A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.69 (979 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0971865906 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A Worthy Polemic" according to Flying Scot. Well, but where do you draw the line between good and bad, obscure and insightful? Inherent in this debate is the question of who really are - and better yet, who should rightfully be - the true arbiters of what's good and what's garbage, what's clear and lucid and freshly innovative, and what's dense, obscure, and pretentious. To most lay readers today (and even to ma. Maria Aragon said Important and Decidedly Overdue Commentary. This is such an important book that anyone who reads fiction whether genre or 'literature' should read this slender, but potent paperback, and then they should pass it on to a friend. One of the things that struck me is that the same elitism that strangles diversity of style in art, unless it is abstract or post-modern (ie., obtuse) is apparently rampant in the rarefie. Provocative take on contemporary lit. Amazon Customer The thesis of this book is that contemporary American literature is pretentious, deliberately obscure, dull, insular, and just badly written overall. Myers provides us with some of his favorite examples dedicating large sections to Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster and David Guterson. He gives what he considers a representative sample from each wh
B. . Myers is an American critic and researcher of North Korean literature, culture, and society. He lives and works in Busan, South Korea. R
If this sounds familiar, it's because the Atlantic published an abridgement of an earlier version of this book in 2001, drawing some applause but also fusillades from much of the lit-crit establishment. From Publishers Weekly Myers reports in this audacious broadside upon current American literary writing that, "at the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say she had to puzzle repeatedly over many of the latter's sentences. Included here are Myers's full arguments plus a meticulous rebuttal of his critics. Myers makes a serviceable, if debatable, case that DeLillo et al., and by extrapolation much of contemporary literary writing, have strayed from the clarity and artfulness of expression that earlier authors, from Woolf to Conrad to Bellow, achieved; and that the true heirs of yesterday's giants may be today's genre writers. . Morrison's reply was, `That, my dear,
"A welcome contrarian take on the state of contemporary American prose."-The Wall Street JournalThe funny and devastating debunking of high "literary" prose stylists, including Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, and Cormac McCarthy, that caused a literary furor.