Carrie was pretty good too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Night_Lamp
I think that it says a lot about King that he hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, though.
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Carrie was pretty good too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Night_Lamp
I think that it says a lot about King that he hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, though.
His non-fiction about the necessity of horror in this day and age, along with Drkshadow's point about Zeitgeist, are generally concieved as very important in academic circles.
PeterL's point is both impossible to prove correct, and very probably wrong altogether. There is NO telling if what he has written is "lasting" because it is still extremely contemporary. Furthermore, many writers--Shakespeare, Dickens--where frowned upon by the elite but lasted because of their popularity to become the cornerstones of the cannon. I've never read King and feel no compulsion to at this time, but to categorically dismiss him as having no affect on culture and history is about the stupidest thing I've heard.
Since this is not a thread about literary merit but rather about culture--i.e. the calculable affect on the public at large--it would be reasonable to say that King as the most published and most adapted modern novelist is THE most impacting living American author. I don't feel completely comfortable defending this claim completely, since some people with a slightly smaller fan-base but more readily seen influence might be more impacting. But my point is that he is certainly one of the most impacting writers on culture. How can you even defend the position that the most read author is not, in some sense, impacting the culture? It's not as if he is writing instruction manuals. King's novels don't, probably, affect each reader to the same extent as, say, Coetzee but what they lack in hugely influencing lives on the individual level, they make up for in slightly influencing the populous at large.
Stand By Me, The Green Mile and The Shining are often ranked in the top 100 American films. While the largest and most respected movie ranking site, IMDB, has Shawshank Redemption jockeying between 1st and 2nd place. That is not even the impact of his scores of books and hundreds of stories, but merely the impact of a FEW of his adaptations.
Add onto this, the influence of all the people and works influenced by his body of work...
Like him or not, he is HUGELY impacting in American culture.
To an extent; the question though is the evolution of American identity - not from a change within, but from an emergence amongst minorities like African Americans and Hispanic peoples. To me, he seems to capture the sort of Melville-geographic American horror - seems to continue the sort of New England rooted Gothic mode, but I think in terms of scope, that is limited now, in the sense that McCarthy really captures a different landscape, or Amy Tan tries to capture another.Quote:
Originally Posted by Drkshadow03
I would agree with you if King had the ability to flip his imagination, but to me, instead of capturing a sort of American darker self, he just seems absorbed in it. The clown in It does seem the embodiment of the evil within the town it takes place, but his resolution to the novel seems conflicted and stretched.
I guess my problem is he has an idea, but nothing particularly inspiring to get beyond it - there is no real development, unless you count his usual Deus ex Machina endings which undercut the often profound foundations of his work. This is excluding his large body of rather mediocre almost meaningless work, but even if we just focus on the best ones, he seems to discover the darkness, but is not able to move forward beyond there.
Basically agree with what Modest and Drk (and his essay) have said. In addition, I can recall reading a few of King's short stories and thinking that a couple of them had merit beyond the pleasures of the genre.
A lot of you guys sound like you shouldn't really be on the internet. You should just give up all of your worldly possessions and move into the woods and talk to each other and discuss reality.
I find reality to suck most of the time so I like to escape it and be happy.
I second that completely.Quote:
A lot of you guys sound like you shouldn't really be on the internet. You should just give up all of your worldly possessions and move into the woods and talk to each other and discuss reality.
I find reality to suck most of the time so I like to escape it and be happy.
I think writers do not have a moral responsibility to anybody, except maybe to themselves to get down in writing exactly what is in their heads. Be as truthfull as possible in other words.
Yeah, maybe some literature is intended to make the reader think and become a little contemplative, but at the same time we need entertainment, we need the writers that provide us with something to escape reality for awhile.
It is ridiculous to sit there and think that writers owe us anything or have a responsibility toward us, and it is even more ridiculous to look down on the writers that provide us with the literature to help us escape from our lives a little.
Quote:
Moral writing, which every real fiction writer strives toward, is a quest for beauty, truth, and the Good. I expect someone to come down on me that such a standard is too abstract or devoid of meaning to be a standard at all. So then, I offer here one simple way that we could determine the value of a given novel. Select any three books in the western literary canon---"the greatest works of artistic merit"---and place your selection with them side by side. For example:
Homer's Iliad
King's Carrie
Plato's Republic
Joyce's Finnigan's Wake
Now ask yourself: "Does it deserve to be among such great books at this time?" Screw the professors, the university database, the feminist whine. This is as good as it gets.
So, by your logic, lets just forget what some people like and enjoy to read. Who cares that - from the example you used - stephen kings book Carrie sold millions and that tonnes of readers read the book and liked it. Lets just forget that and if a book is not the best of the best, then it should not be published and it is not worth anything. Nice one jackass. You need to stop judging a books worth based on other books, or judging writers' worth based on other writers, and starting judging based on whether people actually like what has been written. I think that makes the book worthwhile, and the writer too.
Or go with your own judgmement, which is the most important.
I honestly think some of the great authors that get a lot of praise from the literary community would be sickened by their hardcore fans.
The river does not represent freedom it is just a river.
I am a fan of Stephen King's writing, not his subject matter usually, but his style. I have enjoyed much of his work (ex, Night Shift, Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Langoliers, The Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile, Dreamcatcher), in addition to his On Writing, he’s a gifted writer, in my opinion.
My only disappointment was IT, and I enjoyed the writing but did not care for the ending. I mean, really? (I don’t want to give any spoiler here so won’t go into why it disappointed me)
By the way, what is non-commercial lit? If it's for sale doesn't that make it commercial?
Regarding that maybe: let's compare the number of writers who belong in the category of literature with the number of writers who belong in the category of popular fiction. How many Kunderas, Kadares, Coetzees, Saramagos, García Márquezes, Roths exist in comparison to Rowlings, Kings, Browns, Meyers?Quote:
Originally Posted by breathtest
Maybe some literature is intended to make the reader think? I think we should rephrase that: so many books exist to merely provide cheap entertainment, that we should be thankful for the few writers that still invite us to reflect about life. A Rowling and Meyer can and will be replaced by the next franchise-making writer. José Saramago is irreplaceable in 20th century literature.
People complain that the poor popular writers are always under attack, but when we consider that they exist in greater number than great writers and that they make a lot more money, I wonder why there aren't equal efforts to complain about the poor great writers that no one reads and that live in obscurity for ages before being discovered, if they're discovered at all.
I prefer the great entertainers to the average entertainer. The entertainer who gave us a good story that was memorable and still had good characters and plot. Writers like dumas, bradbury, vernes, carrol, and shakespeare.
Shakespeare was a mix of someone who was both an entertainer and someone who gave us a lesson about life.
I like my entertainers to have legimately good. I don't like my stories for entertainment to have poor qualities. I don't demand an entertainment to be just another ordinary distraction , I want something good and memorable.
Have you ever read The Stand? It was epic!
I'm pretty sure Philip Roth is not starving or struggling in obscurity. Ditto quite a few of the other authors you named. Ironically enough, the Stephen Kings, J.K. Rowlings, and Stephanie Meyers of the world are indeed rare. Anyone going into writing to become a millionaire is going into the wrong profession. Just ask about any writer who decided to write a YA series for entertainment hoping to repeat Rowling's success and who managed to get their series published--I promise most of them probably didn't come remotely close to Rowling in sales, and most likely didn't come anywhere near Philip Roth in sales either.Quote:
Originally Posted by Heteronym
One of the reasons no one complains about "the poor great writers that no one reads" is because none of the writers you named are obscure and in need of discovery; not to mention there are plenty of people who actually read them.
You truly believe that writers like Roth, Kundera and García Márquez are as widely read as Meyer, Rowling and Brown? And you truly believe that the proportion of great writers versus mediocre writers is identical?
It is not the quantity but quality!Quote:
Originally Posted by Heteronym
Obviously, people who read Roth, Kundera or Marquez, like ourselves, are, like, way superior intellectually to those who read Meyer, Rowling or Brown.
Thousand Marquez readers would be same as one million Meyer readers, I'd say.
Not only we read better stuff but probably understand the harder, more complicated stuff more thoroughly than those underlings.