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Oh well, that's your third consecutive post in which you evidently choose to simply decide for yourself what your interlocutor is talking about, with no inconvenient regard for semantics. Meanwhile,...

Well, thank you for reinforcing my accusation of sophistry. You will notice that I did not in fact characterise your position in the terms you are arguing against here, so it is again a case of...

Glad to hear it, I thought that was a bit harsh. :) Anyway, no offense takn.

1. The point is that less objectivity means greater scope for snobbery. It is not in question which field is more objective, obviously science is.
2. I am not a scientist. My degree is wholly in...

If you have an argument, make it. You were presented with a perfectly rational objection to your post, and have no reason to sulk.

Oh, please. The "life" and "world" of a bus driver is neither more or less real than an academic's.

This discussion is badly in need of some agreed and stringent definition of "snobbery". People...

However that may be, the point remains that it obviously has much less objectivity than science.

Sorry, but that is a fairly sophistic twist by reductio ad absurdum on a perfectly reasonable and valid point, namely that science is by and large an activity judged on the basis of objective and...

Sorry, but he is right, and you don't seem to get the point. Science is empirical, and relies on demonstrable proof. Art is not, and relies for its value judgment ultimately on taste. For obvious...

Now you are being deliberately obtuse. That question requires no answer to anyone willing to look reasonably at the statements involved.

And I rest mine on the strength of the same. Well, I'll agree to WSS as an exception, but I would rather go to the dentist than sit through Les Miserables. I stand by my characterisation of musicals...

I agree, there seems little interest in even well-etablished contemporaries like John Banville or Edward St Aubyn. Is there nowhere on the net where actual live literary anglophone culture gets...

Snobbery in academia?! Surely not - whoever has heard of such a thing?

Anyway, dismissing a musical because it's a musical isn't snobbery, it's just good sense. It is a vile and despicable genre.

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is...

Evelyn Waugh and Saki were both fairly ruthless, as well as enormously funny.

Writing today and good enough for the canon? Javier Marias. Thomas Transtrømer. John Banville.

Just that it is hugely debatable if Pynchon and DeLillo are the two best novelists working today.

Even if they're great, You must be incredibly well read to be in a position to make that...

I've read The Corrections and Freedom, as well as his essays. Like you, I come to them from a background of not having read widely in contemporary literature, but mainly rather in that of the first...

Finnegans Wake, without doubt. I also found Aristotle's Metaphysics heavy going.