Lit Net Top Author?

[Saladin]

I have a feeling that Dostoevsky and Shakespeare will be at top three when this list is finish. Hehe.

[mayneverhave]

1. Faulkner

2. Shakespeare

3. T.S. Eliot

4. Proust

5. James Joyce

Yes, I'm very fond of the early 20th century.

[andave_ya]

1. J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Can I come up with my other three later?

[mortalterror]

When I was talking about one plot, I didn't mean that he couldn't follow one plot, I meant that, by Aristotelian thought, a good play only has one plot line. Everything is centered around Phaedre. Even Aricia is just there to be a foil for Phaedre, and not to be an actual full, or even central character. The plot doesn't breathe, there are no sub plots, only one plot, as was the fashion. Aricia, I knew, was a Racine invention (having read Euripides's version, though not Seneca's), but really the problem I have is he doesn't allow for anything to not be part of the plot. The plot is so absolute, so demanding, as to disallow breathing.

O.K., one could say the same about Othello, but really, Shakespeare allows us the beautiful opening speeches from Othello, and the love scene at the beginning of the play - the play can breathe. Racine on the other hand trades that off for drama - makes everything so time-strained, which limits things, as much as develops things. I think my problem is I like a less fast paced, more reflexive story, and with Racine, I think, being drama, the action is too quick - too driven, too compact into too little time, if that makes any sense.

There don't seem to be any subplots in Racine. Even the romances in Andromache, and the triangles only enforce the central plot line, only build upon one idea, one direction. I think it becomes complicated, when quite frankly there are more than 3 actors on the stage, and more tools available, yet the structure is still following a 2000 year old model.

The focus and stripping from the play of all non-necessities is why I prefer him to Shakespeare. That is how a good play should be written, as opposed to a novel, which our modern authors make a Christmas tree out of and hang all kinds of junk on. A play should be nothing but essentials. Take Hamlet for instance. In Aeschylus the play is about 1200 lines and has a third as many characters. The play within a play is 1000. Shakespeare's play ambles all over the place for four hours and to this day nobody knows what it's about. It's a good play, but do you really want them all to be like that? It's a lucky Frankenstein, a mismatched patchwork quilt, made of loose and disparate parts.

Drama is not like a novel where you can describe clouds, or go on a twenty page interior monologue through a character's past; so long as eventually you get back to the conflict. That's why I've found the drama more appealing in recent years. It knows what it is and it has a form, whereas with the novel we don't have any structure yet. The strength of a Shakespearean Sonnet is the confining structure: 14 ten syllable lines, iambic pentameter, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. I've seen you talking about there being a twist 2/3's in and a point driven home in the concluding couplet; so I know you know what I'm saying. Each part of the sonnet has a point, has a purpose, has a task. Writing one is like building a house to code.

Choosing to write in verse at all is to put one's head under the yoke. The shackles of meter and the tyranny of a rhyme scheme are too much for most people, but what wonders are contained therein! There is no free verse in drama because one can't afford to look like one's just screwing around.

You don't like the brevity, the compactness, the clarity, the economy of every word. That may be why you don't like my favorite writer of all, Ernest Hemingway.

Oh, and I'm with you on Leopardi. He is better than Blake.

[JBI]

You see, that's the point though - you are so fixed on Aristotle's notion of drama, that you have a "this is how it is supposed to be" notion. I think the opposite. I think more along the lines with Maesterlinck, a playwright who I don't particularly like, but who wrote some interesting essays. The drama should be more about the subtle, quieter things, than the epic, heroic things. It all comes down to taste though. I think Hamlet better because the ambiguity allows for a wider range of impression, and the depth allows for more reaction with the reader/viewer. Racine on the other hand seems so fixated on one path that it is hard to bend around him.

[Virgil]

1. Dante
2. Shakespeare
3. Homer
4. William Faulkner
5. Joseph Conrad

[eyemaker]

1. Dostoevsky
2. Tolstoy
3. Maugham
4. Shakespeare
5 Chaucer

[mortalterror]

You see, that's the point though - you are so fixed on Aristotle's notion of drama, that you have a "this is how it is supposed to be" notion. I think the opposite. I think more along the lines with Maesterlinck, a playwright who I don't particularly like, but who wrote some interesting essays. The drama should be more about the subtle, quieter things, than the epic, heroic things. It all comes down to taste though. I think Hamlet better because the ambiguity allows for a wider range of impression, and the depth allows for more reaction with the reader/viewer. Racine on the other hand seems so fixated on one path that it is hard to bend around him.

Well that is a very contemporary, a very recent point of view, that has no bearing on how plays were actually constructed for the majority of history. That thinking comes out of the naturalism movement, which emphasized small everyday details, plebian characters, and realism. From that tradition you get Chekhov and Ibsen. You get Strasburg and Stanislavski. This kind of writing and acting will produce a Hedda Gabler proficiently enough, but you can never get an Oedipus. In our theater we have many fishmongers but few kings. Arthur Miller bemoaned that the American theater did not have the actors to do a decent version of Electra and I agree.

[Dr. Hill]

1. Dostoevsky
2. Wilde
3. Tolstoy
4. Turgenev
5. Gogol

[stlukesguild]

JBI... I'll have to trust you on your assertion that Leopardi is much better in the original Italian than in translation... or rather that he sucks in translation. But then again... that would leave you open to arguments that any number of other writers are far better than we imagine... but that they merely suck in translation. Of course... I have no doubt that the original language is always to be preferred... but I am not so quick to dismiss the merits of translation out of hand.

Nevertheless... I questioned your pick of Leopardi knowing your current and recent fascination with him because it would seem one might easily argue that he is but one of any number of Romantic/Post-Romantic lyric poets any one of which (including Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Holderlin, Heine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Rilke, Garcia-Lorca, etc...) may be marvelous (at times), and any one of which might arguably be put forth as a favorite... but on par with Shakespeare or Homer? Doubtful. I could probably argue that Blake is something larger than a mere lyric poet... but your point is fair. I should most probably have gone with Goethe... but I didn't think of him, for some reason, at the time.

[Pewnut]

1. Shakespeare
2. Dickens
3. Dostoevsky
4. Poe
5. Steinbeck

[mortalterror]

Nevertheless... I questioned your pick of Leopardi knowing your current and recent fascination with him because it would seem one might easily argue that he is but one of any number of Romantic/Post-Romantic lyric poets any one of which (including Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Holderlin, Heine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Rilke, Garcia-Lorca, etc...) may be marvelous (at times), and any one of which might arguably be put forth as a favorite... but on par with Shakespeare or Homer? Doubtful. I could probably argue that Blake is something larger than a mere lyric poet... but your point is fair. I should most probably have gone with Goethe... but I didn't think of him, for some reason, at the time.

I'll be very disappointed if Goethe does not make the list. He's better than Leopardi. I don't think there's much doubt about that. But he's a little like Virgil or Milton: easy to appreciate and difficult to actually enjoy. So far, it looks like Nietzsche, a philosopher, is going to garner more votes than any of the former trio. Considering how much JBI claims to love Eugene Onegin I'm surprised he didn't float Pushkin for inclusion in the pantheon of great poets who are underrepresented.

[Bumbeli]

Dostoevsky
Proust
Shakespeare
Tolstoy
Joyce

[JBI]

I'll be very disappointed if Goethe does not make the list. He's better than Leopardi. I don't think there's much doubt about that. But he's a little like Virgil or Milton: easy to appreciate and difficult to actually enjoy. So far, it looks like Nietzsche, a philosopher, is going to garner more votes than any of the former trio. Considering how much JBI claims to love Eugene Onegin I'm surprised he didn't float Pushkin for inclusion in the pantheon of great poets who are underrepresented.

I was torn between Pushkin and Jane Austen in truth, I had him in my original list, but I doubted again he would get another vote, being what these boards are - people here seem to be able to appreciate derivative work that builds off of Pushkin, but not Pushkin himself for some reason. In truth, I felt my list needed a little more prose in it, so I put Austen over Pushkin, and Eliot over Pushkin was perhaps a mistake, but I've been reading Eliot non-stop for the past two months, reading the Quartets about once a day, and I couldn't shake him out of my head.

If the list was ten people, I probably would have added Pushkin, would definately have added Baudelaire, Zola, maybe Flaubert, maybe Virginia Woolf, maybe Faulkner, but really 5 and even 10 is very hard to negotiate. Goethe though, I find doesn't really give me what he gives others - perhaps it's the translations, but I suspect it is my modern and postmodern perspective cutting in at his classical fascination.

[TheFifthElement]

Angela Carter
Paul Auster
Haruki Murakami
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Halldor Laxness

and 2 of those are still alive!