I agree.Originally Posted by nothingman87
Barbara Cartland is the worst. Who reads her books??
I agree.
Barbara Cartland is the worst. Who reads her books??
The fact that he has inspired the word, "Kafkaesque" proves that his impact on Western Literature was profound.
For that alone he should be recognized, if nothing else; but it would be insolent to claim that The Metamorphosis is merely "just another classic."
"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."
— Chekhov
She is said to have sold over a billion copies worldwide. It would be interesting to know what percentage of her readers are male, if any.Barbara Cartland is the worst. Who reads her books??
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Why can't we list truly horrible writers?
The worst writer that I have read has to be William Burroughs. I am a great fan of the beat movement, but most of his novels simply do not make sense. He writes so cryptically that we are supposed to think of him as a genius and that is that. Having said that, I haven't read Naked Lunch or Junky, two of his most linear novels. I have them both, but haven't gotten around to reading them.
'For sale: baby shoes, never worn'. Hemingway
Get over yourself. Using cheap personal insults like "I doubt they'd waste a bullet on you" just because someone doesn't like modernism and postmodernism?
I agree with how he described Faulkner's style as an excuse for inability and think that this applies doubly to Delillo. It doesn't surprise me that Delillo has a Master's in Literature and in fact I would expect him to hav a Ph.D. by how boring and self important his writing is.
I don't think I have any hated authors. I got over my hatred of dean koontz after the 30th book I read of his.
Now let's see here.
Kafka
Ayn rand
Charles dickens
James joyce
Ernest Hemingway
These authors seem to have a lot of people against them on this thread. So perhaps it is fair to say they are controversial.
Calling William Faulkner as "dumbed down" literature will invite personal insults. Whereas, if he would have said "I do not enjoy modernism, although William Faulkner may be a good modernist writer," I would have no disagreement.
If you claim that his insult of Faulkner's writing was a "description" of his style, then you are being ignorant yourself. As to Delillo, I merely claimed he is a postmodern author which does not deserve to be considered as the worst of critically acclaimed writers.I agree with how he described Faulkner's style as an excuse for inability and think that this applies doubly to Delillo.
For those who aren't in search of cheap entertainment, "boring" should never be a part of their vocabulary.by how boring and self important his writing is.
Last edited by Intuition; 08-15-2011 at 10:54 PM.
"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."
— Chekhov
I know the Canon itself is massive, I don't question that. But our colleague here was claiming that he was reading what Bloom considered to being the central part of the canon. Which would also be why he never read Homer because it was left out of the top 26 whom Bloom centralized around. I'm inclined to believe he was alluding to these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wes...ol_of_the_Ages
Of course Bloom has written other books as well. In Genius he gives a brief bio and critical response to 100 writers whom he places at the center of Western Literature. Certainly Homer deserves a spot on nearly any list of the most influential works of literature in the West. Glancing over Bloom's list of 26 I find that I have read something by all except George Eliot. The arguments over the "canon"... this notion of some universal, never-changing list of books that represent without question the greatest works of literature... are fed by the recognition of the giants left off the list that would make for reading no less rich:
Shakespeare..........Spenser, Donne, Calderon, and Racine
Dante................... Virgil or Homer
Chaucer................ Boccaccio or The Arabian Nights
Cervantes.............. Ariosto and Tasso
Montaigne.............. Plato
Molière.................. Rabelais
Milton.................... William Blake
Dr. Samuel Johnson... Boswell
Goethe.................... Leopardi and Rousseau
Wordsworth.............. Keats
Jane Austen.............. Lawrence Stern
Walt Whitman............ Baudelaire
Emily Dickinson........... Tennyson
Charles Dickens.......... Flaubert
George Eliot............... Melville
Tolstoy..................... Dostoevsky
Henrik Ibsen............... Checkov
Freud........................ Thomas Mann
Proust....................... Walter Pater, R.M. Rilke, and Oscar Wilde
James Joyce............... T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Lewis Carroll
Virginia Woolf.............. Eugenio Montale
Franz Kafka................ Hermann Hesse and
Jorge Luis Borges......... Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar
Pablo Neruda............... Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, and Rafael Alberti
Fernando Pessoa........... Jorge Guillen, Antonio Machado, and Miguel Hernandez
Samuel Beckett............. Jean Paul Sartre
I think what turns people off the notion of a "canon" is the idea that there is some universal list of essential reading and that one cannot be thought to be well read until he or she has conquered this. It also misrepresents the notion of critical discussion with regard to literature. Stating that "Shakespeare is greater than Dante" (or the reverse) is essentially as useless as ridiculous claims as to how "boring" Faulkner is or how "overrated" Kafka is. Shakespeare and Faulkner and Kafka and all the writers who are deemed as "classics" or part of the "canon" are thought of as such for a reason. Any individual reader may dislike or feel ambivalent about any given writer... but that doesn't mean that said writers are "overrated" or "boring"... It simply means that the individual reader didn't connect with that writer.
Seriously, I'd like to see posters make some attempt at defending absurd blanket statements such as "Kafka is overrated" (Oh really? Why? What arguments can you make in support of this statement of fact?)... Such would at least be more interesting than the usual comments worthy of the highschool freshman: "Dude! This Shakespeare guy sucks!"
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
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The worst writer ever is Stephen King. I will NEVER recover from Pet Cemetery. All I could think was, I wish I had that, and I'd take advantage of that pet cemetery, no matter the consequences. But it was a horrible thing to contemplate.
I'm pretty sure that the worst writers in the world don't get published. Though, there is Stephanie Meyer. . . .
This would seem to suggest King is a great writer, no? If he can evoke such emotion and contemplation, he's doing something right.
The whole point of entertainment is to prevent boredom. Being boring will always be a perfectly legitimate criticism of any form of art.
Faulkner purposely tries to make his work confusing. I can't respect an author who tries to make his work look like more than it is by muddling things up.
And DeLillo is somewhat like that, although he doesn't go about it by using confusing prose. He takes the typical postmodernist approach of placing style over substance. Saying a very simple thing in a terribly long-winded and boring way that it must be artistic and important.
I wouldn't say that either is the worst writer--that's a title reserved for someone who's absolutely incompetent at crafting a story. The criticisms they reserve, however, are, in my opinion, warranted.
And there is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody and insulting them.
I do remember being riveted by this book. But I don't think I'll read another of his soon!
I think that more and more the worst writers do get published. Virginiawang has been published apparently. I think more and more any decent author who comes along will get buried underneath a heap of that ...um, I don't know what to politely call it. And there are a gazillion of those awful authors who write for women now - all that "chick lit."
Now there are certain to be writers out there who are technically inferior in their craft. And recently this reader has been made aware of what 'fan-fiction' really is (a three way assault on intellectual property, written language and human decency)... so the category must be narrowed.
There've been dry books, and boring books, and dense books. Even stupid books. But reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was, for this reader, a put-the-book-down-in-disgust, seriously-are-you-serious kind of awful. So put another chalk mark on the Ayn Rand side of the board.
As an interesting side note, this reader did finish it, and is still awaiting her posthumous apology.
J
Publishing is first and foremost a business and publishers know their customer base is largely composed of people who are not concerned with 'literature' per se; which explains the myriad examples of pulp fiction that fill the bookstores and online publishing outlets. Many respected writers were frequently rejected before being published, which begs the question as to how many good writers are still being rejected ( see list below). Conversely, now that millions of people have a word processor at there disposal, the number of poorly written but saleable books awaiting publication must be monumental. Somewhere among them lies the book whose author will live up to the title of this thread.
http://www.examiner.com/book-in-nati...-by-publishers
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
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