerations' - Poe's "styles" were hampered by him quite sincerely NOT thinking. Eliot explains this perfectly in his essay, should you have the humility to learn from it. Poe is an intelligent versifier who privileged the flesh of words over their sense, their logos, c'est tout, and only adolescents tend to mistake this for genius.
>>23816215>Bad critic and worse poetNah, terrible critic but great poet
>>23816024Classic /lit/ (2009-2012) was composed primarily of undergrads and grad students in humanities fields. It probably makes a little more sense now doesn’t it?
>>23818822Poe mogs Eliot as a poet, so does Baudelaire who liked Poe. Simple as.
>>23818822>Ulalume--to my mind one of his most successfulOpinion instantly discarded.
>>23816024I have Poe, Melville, and Faulkner on my favorite shelf. McCarthy is okay to me because of his similarities to Faulkner.>>23816093Utterly ridiculous comment since Memorial Day is nationally recognized, and it was started as a lamentation for Confederates. They were and always will be Americans and there is no matter how many statues you destroy, how many books you refuse to read, how many lies that you pen about what they fought for or believed in will ever change this.
>>23816024Europeans have much better taste and quite frankly European literature blows American "literature" out of the goddamn water on every count. Burgers have a hegemonic presence on the internet so they can afford to pretend that Burger authors are worth anything.
>>23819204>Europeans have much better taste> actual European taste:The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispéd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. These were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll— As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the pole— That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the boreal pole.
>>23816024Eh, we love all those authors in America. It's just 4chan that doesn't because most people don't actually love literature here, it's just a stage where they can enact their "intellectual" persona. I took classes on Poe, Faulkner, and Melville at my (ivy) university. It's mostly adolescents here who dislike them because those authors don't let them drop science, math, and pop culture references to appear smart in lieu of a real personality.
>>23819314/lit/ is also largely and hopelessly contrarian; any famous writer will have anons who hate them simply because they are famous and popular; they may have never read these writers they hate, funnily enough
>>23816024Washington Irving is one of my favorites, especially his travel books. He rarely gets mentioned here.
>>23818822Based takes there, anon
>>23819314truth nuke; also this >>23819350
>>23816214i wouldn't call poe "literature" because i don't think any short story writer is, and his poetic output is a bit limited. in spirit he's like an american tennyson---strict in meter and relatively straightforward in theme. but when you say>All great stuff for elementary school and middle schooli don't think that's being fair. you only say that because you read him in middle school. and he's certainly not an elementary school author. he's an adept prose stylist with a clarity that's not often seen in authors of that era
>>23819365Irving's Tales of a Traveller and Tales of the Alhambra beat out practically all other early American writings (depending on when you mark the cut-off date; I'd say the period spans from the late 16th century to around 1820), except for perhaps Brown's novels, Jefferson's letters, and Edwards' sermons.
American authors directly led to the current state of the American publishing industry, so frankly I think all of them should be burned and said publishers hoisted into the fire. That way we don't replicate this comical error.
>>23819403
>>23816441You’re living in the past I’m afraid. That particular group of authors’ cultural capital here dried up pretty definitively around 2010 with maybe sometimes the exception of Bellow funnily enough (or Didion among wine aunts but I’m not particularly acquainted those circles)
>>23816024Pynchon, DFW, and McCarthy are low bro so they appeal more to the average American
You pseuds aught to read Poe's The Philosophy of Composition, and realize that one of his strongest quallities is writing st the time about are every day fears, anxities and phobias.
>>23816024Same reason continental Euro's can't make rock music.
>>23820069>What is krautrock?
>>23819539Interesting. Who are the influences now for current American writers? Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, Colson Whitehead, etc, whose teat are they sucking would you say? >captcha is H0NKPerhaps the universe is trying to tell me...
>>23820069which is...?
