>https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/Pic related is a mid review of a mid book by Krasznahorkai, but he also makes a point about the existence of a trend among male readers called brodernism.>Brodernism is not a writerly movement but a critical tendency, not a tradition in the strict sense but a kind of post facto absorption, a critical construction with no real basis in textual history or novelistic corpus that is slowly trickling into the fictional unconscious. An aesthetic product, often, of critical ignorance or disregard: glorious local and regional traditions of experimentality or ambition vanish under the haze of a homogenizing (and loudly proclaimed) American reception as “difficult.” If careerism is the dominant literary style in the United States, brodernism esteems itself the resistance. Provincial or hermetic American texts balloon outwards and swallow up the world, unaware that the world was already in them. The complex interplays of local and transnational that define most literary production disappear into a diffuse but ever-expanding vacuousness into which all are incorporated: some broad notion of “challenging” or “maximalist” literature. I'd say the trend started in the US, and extended well beyond it among readers who are terminally online. At least in my experience, I was first exposed to this kind of annoying male readership here on /lit/ more than ten years ago, and it seems that like me many other readers online (books of some substance, metafictional meathead, WASTE mailing list, etc.) have internalized this way of reading difficult fiction novels and using them as social signifiers. What do you think of this "brand"? Does it exist? Do you see others or yourself in it? And how do you interpret it as a phenomenon? Effortposts welcome.
>>25087301Here are listed some books he identifies with the trend:>the phenomenon I reference—call it brodernism, with apologies for yet another portmanteau—doesn’t end with translated literature. It expands toward works described as “maximalist,” “difficult,” “avant-garde,” “epic,” “excessive,” “oblique,” “speculative,” “experimental,” “modernist,” “postmodernist” and “post-postmodernist.” Though men are not its only practitioners, male writers dominate the corpus, and a tendency for phallic competition underlies the formation’s core texts. These include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is rather too mainstream and easily read.
>>25087304>These include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971).Thanks for the recommendation list (except Schittenfroh)
to be desu I don't understand what he's complaining about and I'm not even sure if he actually said what his problem was
Yankees should stick to baseball.>difficult fiction novelsLOL
Musil and not Proust is very telling btw. These people are faggots.
Putting in The Plains seems weird. It's merely 150 pages and a minimalist type of theory fiction that the other novels aren't.
>>25087421i think hes complaining that certain books only get read, because they have the status as a difficult read, or hes complaining about the people who only read books because they are known as difficultbut i myself couldnt decipher what ecxactly his problem and implications with this type of literature consuming ispretty convoluted and full of himself this guy, i think he just hates himself and projects all this stuff he does himself on other people
>>25087304>DFW is rather too mainstreamlol americans are braindead
>>25087304Why didn't Joyce make the list?
>>25087458Too mainstream
>>25087301> post facto absorption, a critical construction with no real basis in textual history or novelistic corpus that is slowly trickling into the fictional unconscious. An aesthetic product, often, of critical ignorance or disregard: glorious local and regional traditions of experimentality or ambition vanish under the haze of a homogenizingPeople learn to write this way to hide mediocre opinion under a torrent of verbiage as to convince those who don’t speak your shibboleths that something intelligent is happening. It’s not.
>>25087458because he's actually good, despite being the protoversion of all this
>>25087458there's no litbro clout in joyce because you're likely to encounter him in school
>>25087446>couldnt decipher what ecxactly his problem and implications with this type of literature consuming isThis is sort of the poin. He has just enogh intuition to point his finger at a genuine thing (brodernism) but not nearly enough to properly explain what this is (or criticize Hersch, which is indeed a bad Krasznahorkai book).The point in my opinion is that there is a tiktok-ification or instagram-ification of reading adjacent to the manosphere, where male identity is now attached to big complicated fiction books in ways it wasn't before. A lot of these male readers are similar to manga and anime consumers, surrounding themselves with a different kind of product that they take a social signifier. However, many of them remain absolutely superficial in their insight of their chosen medium: they accept and regurgitate mainstream views on big books as this is mainly a social phenomenon for them, they are unable to discuss particular insights or to unravel deeply personal point of views on things based on their own taste - in fact, the main problem could be that this kind of reader is entirely devoid of taste, intended as a personal and coherent way of liking/disliking stuff developed through time and experience. Brodernism is the male version of reading smut, and it's how reading looks like in the internet era, i.e. first and foremost as a way of gaining social points in the social-media-simulation enveloping us all. To a certain extent it's always been like this (posers always existed), but now you can really recognize currents and trends of being a poser, and, which is even worse, you see them becoming part of accepted public discourse instead of being ridiculed. This is relevant because it only takes one or two generations of the equivalent of the current YouTube-essay environment to substitute actual criticism with these trends, in my opinion.
>>25087301"Brodernism" as in bro + modernism? I can already tell the author is an imbecile, so I will not retard myself by reading their spiel.
>>25087488that are pretty valid points, if only the guy in the op could have thought his thoughts out to an end. I dont have to add anything i actually agree with the critic and with you on pretty much all points. I just find it ironic that this critic wrote about reading difficult stuff for showing off and wrote his own stuff in an unnecessary complicated way.There wasnt a need for writing this way, he could have get his point across in simpler terms without losing the essence of what he is trying to say, thats pretty symptomatic of the same kind of person hes complaining about.And to your post, what would be the solution and cure to this? Ofcourse just to read what you want to read and to not stay on the internet so often or get all your opinions from it, but its hardly possible in this age. Even if you want to discuss and discover books organically, you are bound to have discurses with other people who themselves are perverted by the internet and its way of influencing thoughtpatterns and social dynamics, so you cant truly escape it. It has seeped in all corners and aspects of analog life too
>>25087301The novel in question:> While frantically writing letters to Angela Merkel, begging her to save the universe from annihilation, a gentle man in an East-German town is driven to a murderous rampage against his neo-Nazi employers after discovering their role in a fatal bombing.> The mistreated protagonist elicits sympathy from kindly librarian Frau Ringer, whose husband vocally opposes the gang and its alleged influence on the community: “Almost everyone here is a Nazi, even the ones who don’t realize it yet.”
>>25087505>what would be the solution and cure to this?I don't know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and since I saw /lit/ as a place where people could have experienced this trend a lot (or even invented it), I thought to ask here.The sort of natural opposite to this kind of reading at least in my experience have been real life reading groups - mostly academic, but also outside of academia. It happens a lot in this groups that you read stuff that you don't like, isn't a masterpiece or isn't sociall spendeable in any way, but getting on it together with others to interpret it is what genuinely develops your ability to engage critically with a text. Even if it's bad, as long as your interlocutors are smart enough and you sit together trying to seriously find something to say about a text (even something bad, but articulate and on point), you will keep growing and develop actual taste. You will also no longer express yourself in cliches about books or talk in generalities, which seems to be a problem of a lot of these male readers when you listen to them talking on podcasts - they discuss big philosphical points, but are unable to make a poignant, specific argument about a theme, or a paragraph, or a specific piece of text.I used to complain a lot about this push towards hyper-specialization when I was in academia, and I am still very critical about pursuing this autistically and robotically as you're often asked to do as a student. But on the other hand, the call for "intensive" sophistication of a discussion, i.e. the ability to go deep into the minutiae of a literary work, when requested, seems to me of growing importance given that the direction public and cultural discourse seems to take is toward ever-increasing simplification.Only, academia seems to have committed seppuku through specialization... We got so caught into justifying the functionality of studying the humanities, and made the arguments so specific and scientific-sounding, that the data we produce are irrelevant and no one cares about them (rightfully so).So where do we go from here? I'm not sure. The way universities and "schools" in the Greek sense were born was by gathering around smart people to read together. I still think there's value in this. But it needs to happen in reality and without mediation from social media, if you want to maintain depth and complexity of discourse. There's also a value in doing this constantly with people you get to know better and discover as humans while you read with them, rather than with strangers online.
>>25087488The manosphere is much more into the blind worship of "Great Books", mainly as a way to position themselves as Against Current Year. Brodernists are just hipster casualties.
He just vomited a bunch of words and made his writing pointlessly difficult while conveying no argument to criticize readers consuming hard to read writes that have ready consolidated themselves? Alright.
>>25087547>>25087472>>25087421wtf learn how to read, it's a fucking magazine article, it's monkey-proof
>>25087304>>25087359This “journo” clearly has never read 1/3 of these books and is simply basing, as the article suggests, his opinion on Max Lawton’s and Andrei’s twatter personas and their dysgenic little group of preddit groupies
>>25087301Jfc OP and whomstever wrote that needs to go outside immediately>interplays of local and transnational that define most literary production disappear into a diffuse but ever-expanding vacuousness into which all are incorporatedThis is what no pussy does to a nigga etc.
>>25087488The goy cattle will always eat slop and only superficially pretend to not eat slop. Who cares.
>>25087301>How many people in America read fiction? >Of those readers, what percent of them are men? >Of that, what percent of those male fiction readers read contemporary literature in translation?>Of that, what percent of those male fiction readers who read contemporary literature in translation read experimental, avant-garde, maximalist contemporary literature, in translation or in English?I mean at this point we can't be talking about more than 10,000 people MAX
>>25087561>it's a fucking magazine articleYeah, a fucking magazine article that's written like a parody of an insecure grad student trying to impress a 19 year old at a bar except the author is doing it with 100% sincerity. Look at the greentexts in this thread and then consider the fact they just boil down to>It's challengeslop. You only like it cuz it's hard. (That's what she said, ROFL!)
>>25087547This anon is correct but other posters will disagree with him because this board has an addiction to subversionslop
The author of the article is a pseud and a faggot who hates it when others, especially gringos, read big books.
>>25087301Someone should tell this retarded performative faggot trying to earn points with the holes that hard books are the Dark Souls of books.
>>25087539I think you should let go of the idea that you could ever have a popular audience or a subculture audience that had good taste and engaged with anything in a non-superficial way.You have to be an elitist and find the few capable of rational thought.
>>25087301Considering how much Mr. Peredmuter has said without saying anything, he should consider a career in government.
>>25087424Why? So we can throw one in your face and bust your nose so bad it gets bigger than it already is?
>>25087453Retarded people breed more.
There definitely are people on this very board that refuse to read anything slimmer than a few hundred pages and they've told on themselves before. Size is often conflated with profundity and that's just an observable fact. This guy's prose is, however, cheeks.
Yeah, hard reading books are for incels, we should read those pornographic novels that women like
>>25087424>>25087453You are obsessed with us. We rule your entire existence.
>>25087301That doesn't exist. People, not only male readers, choose books that have a good reputation, and there's nothing wrong or ignorant, or "fascistic" about that. The list he gave is full of people drowning in awards. Perhaps a young reader might give Krasznahorkai a try because he got the Nobel prize last year? Is this a far-reaching conclusion? Very few of the books he mentioned are known to be difficult, by the way, whether in their original language or in translation. Céline writes in an oral and fragmented prose notorious for avoiding any literary ornament and Sorokin underlines violence and alienation by using a deliberate flat style with some socialist pastiche. Nowhere is there any trace of "winding sentences", "explicit references to entropy and math and classical music", let alone "brick-length tomes". "Wittgenstein's Mistress" is a bit over 200 pages long, "The Looser", less than that and "The Plains" laboriously reach 150 pages. The whole article is just about insulting people with different tastes, he doesn't substantiate any claim, and the last quarter focuses on nazism for no evident reason. I'm baffled when he discusses his own review of a Romanian author he then admits knowing nothing about, and has the audacity to project his crass ignorance onto the literary critique world.Also, the irony to complain about some glorification of density in a prose so convoluted and pretentious. Every word is polysyllabic, abstract, and culturally coded.>Brodernism, nostalgic for the would-be uncharted waters of modernism (but whose?), revives the early 20th century’s fetish for textual originality devoid of its acute historical self-consciousness and critical cosmopolitanismCan these people even read their own articles?
>>25088828Max your geriatric millennial unc taste has been ridiculed, now go to sleep
the "brodernist canon" is basically just whatever a handful of anglophone translators and small presses (new directions, dalkey archive press, archipelago, wherever I'm forgetting) decided to put into English. Max Lawton translates Krasznahorkai so now Krasznahorkai is the guy. the whole canon this article complains about is like getting mad at people's taste when they all eat at the same restaurant because there's only one restaurantimo the more interesting question is why translated experimental fiction is the prestige object instead of poetry or drama or essays. probably got something to do with how novels are a consumption commodity and those other forms aren't. you can hold a novel up, say how many pages it was, say it took you three weeks, but you can't flex a Celan poem because engaging with a poem is internal and you can't quantify it. the novel is the only literary form that works with clout logic because it has a visible size and a finish line. the novel's the one literary form structurally compatible with clout economicsnonfiction doesn't work for this because nonfiction has external accountability, you read a 700 page history book and someone can just ask you a factual question about it. a novel protects you because engagement with it is always interpretive, always subjective, so you can always pull the "well that's just my reading of it." the novel gives you the visible size of nonfiction with the unfalsifiability of poetry. perfect clout object
>>25087301Dismissing art through low-effort pseudogenres with the words "white" or "bro" in their name is a more verbose, more pseudointellectual way of making starterpack images. Like complaining about "DFW bros" on twitter but for prestige magazine readers.
>>25087304>>25087359can you format this so it’s easier to read
