>mfw plebs try to name any country with a greater literary tradition than Ireland
England
>>7619133
/thread
>The OECD Adult Skills Survey shows that 17.9% or about 1 in 6, Irish adults are at or below level 1 on a five level literacy scale. Ireland ranks 15th out of 24 participating countries. At this level a person may be unable to understand basic written information.
https://www.nala.ie/literacy/literacy-in-ireland
Russia
America
>>7619140
>According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html
>>7619140
Oh come on now, Russia and England sure but America? don't be an idiot.
>>7619154
People don't want to admit this but America outplayed the Brits in 20th century literature.
>>7619132
Italy
Spain
China
>>7619156
>>7619156
this, not even American.
>>7619159
ugh
wat?
no
>>7619154
Melville
Emerson
Whitman
Pynchon
Wallace
DeLillo
Faulkner
Steinbeck
Fitzgerald
Hemingway
>>7619143
I would rather be illiterate than share a literary culture with the Sun or Mail.
>>7619156
I think the Beak was equal to Corn Cob so at the absolute highest level it was a draw
On a per-capita basis I would agree Ireland has an astounding literary tradition but they have us to thank for that.
If it wasn't for us, their most patrician neighbors, they wouldn't even be speaking English and still be wearing burlap sacks and eating their leather boots
If it wasn't for us they wouldn't have anything tragic and depressing to write poems and plays about either.
By virtue of the fact that Ireland was British until 1916 (or whenever), it is only logical to say that all pre 1916 "Irish" authors were in fact English.
Joyce, Yeats, Wilde etc. All subjects of His Majesty
>>7619143
Southerners aren't really US citizens.
>>7619156
Britbong here, this is true. Declining from Great Power status is a hell of a drug.
>>7619174
>Southerners aren't really US citizens.
They keep claiming that. But once we burn a few of their cities to the ground they start to see reason.
>What is France: the Thread
do you really dare to compare to germany?
>>7619132
one could argue without much difficulty, that most of the european nations with a bigger population have a greater literary tradition
>>7619206
They're only going to develop a richer literary tradition after importing so many artists and future Nobel laureates
>>7619206
philosophical tradition =/= literary tradition
besides, france has you beat
>>7619172
>Joyce
jej, this is like the most obvious tell someone hasn't or can't read Joyce: they assume they don't need to know Irish and a couple other dead languages.
>>7619220
its a tie
>>7619249
>its a tie
>this is what germans have to believe to avoid chimping out all over europe again
>>7619172
No, they have the Vikings to blame and the Normans to thank. Since the plague in he early 14th Century obliged many Normans to go inland.
I was reading Dubliners, and got around halfway through, before returning it becuse I was busy.
Is it worth finishing it ? I think I'm on the story after the race one,
>>7619156
It just seems that way because of the power of American media. Is Faulkner better than Woolf? Or Hemingway better than Lawrence? Not really, but they have more of a legend surrounding them so it just seems that way to laymen.
Shakespeare
Milton
Chaucer
Blake
Marlowe
Jonson
Spenser
Keats
Donne
Herbert
Rochester
Austen
Dickens
Wordsworth
Tennyson
Byron
Shelley
Shelley
Brontë
Brontë
Brontë
Orwell
Huxley
Forster
Lawrence
Woolf
Eliot
Coleridge
Pope
Browning
Swinburne
Dryden
Fielding
Rosetti
Rosetti
Burns
Hopkins
Hardy
Ford
Defoe
Chesterton
De Quincey
Hogg
Lewis
Trollope
Kipling
More
Bacon
Johnson
Boswell
Gibbon
Burton
Browne
Tolkien
Lewis
Carroll
Wells
Doyle
Fleming
Wodehouse
Waugh
Ford
Greene
Saki
Auden
Eliot
Hughes
Larkin
Thomas
Maugham
Murdoch
Sparks
Lowry
Durrell
Rhys
Lessing
Pinter
Galsworthy
Powell
Golding
Johnson
Kavan
Quin
Brooke-Rose
Themerson
Gray
Kelman
>>7619317
You forgot Joyce.
>>7619298
I think Americans have Hemingway and Steinbeck for Lawrence and Orwell -- which is not a fair trade -- but on the other side of it, I would say that Gertrude Stein is just as good of a writer, but didn't Woolf's glorious critical streak. I would honestly say that Jack Kerouac is the best of the bunch. He's the American Proust, really, and does Britain have a Proust?
>>7619322
I personally rate Woolf right alongside Joyce and Proust. And I'm sorry but I can't agree with you re. Kerouac. I somewhat enjoy the tone of his work but his syntax and figurative language are crude and there's not that much to think about.
>>7619317
>two Lewis
one of those is Irish
>Burns
>not Scots
>More
the guy who died refusing to accept henry viii as a legitimate king?
>Murdoch
if this is iris, you seem to have missed her POV
it's like you got so insecure you needed to compile an indiscriminate list
>Doyle
kek, he probably wouldn't mind this
>>7619320
don't make him mad, he might find out sterne isn't english either.
>>7619329
In his best works, the ones that were basically proof-edited first drafts, Kerouac traded immediate syntactic control for an unrestrained stream of consciousness with which he was trying to express his reality, and the beauty he creates he does the same way as Dante, by the contrast between the perspective of Kerouac as he lived it and Kerouac the writer, later on.
And his major works, his 'Duluoz Legend,' is basically his attempt at La Comedie Humaine and the Proust formula.
The reason I say all this is not because I'm desperate to make the case for Kerouac as a world-beater, but because his actual literary craft is lost in his image and reputation.
I believe in Woolf as about an equal power to Joyce, but I also rate Gertrude Stein way, way up there. She's one of the closest successors Henry James has anywhere in literature
>>7619317
t.Ahmed Mohammed al-Rape
Leave literature to white countries, moor --like Argentina.
>>7619132
Russia
>>7619132
>hurr durr my country has a better literary tradition!
>durrrr no its mine!!!!!!
>no no, mine! mine!!!!
You have no idea how much I pity you.
>>7619317
>Herbert
Like Zbigniew Herbert, thePolishNobelist?
The United States
>Hemingway
>Faulkner
>Pynchon
>McCarthy
>Salinger
>Fitzgerald
>Vonnegut
>DFW
>Nabokov
>Twain
>Ellison
>Heller
>Williams
>Gaddis
>Steinbeck
>>7619206
>brecht
literally discredits anything Germany has produced
>>7619485
Literally babby tier writers desu
read more American literature
>>7619485
continued
>Herbert
>Burroughs
>Kerouac
>Ginsberg
>Whitman
>S. Thompson
>Bradbury
>Palahniuk
>Thoreau
>S. Buck
>K. Dick
>Easton Ellis
>DeLillo
>Melville
>>7619395
According to Wikipedia they're actually related.
He never won a Nobel btw. You're thinking of Milosz.
>>7619132
I dont even like Russkie lit, but England, Russia, and Classical Greece blow it the fuck out
>>7619174
This, New England is basically a European state and Mississippi is Ukraine/Bulgaria/Roma tier.
>>7619559
Chicago blows all of your stinky euro metropolises right out. We even have our own self-contained warzone below 40th St.
>>7619499
>Dismissing Nabokov, Faulkner, Pynchon and Gaddis for no ostensible reason
>using words/phrases like 'literally', 'babby', and 'tier' in literary discourse
You are everything wrong with this board.
>>7619562
At this point, when Europeans think of a true American city, they should think of Chicago. Violence, great universities, great fast food, lots of angry smart white people, tons of bloodthirsty minorities.
I do wonder what alot of eurofriends would think of burlington vermont
>>7619559
Word. Anything below the Mason-Dixon line has been existing in a different world than the Northeast for over a century. Florida is another fucking universe altogether, besides.
>>7619566
>tfw you realize that Chicago will be the next Detroit
>>7619566
Not to mention that people from warm climates in America are weak, weak bitches -- cold cities are better to live in unless you're existentially unaware and require a tropical spring break every year.
>>7619571
Also cold weather scares away blacks and hispanics.
>>7619570
it can't really happen that way because of the population density and our small amount of manufacturing. arguably if that would have happened it would have taken place during or after the depression when the stockyards were all built over but they just had a very steady economic rise over the latter half of the 20th century
>>7619575
No, it just breeds stronger and more cunning ones.
>>7619507
Only a few of them are any good tho lad. Massive land and like 4 good authors.
>>7619586
Strongly disagree, the only blacks NH or ME gets are drug dealers that travel up 93 to deliver their stock to white meth head trash in Manchester or Portland, or very smart professional african/n. african ex-pat doctors on visa programs. Vermont doesnt even get that.
>>7619590
He made you a shit list. Here's the real American lit masterlist:
>Twain
>Hawthorne
>Melville
>Poe
>Richard Wright
>Baldwin
>Henry James
>Gertrude Stein
>Hemingway
>Kerouac
>Steinbeck
>Faulkner
>Upton Sinclair
>Tennessee Williams
>Emerson
>Thoreau
>Dickinson
>Whitman
>Eggers/Franzen
>Roth
>McCarthy
>John Updike
>DFW
and I'll throw in Mary Karr, an ex of DFW's and in my opinion the best living memoirist
>>7619570
Detroit turned into Detroit because that city only had one means of financial profit and almost everyone only worked for the auto industry, then when it crashed the gorillion blacks didn't have money anymore so they sell drugs now
Chicago has more of a diverse job economy
>>7619620
White Flight also happened. White people still live in and work in diverse industries in detroit, but its like hartford on the weekends: a wasteland.
>>7619317
Eliot was American.
>>7619342
>not Scots
Can we stop this retarded meme?
They literally voted to stay part of Britain.
>>7619317
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spencer, Rosetti, and Tennyson are great.
Most of England's poets are shit; Blake, Byron, Keats, Donne, Rochester, Kipling...who reads hat shit today?
The world-improvers like Dickens, and Wordsworth are utter ass.
Kavan, Quincey and Huxley were addicts first and foremost.
Some great travel writers like Trollope and Greene, humourists like Wodehouse and Saki are worth mentioning. Philip Mackie was a television writer, but also worth a mention.
Historians like Gibbon are a gigantic joke today. Compare him with Germans like Mommsen.
> Brontë Sisters are Irish
>Ford
>Hughes
>Durrell
>Doyle
>Maugham was born in Paris of Irish ancestry
>Evelyn Waugh was also part Irish
Those are just the ones which can be named!
>>7619706
That's not to say that I wouldn't have loved Dickens in his own time. He's a good Victorian era writer, attempting to make the time seem comfortable, or potentially so.
>>7619718
Dickens wrote some shit which plenty of theoretically 'better' authors would have killed to have written. I still fuck with Keats, too. He stands out of the Romantic crowd
>>7619726
He's great with class-based iconography. A great writer of dispositions. Chess pieces.
It seems a little mechanistic to some people, I guess.
>>7619733
The serial format is totally at odds with the modern understanding of the novel but I am totally willing to suffer it for Chuck Dicks
plus, it's the only appropriate primer for The Bonfire of the Vanities
>Ireland has the audacity to claim Beckett and Joyce as their own when they essentially forced them out of the country
>>7619742
I'm sure the Irish patrician minority would have been heartbroken if there were one at the time.
>>7619177
Do you know fucking anything about history and modern geopolitics? By any standard, Britain remains a great power. We have the fifth largest economy, for one thing.
No, it's the decline from "biggest superpower ever, even bigger than Rome at its peak" that fucking rekt us.
>>7619745
I think that's probably what he meant. Seems you're splitting hairs m8
>>7619744
>He thinks Le Fanu, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, and Fitzgibbon came from working-class homes
Not quite. Although people from all backgrounds can set themselves toward creating great works of literature.
>>7619706
>Most of England's poets are shit; Blake, Byron, Keats, Donne, Rochester, Kipling...who reads hat shit today?
Are you serious?
>>7619706
Would you accept Evelyn Waugh as an Irish author.
I don't think a country can claim an author unless the author was raised and educated in said country.
>>7619801
I'll admit that I don't enjoy most of Shakespeare's sonnets, or even much of Milton, but I find the poets which came after them to be ludicrously dull.
I can't read Pope, Kipling or Blake. Donne has some interesting ideas, but I don't always see why it needed to be formulated as a poem. I get nothing from Keat's odes...
How anyone could mistake Rochester for Shakespeare is simply beyond imagination.
I do see authors like Dickinson for example as belonging to an English or New English tradition, so I would accept her and Eliot as English writers, yes.
I find the decadent style portrayed by Rochester and Byron to be an acrid slur against poetry.
>>7619853
>get nothing from Keats' odes
i feel really bad for you. like genuinely. some of my most deeply felt experiences came from reading keats :(
>>7619507
>>7619342
CS Lewis is Irish? Fuck off, he's from Belfast you cunt.
>>7619609
>>7619485
>Nabokov
>>7619882
>>7619882
Sure why not tolstoy and dosto?
Lewis wrote some great religious books either way. Same with Chesterton.
So much better than some of the more highly-paraded fiction: "Tolkien! Caroll! Lewis!" They're designed to put the kids to sleep.
Sorry I am a bit tired. The nephews wouldn't let me sleep.
american literature, prose and verse, is trash
scifi/speculative fiction is the only genre where the americans have a strong claim to top 1 - 3 in the worldwide rankings.
>>7619853
>I'll admit that I don't
>I find
>I can't
>I don't
>I get nothing
Do you understand that you and your personal tastes are not applicable to everyone? Songs of Innocence & Experience are probably some of the most commonly known poems anywhere on Earth. And you're dismissing Kipling, the author of that highly obscure collection of short stories, The Jungle Book?
Please, think before you speak.
>>7619917
>Do you understand that you and your personal tastes are not applicable to everyone
Absolutely, and thankfully nobody's opinion will demolish a great author, right? There's no fully objective appraisal to be made here.
I just like hearing the angle from which readers like yourself might defend them.
>>7619882
Russian-Americans count desu
>>7619938
>. Donne has some interesting ideas, but I don't always see why it needed to be formulated as a poem.
poetic conceit is not something that's transferable to prose
>>7619899
>Tolstoi will never write his great California surfer novel
>>7619938
I don't really need an angle by which to defend them, you were saying they're not great writers simply because you don't read them. Which is tosh.
>>7619952
No, I don't care about a general perception of 'greatness'... I care about what I can get out of a book personally.
If I had observed a Greek urn more closely, maybe I would get more out of Keats the next time out. Sometimes it's just the location or outlook which needs to change before you grasp what makes an author so relatable.
>>7619963
Maybe if you examined what a thread was about next time you wouldn't come in and start talking at cross purposes like some deluded autistic fellow who doesn't understand that not all conversations are about his personal opinions.
>>7619944
Yes, he has a very high level of poetic conceit and that's probably something I admire about him.
You know how in landscape painting, there has to be that little pathway which allows a viewer to 'enter' a painting? Some authors have a larger or smaller pathway than others.
I'd say, objectively, England has the best tradition of anything except dealing with the US.
As a US American though, I like US writers more.
>>7620033
>as a US American
kill yourself my man
>>7620033
give it up for miss teen south carolina everyone
>>7619609
>Eggers/Franzen
It's like you didn't even try
>>7620207
Take yr pick or pick neither, they're still massive pieces of the canon of the 21st century
Eggers was also stupid young when he published his first thing. He's the benchmark for 'young memoirist'
>>7619861
Cause you were 17 and depressed?
>>7620213
According to wikipedia he published his first thing when he was 30
That's not considered "stupid young" by any stretch of the imagination
>>7620247
For a memoirist, especially today, it is. Trust me on that
>>7620256
Pynchon wrote V. when he was like 25
30 is very average
>>7620280
that's not a memoir is what I'm saying
young writers write semi-autobiographical fiction, and older writers write memoir, and david eggers wrote one at 30, which people who write memoirs regard as a pretty savage literary accomplishment
>>7619172
And England has Ireland to thank for being literate at all. If it weren't for Gaelic monks and monasteries in the dark ages writing would never have been spread to Anglos.
>implying Ireland didn't have a rich literary native tradition before England even existed.
>>7620312
>If it weren't for Gaelic monks and monasteries in the dark ages writing would never have been spread to Anglos.
Yes, this is why we use the Gaelic alphabet.
>>7620290
That doesn't make any sense. If anything a memoir would be less of an undertaking considering you're just transcribing your life to paper without adding anything to it.
He had some traumatic shit happen to him and was able to profit off of that. A 16 year old could do the same thing if they were put through terrible situations early in lifeAnne Frank for example
>>7620213
franzen -maybe-
but eggers? wew lad i am laffin'
>>7619276
is greentext and an allusion to the war supposed to convince me, jacques?
>>7620319
Memoirs by young people do not, by rule, happen. It's definitely possible, but the problem is that young people don't have like a life-long narrative arc or really a story, or accomplishments, and much less the self awareness and talent requisite to write a good literary memoir, and so they write fiction instead. It's also really hard to pitch an autobiographical piece without requisite publishing credits -- which take time to earn -- or some degree of external fame.
I know this because I am 22 and attempting to pitch my own, which is basically just a bildungsroman-type story with a realistic portrayal of the punk subculture, which there are very few books about, and which I spent three of the past four summers touring through. It's a totally logical piece to write, so I think, and half of it is indeed written, but without the accreditation these projects just stall. People in my situation gather that it's easier to write fiction and submit your finished piece than to pitch a nonfiction piece -- you need a proposal letter foremost with a nonfiction piece, which is often before they even see text, and without a serious resume it just doesn't happen. Eggers IS the exception
>>7620317
yep. Spaces and capital letters, you're welcome.
>>7619544
No, but he deserved onemuch more than Szymborska
>>7619132
Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я Poccи́я
>>7620354
You're just making up excuses for yourself. Once you start saying "this author did this thing because they're brilliant and I'll never be able to do that", you fail as a writer. You're making it seem like it's impossible to write a great memoir at a young age when that's completely false. Do you not agree that 10 years is a long time? If you were forced in a terrible living situation I guarantee you would feel that 10 years is a very long time. Even 1 year is a long time under certain conditions.
You could write an amazing memoir that spans one year.
If your only excuse is that it's a big hassle to publish it as non fiction then don't. Why is it a huge problem for you if you say it's all fiction?
No one cares about your excuses.
>>7620394
I could give a fuck about the conventional thinking about writing and age because right now I am actively defying it anyway. I'm not saying it's impossible to write a great memoir as a young person, I'm saying that young people seldom if ever make the attempt and even less often than that does said attempt get published
I'm quite happy with where /I'm/ at with the project, but I have no illusions about where it's going in this year of our lord 2016.
>>7620402
Young people who write good fiction realize after it's written just how personal and real this "fiction" really is.
There's no difference between memoirs and fiction. They're just different titles created for marketing purposes. People don't realize that these fictional situations can actually occur (and have) in real life because a label of 'fiction' has been printed on it so therefor it must be complete fantasy.
Don't get so hung up on fiction versus non-fiction.
>>7620387
what a big guy
>>7620402
>g in this year of our lord 201
god has been dead for at least 100 years now, bub
modern american literature is the greatest of all time
>>7620417
there is a huge difference between memoir and fiction, and if you don't think so I have no idea what you're talking about. they belong to the same tradition of writing, but the memoir is a certain kind of book, like the novel in structure but in which the author has implicitly attested to the factual, testifiable truth of the events in the story. Writers who break this contract like the guy who wrote a million little pieces, do so completely at their peril and this is why there is a difference. Kerouac wrote about his life plainly and autobiographically but he did so as fiction (also for legal reasons) but mostly for the authorial license fiction affords.
Check out 'The Art of Memoir' by Mary Karr if you have any further questions about the memoir form. It came out last year. She, a middle-aged memoirist, is one who regards Eggers as an inexplicably young as a writer of memoir, generally speaking. The younger fiction writers are even younger than their counterparts in memoir.
>>7620422
aww, are you triggered by my appropriation of christian slang
>>7619172
>Ireland was occupied by the English
>therefore the Irish were English
If this were true there would have been no desire or need for independence
>>7619394
Nationalism is such a spook, I agree. To ally oneself with arbitrary individuals based on ridiculous geography and chance of time-- how pathetic.
>>7620143
next time, say 'USian'
> tfw plebs think that X country is better than Y becouse Z was born there
>>7619646
Robert Burns wrote in Scots. He's one of the reasons why there's linguistic arguments that it might be a Germanic language not a Anglic dialect. Go back to the voting board.
>>7619876
You haven't read anything he wrote about his own life, have you?
