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Ayn Rand maybe. How the hell is it that Atlas Shrugged is number one on the Modern Library's best novels of the century auidence poll, a privlige shared alongside Ulysses in the critics poll. Total absurdity.
Wilfred Owen is a bit overrated as well. And so is Charles Burkoski, but that's just my opinion. His works always appeared a bit superficial to me.
By Burkoski do you mean Charles Bukowski? Either way, everybody knows that JBI is the most overrated writer anyway - no point looking for a competitor.
For me it's got to be D.H. Lawrence. He was pompous, judgemental, full of self-pitying egotism and his stories describe a black and white world where he is right and everybody who opposes the narrator's pov is wrong. I rated him as an adolescent but it was when I had to study Sons and Lovers for A level that I really went off him big time.
Yes!Quote:
Originally Posted by neilgee
The man was an abysmal writer... god alone knows why he stays so popular. I can only assume it has something to with noteriety...
Joyce.
I think James Joyce is vastly overrated; so is Hemingway the novelist although he wrote some fine short stories.
Friedrich Schiller... don't know if you know him but my country is awfully proud of him and I can't see why ... there might be some nice ideas in his plays but ... really they agonize me with him every german lesson... that wannabe-shakespear (I realy like shakespear and reading Schiller I realy must say that he can't hold a candle to the beaty of his stile...)
Joyce is overrated, but that's cos critics are always waiting for a writer who's hard to understand, so that they can spend the next 987694375 years writing about them. Pathetic. Having said that, I've only read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses may yet surprise me, but I'm not counting on it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jermac
I loved The Sun Also Rises so I wouldn't say Hemingway is overrated. The Old Man and the Sea definitely is, though.
Dan Brown is overrated. But then again, he's not a writer.
Oh come on. Since when was ambiguity such a bad thing? Mystery is what keeps things beautiful. If Joyce had not written in such a radically different way, literature would not be what it is today. New percpectives always create new horizens for creativity. I suppose Shakespeare and Dante too are overrated since they've been written about for well over three hundred years.Quote:
Originally Posted by escapologist
Okay, I know I'm the bad guy, but Dickens hasn't really appealed to me in recent years. When I was younger I loved Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, but now, despite the forever known fact that Dickens is probably second or third to Shakespeare in charactarization, he just writes on and on to a rather dull extent, and his class commentary isn't as powerful as Dostoyevsky's.
I'm not saying he's a bad writer, I'm saying he's made to sound more complicated than he really is. I don't see the point in analysing every little word in Ulysses. It ruins the beauty of the book. The point of literary criticism isn't to dissect works of art.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
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Originally Posted by Lokasenna
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Originally Posted by Jermac
What is UP with all this hate towards the modernists? Is it because they're difficult?Quote:
Originally Posted by glover7
I think you'll find Lawrence and Joyce aren't the only modernists :). Plus, 'overrated' doesn't mean that they aren't good, just that there's a lot of inexplicable hype around them.
Yep, you have figured us out: Since we cannot understand the literary works of great depths, we just go nasty on the authors... Kind of a defence mechanism.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit
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Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Well maybe I'm just projecting from experience. I have a friend who despises anything made in the 20th century, so I'm just too used to hearing people complain about Ulysses because it's a difficult book.Quote:
Originally Posted by escapologist
Trust me, 1000 year old skaldic poetry is a thousand times more difficult than Lawrence or Joyce. It is also far more enjoyable!;)Quote:
Originally Posted by DanielBenoit