Major American Writers - Why Are Some More Popular than…
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Major American Writers - Why Are Some More Popular than Others
John Updike. Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. These are names I know in a very abstract way as important writers of the somewhat distant past. In fact, I'm not sure I even knew who Roth was before I started looking into mid-20th Century American fiction. I hang around here and other places where people talk about their favorite Literature (with a capital L) and I don't think I've once seen their names mentioned. The American writers I see praised most and discussed most by people actively reading them for pleasure are the likes of Pynchon, McCarthy, Vonnegut and Wallace.
Speaking of DFW, I wonder if his opinion on at least Updike is relevant here. This is a quote I stumbled on just now:
>Even in their own time, the ongoing sagas of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom were considered by at least some members of the intelligentsia as excessive, self-indulgent, square, and complicit with the status quo.” By the time the 1990s rolled around, David Foster Wallace relegated this brand of fiction to the ash heap of literary history when he famously dubbed Updike and Roth (along with Norman Mailer) “Great Male Narcissists” who served as spokesmen “for the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” — the so-called Me Generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Instigating what amounts to a youth rebellion, he patently rejected these authors as literary fathers.4
Is this in fact the judgment of modern academia and modern fans of literature? I doubt it was precisely a pronouncement from on high and everyone just agreed with him, but maybe he vocalized how others were already viewing them and that's just continued to our day?
(I should stress I'm very much an outsider looking in. I have zero training in English Literature. I just have a lot of free time and an interest in both history and literature. I started researching the American novel and here I am. But my point is, I have a supremely small perspective that might be totally wrong about given popularity or respect)
#entertainment
source
John Updike. Saul Bellow. Philip Roth. These are names I know in a very abstract way as important writers of the somewhat distant past. In fact, I'm not sure I even knew who Roth was before I started looking into mid-20th Century American fiction. I hang around here and other places where people talk about their favorite Literature (with a capital L) and I don't think I've once seen their names mentioned. The American writers I see praised most and discussed most by people actively reading them for pleasure are the likes of Pynchon, McCarthy, Vonnegut and Wallace.
Speaking of DFW, I wonder if his opinion on at least Updike is relevant here. This is a quote I stumbled on just now:
>Even in their own time, the ongoing sagas of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom were considered by at least some members of the intelligentsia as excessive, self-indulgent, square, and complicit with the status quo.” By the time the 1990s rolled around, David Foster Wallace relegated this brand of fiction to the ash heap of literary history when he famously dubbed Updike and Roth (along with Norman Mailer) “Great Male Narcissists” who served as spokesmen “for the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” — the so-called Me Generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Instigating what amounts to a youth rebellion, he patently rejected these authors as literary fathers.4
Is this in fact the judgment of modern academia and modern fans of literature? I doubt it was precisely a pronouncement from on high and everyone just agreed with him, but maybe he vocalized how others were already viewing them and that's just continued to our day?
(I should stress I'm very much an outsider looking in. I have zero training in English Literature. I just have a lot of free time and an interest in both history and literature. I started researching the American novel and here I am. But my point is, I have a supremely small perspective that might be totally wrong about given popularity or respect)
#entertainment
source
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