Who is the most overrated writer in the entire canon?
>>25150570this kike
>>25150570Tolstoy
>>25150570Pretty much any american except Melville
>>25150601Nah man Faulkner is legit.
Milton, obviously
>>25150570Why would it be Austen? No one proclaims her to be the greatest. She's adequately rated as a progenitor of the realist novel with a consistently good oeuvre.
Melville
>>25150700Melville is underrated if anything. It's all Moby-Dick wank, while Pierre is almost completely ignored.
>>25150601What about E.A. Poe?
>>25150702Is it really about wincest.
>>25150570Your mum
>>25150831He abandons his fiancee and he pretends he's married to his sister, but it's ambigous (hence the title) whether they actually fucked. His fiancee is later on shocked and faints (I think she even dies) when she finds out Isabel is his sister.Here's as intimate as it gets:He moved nearer to her, and stole one arm around her; her sweet head leaned against his breast; each felt the other’s throbbing.“Oh, my dear Pierre, why should we always be longing for peace, and then be impatient of peace when it comes? Tell me, my brother! Not two hours ago, thou wert wishing for twilight, and now thou wantest a candle to hurry the twilight’s last lingering away.”But Pierre did not seem to hear her; his arm embraced her tighter; his whole frame was invisibly trembling. Then suddenly in a low tone of wonderful intensity he breathed:“Isabel! Isabel!”She caught one arm around him, as his was around herself; the tremor ran from him to her; both sat dumb.[...]She blew out the light, and made Pierre sit down by her; and their hands were placed in each other’s.“Say, are not thy torments now gone, my brother?”“But replaced by—by—by—Oh God, Isabel, unhand me!” cried Pierre, starting up. “Ye heavens, that have hidden yourselves in the black hood of the night, I call to ye! If to follow Virtue to her uttermost vista, where common souls never go; if by that I take hold on hell, and the uttermost virtue, after all, prove but a betraying pander to the monstrousest vice,—then close in and crush me, ye stony walls, and into one gulf let all things tumble together!”“My brother! this is some incomprehensible raving,” pealed Isabel, throwing both arms around him;—“my brother, my brother!”1/2
>>25150570Joyce
>>251508472/2“Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul”—thrilled Pierre in a steeled and quivering voice. “Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?—I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common humanity,—no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me—let them look to it! let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half-see, somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of the mark. The demigods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I will write it, I will write it!”“Pierre, I am a poor girl, born in the midst of a mystery, bred in mystery, and still surviving to mystery. So mysterious myself, the air and the earth are unutterable to me; no word have I to express them. But these are the circumambient mysteries; thy words, thy thoughts, open other wonder-worlds to me, whither by myself I might fear to go. But trust to me, Pierre. With thee, with thee, I would boldly swim a starless sea, and be buoy to thee, there, when thou the strong swimmer shouldst faint. Thou, Pierre, speakest of Virtue and Vice; life-secluded Isabel knows neither the one nor the other, but by hearsay. What are they, in their real selves, Pierre? Tell me first what is Virtue:—begin!”“If on that point the gods are dumb, shall a pigmy speak? Ask the air!”“Then Virtue is nothing.”“Not that!”“Then Vice?”“Look: a nothing is the substance, it casts one shadow one way, and another the other way; and these two shadows cast from one nothing; these, seems to me, are Virtue and Vice.”“Then why torment thyself so, dearest Pierre?”“It is the law.”“What?”“That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing. It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.”“Pierre, when thou just hovered on the verge, thou wert a riddle to me; but now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of the soul,—now, when thou wouldst be lunatic to wise men, perhaps—now doth poor ignorant Isabel begin to comprehend thee. Thy feeling hath long been mine, Pierre. Long loneliness and anguish have opened miracles to me. Yes, it is all a dream!”Swiftly he caught her in his arms:—“From nothing proceeds nothing, Isabel! How can one sin in a dream?”“First what is sin, Pierre?”“Another name for the other name, Isabel.”“For Virtue, Pierre?”“No, for Vice.”“Let us sit down again, my brother.”“I am Pierre.”“Let us sit down again, Pierre; sit close; thy arm!”And so, on the third night, when the twilight was gone, and no lamp was lit, within the lofty window of that beggarly room, sat Pierre and Isabel hushed.
>>25150606Based
>>25150570she was just pic related of her time
Austen was in dire need of a good dicking.
James Joyce
>>25150570Brontë
>>25151265You better not mean EmilyThe other Brontës are excruciatingly mid tho
>>25150594norwood -1 ahh hairline
>>25151288Charlotte is pretentious, but Anne is plainly unassumingly sincere.
>>25150570Nabokov
>>25150570All of them post 1500 or so.
>>25150570Not even a contest.
>>25150703Poe is B+ in the English literature canon but A list in terms of influence. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" invented the English-language mystery genre as we know it. There's no Sherlock without that.There are also his contributions to horror to consider. Where are Lovecraft and Smith without him?
>>25151466And Nabokov would agree with you. Most of his stuff aimed to parody the literary set of his day. He would consider it a high irony that we're still talking about "Lolita".It's as if we were still talking about Tom Sharpe's "Great Pursuit" in 2026.
I'm putting my marker for Ursula LeGuin as the most overrated, presently. She was in her time a below-average genre author; she thought highly of her own social importance though, and is being touted by soeyboeys as a result.
Both his philosophy and his literature are kinda mid but he’s hailed as one of the greatest french writers of the 20th century
>>25150848/thread
>>25150702He is by far the most overrated writer in the litbro canon
>>25150594true
Hemingway. Baffling how prose so dry and lifeless is celebrated.
>>25152105Men don't need life
>>25151766the goat
>>25150663Because Austen's morals are trite and her plots contrived.
Borges>>25150653>>25151205>>25151246>>25150599FLVKE! You’re all wrong
>>25151787he would not. when he puts a spin on a trope, that doesn't make an entire novel a parody. >>25151783ye accurate.>>25150606some terrible short stories and his bigots are boring.
>>25152105you just gotta hate yourself a little more
>>25150594fpbp
>>25150594What do people see in Kafka? It baffles me.
it's kerouac for sure
>>25150594>>25152104>>25154324>>25154329>Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification. Innumerable attempts to write à la Kafka, all of them dismal failures, have only served to emphasize Kafka’s uniqueness, that absolute originality which can be traced to no predecessor and suffers no followers
>>25153838>trite>contrivedAre these words you just discovered using your macbook’s thesaurus before posting?
>>25150570This guy doesn't receive enough credit for the damage he's done from the 50s onwards
Most of the authors named in this thread could be overrated but they all have at least some merit. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and Zora Neal Hurston have none whatsoever.
>>25154692Lmao didn't even see this
>>25154379>startled by words even a 12yo would knowGrim.
>>25156509>thinking that anon didn't know what trite and contrived meant>not realizing you were being bullied>expecting to be taken seriously and intimidating using the one hit wonder cultural phenomena "grim"
>>25156517'Phenomenon'. It's singular.
>>25150594yup. I like him but he gets overrated because hes easy enough for normies to grasp>ughh I just went to the DMV, it was so kafkaesque
>>25156526technically it's grammatically incorrect, surebut i was hinting at its multiple and constant use, so I used the plural formsorry to have picked your grammar autism scab
>>25156535>I was writing poorly on purpose>So you see, I am not retarded, I am even more retardedNAYRT, but grim.
>>25150570Anon.His only work of note is the book titled "My Diary Desu" and it's just thousands of pages of slurs and disconnected rambling. How that piece of shit made it into the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature is beyond me.
>>25156580>distinction between singular and plural>writing poorly>typical rule following english speaker not educated enough to bend rules to hint at things impossible to communicate otherwise>not retarded>joining the grim club to enjoy safety in numbers
>>25150570William Burroughs is the shittiest writer of all time
>>25152096This.He's only so well known because of his stanning controversial views at the time; as people stop understanding/caring about them he'll disappear, too.
In the entire canon of what niggerThis thread is just 'name bad author, go!'
Right??
>>25150570Camus.>>25150599Lol no.
Some of the people named here, should not be named here.Here’s who have been named and belong here: Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, Burroughs, Jung, Nabakov, Kafka, Woolf, Austen, Brontë (if Charlotte)Now for those who don’t deserve their placement: Tolstoy, Borges, Joyce, Melville, Brontë (if Emily), Milton.My pick: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not into him, at all.
>>25153838Sure, but that's probably the least of what makes her so shite
>>25159721Villette hard mogs most of you “who don't deserve” list
>>25150570Dostoevsky
Has there ever been a writer with anything like the gap between writing quality and accolades received than Maya Angelou?Angelou was honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors included >a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie,[143] >a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, >and three Grammys for her spoken-word albums>She served on two presidential committees>was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1994>the National Medal of Arts in 2000>the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011Angelou was awarded >more than fifty honorary degrees>In 2021, the United States Mint announced that Angelou would be the first Black woman to be depicted on a quarterInterestingly, those are all domestic awards. Somehow no one outside the USA saw her writing the way Americans did...
