>early 2000s
>Franzen bitches about Oprah choosing The Corrections for her book club because it might hurt his standing in the literary world
>2015
>I don't care whether people read books or not
What happened?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MYiu3fuJjM
>>7736384
>early 2000s
>Franzen is frustrated that he's been drawn in with the swill of mainstream culture
>2015
>>Franzen has turned to apathy about the fact that he was irreversibly drawn in with the swill of mainstream culture
Hes kinda like the Kurt Cobain of literature except he can live with his apathy
>>7736384
He's well-established enough to not have to care at this point. Gone are the days when he'd write godawful impressions about Gaddis as a convoluted reaction to criticism about his own books.
Ironically, I introduce: intentionally introspective interviewee is idealizing intellectual identity (imagining implicit importance); interviewer incites inane interpersonal interaction, intending instant, immature amusement instead.
>>7736384
You're jumping past a crucial period in the development of Franzen.
All through the 90s he was an author with a fantastic critical reputation but no sales and next to no way to support himself (he refused to take an academic job; the New Yorker didn't to play patron to him like they are currently with folks like Don Antrim).
Go pick up a copy of How To Be Alone and really get inside the head on a deeply insecure white male novelist. The essay that made him famous, Perchance to Dream, out-and-out refers to fans of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich as "tribalist." He decries literary cliques forming around notions of sexuality, race, and gender -- primarily due to thinly-veiled anxiety that he was going to be excluded/that these developments where the reason why he couldn't sell a book.
Homeboy stopped just short of crying reverse racism.
He wasn't bitching about "his standing in the literary world," he was bitching that he might not be able to connect with a male audience -- the only audience he believed at the time had any merit.
>>7736592
If somebody doesn't step up to do the "20 year anniversary" thing on goddamn perchance,it might have to be me
>>7736592
>decries tribalism
>only male audience has merit
Does not compute.
I think tribalism is a good thing, though. Everyone has a right to think and behave tribally. It's a necessary survival strategy.
>>7736671
Most of Perchance doesn't make sense, which is a shame, because the intro alone is 500 words.
A great deal of angst and frustration with the modern world is amalgamated with his professional failure to make the essay an enormous, associative Rorschach that anticipates (or at least predates) a great deal of the more racist/classist gripes you find on /lit/. His intellectual leaps are of the exact same tenuous nature that you find all over this board.
As for the tribal comment: what are you actually trying to say? Your comments are too broad to be taken in a conversational way.
>>7736592
>homeboy
go to sleep Junot
He merely said Oprah's choices are often schmaltzy, but she does a lot of good for the cause of readership.
You have to realise where he's coming from. Intelligent people used to care about the world / politics / causes and take it seriously. Now because of the internet's reach they know over half the population are idiots and don't want to listen or change.
![x354-q80[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BblZgcz.jpg "x354-q80[1].jpg")
>>7736592
>>7736960
Where did he say that ? My point is he didn't express worry about his standing in the lit world like you said
>>7736592
>he refused to take an academic job
There are essays in How To Be Alone about his teaching career and his relationships with his students, congrats on proving you're completely talking out of your ass.
he realized books are irrelevant. we film and tv now.
>>7736981
Yes. Anyone else?
>>7736992
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Franzen
> CTRL+F "male audience"
>>7737956
It's on the DL, but I know for a fact that he turned down a TT position because he felt that the university was a "corrupting" institution to artists -- something else he talks about in HTBA.
If you're going to nitpick instead of engaging in the actual meat of the argument, I also had a few typos in there -- go for it.
>>7738284
If you read How to Be Alone like you claimed to, you would know Franzen wrote generously about his academic career pre-Corrections. Since you seem to have forgotten this tidbit, though he made mention of it in several essays, I have reason to believe that you didn't read the book, or at least finish it. So I could probably be forgiven for disregarding your opinion.
And also, the whole "fear of the female audience thing" is an astonishingly stupid misinterpretation of the turbulence between him and Oprah. Franzen isn't suspicious of female readers at all, you've got it completely backwards (in fact, he's said time and time again that Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters are among his favorites). He said that he was afraid that the Oprah marketing, particularly the Oprah Book Club sticker logo that got put onto the dust jacket of The Corrections, would misdirect potential male readers into thinking that the novel was "chick lit."
You very clearly have never finished How to Be Alone and have a remarkably underdeveloped opinion and understanding of the guy.
>>7736384
He sounds way less spergy than I expected him to
>>7738617
To my memory, the only essay in which he mentions his academic career is scavenging. It's possible that you're confusing his academic career with his time working as a researcher in Cambridge, which is an honest mistake (though one that should't be made when criticizing reading comprehension). In any case, the claim that discussion of said -- and brief -- academic career commands a "generous" portion of How To Be Alone is evidently false.
Incidentally, Scavenging is also the essay in which he decries the University's patronage of writers most violently, and in essence explains why his time there was brief. Your only evidence also shoots you in the foot here. Your opinion is, perhaps... obsolescent? Lawl, lawl lawl
As for the Oprah issue, I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "fear of female audience" angle. I accused him of borderline racism, not sexim. In '96 he didn't fear a female audience -- he didn't know how to reach it.
>>7736384
"The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gitted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city's remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, Gay, and women's communities that had taken over the structure vacated by fleeing straight white males. MFA programs offered housing and workfare to the underemployed... visiting police would still pay weekend visits to certain well-policed cultural monuments -- the temple of Toni Morrison, the orchestra of John Updike..."
>>7739248
still tryna fight but dude is still wrong and cowardly
He got the paycheck in his mailbox at some point.
>>7739695
tru
>>7736671
>It's a necessary survival strategy.
It was necessary in the past when we lived in competing tribes but now it only allows the capitalist class to divide workers and exploit them.
>>7736564
you fucked up in the end, friendo
>>7739248
>chase burke
He seems to be a pretty popular figure here on /lit/. Is he our newest meme?
I really like watching these interview things with book writers even if I don't read them
Any other good ones, besides Wallace?
>>7741094
Delillo gives an interesting interview
>>7741094
bookworm dude
