Those who have not a good knowledge of these three authors shouldn’t vote… I have read only two Faulkner’s novels, so I won’t vote. But my vote wouldn’t go to Joyce and his mastery of shallow techniques.
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Those who have not a good knowledge of these three authors shouldn’t vote… I have read only two Faulkner’s novels, so I won’t vote. But my vote wouldn’t go to Joyce and his mastery of shallow techniques.
"By the way, did we abandon the idea of having a West/Midwest/Northeast/South showdown for US authors? I thought that'd be a fun idea, take three or four from each region and stack them up against each other as a "team" and see which "team" comes out on top?"
Honestly I dont see this working for everyone outside the U.S.A, It would be akin to me creating a pole of North Vs Center VS south of italy literature. AMongst Italians we would have a great debate. AMongst europeans some sort of debate could be roused. Amongst americans there would be little to no debate.
You're arguing the difference between manslaughter and homicide there. At the end of the day, 43 million people died during the Great Famine. It was a manufactured, ie man-made preventable event directly caused by Mao's policies. And there was a lot of brutalization going on. At least 2.5 million people were violently killed under government orders during just the three years of the famine.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
There was a drought, and a flood, which contributed to the devastation but the famine was man made. I don't think anyone disputes that anymore.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Are you seriously making the argument that more people survived his brutal reign of terror than didn't so how bad could he have been? What exactly are you saying here "There's so many Chinese that a couple dozen million either way... I mean it's not like he killed all of them!"? More people died than in World War I or the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Mao kept exporting grain. And that's just three years of his rule.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
For more information on Mao check out the rest of this article here: http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/dictators/mao/Quote:
When the farmers could not meet their production quotas in 1959, the local government declared that the farmers were hiding their harvests and denounced the citizenry as enemies of the people. Military patrols were sent to locate these hidden caches of grain. The soldiers beat families who failed to cough up the food they were assumed to have hidden.
When winter arrived, the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark and grass. The officials saw to it that the families' cooking pots were smashed, to prevent them from cooking grass soup. As an incentive to finally release their hidden stores of food, thousands of peasants were tortured and murdered by the local government. Military forces patrolled train stations and roads to block escape.
The people had nothing to eat. They filled their stomachs with whatever they could find: leaves, weeds, leather, straw, feathers, dirt. When they had run out of everything, absolutely everything, they finally resorted to cannibalism.
We must not be reading the same histories. What I've heard about him involves wholesale massacring of entire cities, rape, slavery, pillaging, skull pyramids, sacks full of ears, unslakable bloodlust. He'd take the people he captured in one city, march them to the next, kill them and throw their bodies into the moats to create a bridge of the dead for his warriors to storm the city walls.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls; ten only escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial piety of the Chinese, covered his vanguard with their captive parents; an unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse of the virtue of his enemies.- Edward Gibbon
Fair enough. You carry that point.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Yes, I have to agree with JBI. The better than game is a waste of time. Who cares if Shakespeare is better than Faulkner? Joyce better than Proust? Whatever. They all have value.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
Well, lets give some help to the thread originator and use this just as an excuse to talk about those 3 or however come up. Nobody needs to assert absolutes as Ulysses undoubted center of the western cannon in the XX century (which is easy to refute, so absolute as it is).
I probably should have worded the OP better, I was naive to assume that the people on this forum would realize that this thread was merely a thread to compare and discuss the three aforementioned authors. I didn't expect anyone would actually come on and go XXX is the absolute best, end of discussion. Ohh optimism how cruel you are !Quote:
Originally Posted by Drkshadow03
@MortalTerror Yes the famine was manmade, but it was because of poor management by officials below Mao. The extent to which Mao knew of the famine is disputed, and sources for both sides of the coin are unreliable at best. Either way, Mao's cultural revolution after the Great Leap Forward (which was a failure) made China the economic giant that surpassed the US and still surpasses it.
Well, most people in all internet forums have no idea that comparing may include saying what is alike and also what is different. They go to lengths telling even that someone is better, but end saying they cannt compare such two different things. And it is not here, but a mere reflex of this "democratic" philosophy that there cannot be status or something that is inherent better. This is false. The problem about those 3 is that they are too similar in their intents, techniques and even arrogance (to satisfy Mortal). Faulkner gothic may have nothing to do with the giblenglish of Joyce, but that is like saying a black dog is not similar to a white dog. And their quality and influence (considering all had a strong impact, which still strong, since time wasnt enough o erase them and really see which one has power to return) is much similar. So, saying which one is better ends even more futile. There is no how to assert this.
Would be quite different if it was something like Joyce or Anatole France.
Not quite surpassed the US, and I take a rather different cut at history - the failure of the revolution was that the need for it was there - the communist party was corrupt to the core, and Mao knew that. In the end, he didn't do a good enough job, because the internal frustration of the country solidified and destroyed his idea of a revolution of culture and politics - Deng Xiaoping et al put forward their reform, and now I see university graduates here with an average income of 2000renminbi a month walking the streets, and party member's kids driving sports cars and paying half a dozen women a few thousand renminbi each to come to night clubs with them as their entourage (then to I guess go home and sleep with them).Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeremydav
The whole idea of some must get rich first makes sense, except when you realize the poor seem poor and the rich are so rich it is stupid. The corruption is so apparent here that people do not even point it out anymore.
Considering that China basically owns the US in debt we owe, I'd say China has surpassed us.
I'm sorry, but I'll have to side with Mortal here. As usual JBI falls for whatever candy-coated views of history he is getting from his current college courses... as long as they are anti-American. Mao is responsible, directly and indirectly, for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin. I am of German heritage myself, but in no way would I make the least attempt to justify the actions of Hitler and the Third Reich ("Well just look at how the French and English mistreated the Germans with all those reparations after WWI. They were just acting as expected.") Seriously, the mere attempt to defend Mao by citing other atrocities, whether that of the Mongols, American Slavery and the treatment of the American Indians, the Inquisition, etc... is simply pathetic and doesn't change the fact that Mao was a dictator behind some of the worst atrocities and genocides in the history of humanity. Whether he was a good or bad writer is another question altogether.
the population of China is big, the numbers are big
The fact that China's population is big allows for us to simply accept the deaths of millions as no big deal? Instead of getting all your information on Mao from college professors that would never dare to challenge the official view of history, perhaps you might want to talk with some who lived through the atrocities of those years, such as my studio mate and his parents.
Mao's cultural revolution after the Great Leap Forward (which was a failure) made China the economic giant that surpassed the US and still surpasses it.
Jeremy, China isn't even close to having surpassed the US as an economic giant. It hasn't even surpassed Japan yet and was not predicted to do so even at the pre-recession growth rate for another 25 years. Exaggerated claims of the US being surpassed by this or that nation have been going on since the US first took its position following WWII. The Soviets were going to "bury us". Then the Japanese who also bought huge percentage of the US debt. Now the Chinese are next in line... followed no doubt by India. The reality is that the world economy has changed greatly since the days immediately after WWII in which the US was virtually the only Western nation with its industrial base left largely intact. As a result, the American economy boomed like no tomorrow. Western Europe has since rebuilt as well as China and Japan and Korea and India and Russia are gaining. This means certainly that an absolute hegemony is a thing of the past... the US is not likely to roll over any more than Britain did following their fall from World domination. In many ways, the British citizens are better off today than they were during the height of the British Empire when huge percentages of their budget needed to be spent simply on military forces to maintain control. The Soviet Union imploded as a result of these costs.
The whole idea of some must get rich first makes sense, except when you realize the poor seem poor and the rich are so rich it is stupid. The corruption is so apparent here that people do not even point it out anymore.
And in Russia... and in the US. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any government or economic system free of corruption.
Back to the OP... this discussion seems to have run its course, devolving into a political discussion of Mao. Perhaps a compare/contrast that discusses the actual strengths and weaknesses of the authors?
well no other writer has written longer, more beautiful sentences than proust...
What weaknesses can we say these writers have? Anyone who's read any of them knows how important stream of consciousness is to their styles. In my opinion, Joyce comes closest to formal perfection. Faulkner stumbles sometimes, mixing up dates and having characters be simultaneously 33 years old and 40 or something. I know this happened in Light in August. But is such a fault really something that should upset his position in the lineup?