British Literature vs. American Literature

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Originally Posted by lawpark

Interesting that all heated threads are arguments about canons ...

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Which would make the subjects canon fodder.

Alex ... your source is from ... France, I guess?

If so, that would be such dick move :D

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Originally Posted by stuntpickle

Seriously, can you show me a better 20th Century novel than Lolita that isn't Ulysses?

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Yes. The Recognitions and JR by William Gaddis, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, to name a few in English. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Petersburg by Bely (Nabokov would agree with this one). If I wanted to get into those that are arguably but not obviously better, the list would be much longer.

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Originally Posted by stuntpickle

Seriously, can you show me a better 20th Century novel than Lolita that isn't Ulysses?

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I'll follow Wyatt's example and throw some out there that could be possible contenders:

Great Gatsby, Blood Meridian, Gravity's Rainbow, Slaughter-House Five, To The Lighthouse, As I Lay Dying, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness, A Clockwork Orange. . . .

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Originally Posted by stuntpickle

I admit that I'm thoroughly unconcerned with criticism in general. I think Borges is a far better writer than critic, though I will admit that my acquaintance with his criticism has been passing. Citing Borges on the Romantics seems to me like citing Tolstoy on Shakespeare or Nabokov on Dostoevsky. Because I'm particularly impressed by Coleridge and Keats, I'm apt to ignore someone who makes light of the English Romantics.

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Which is really just a round-about way of saying, "I'm basing all this on my personal tastes, and pretending it is really an objective argument."

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Originally Posted by WyattGwyon

Yes. The Recognitions and JR by William Gaddis, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, to name a few in English. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Petersburg by Bely (Nabokov would agree with this one). If I wanted to get into those that are arguably but not obviously better, the list would be much longer.

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I LOVE The Master and Margarita.

Off the top of my head I can think about four spanish novels that can compete or surpass Lolita, since the 20th century was an excellent age for latin-american novelists.

America because we have Steinbeck.

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Originally Posted by John Steinbeck

America because we have Steinbeck.

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Of course, you would vote for yourself!

You can't blame me.

I don't think that I've ever connected with a British writer, honestly. Unless James Joyce counts.

But America has Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, and Hunter Thompson. So America gets my vote, for now.

I'm a bit undereducated when it comes to both cultures because of my prior focus on the French, and there are plenty of authors from both sides of the pond that I'm anxious to read, like DH Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Pynchon, Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, Joseph Conrad, John Dos Passos, Don DeLillo, Henry James, et al. Much to discover yet.

I came across with this book that talks about "double-narratives" in Indian poetry in the library today:
http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Poetry...=26R50W8SS4O2E

Double-narratives means the lines of poetry can tell two stories at the same time. And there are like couple dozens of such works, with half of those narrating both Ramayana and Mahabharata at the same time (i.e. these are long epic poems).

This is amazing ... and it was not only done in Sanksrit, but Telugu / Tamil. And some would write double-narratives but one story reads from left to right while the other story reads from right to left. Truly eye-opening!

Now I'd forget Shakespeare, Dante, Su Shi, Wang Wei, Ferdowsi, Rumi, Kalidasa ... Kaviraja will be my hero!