2. Melville

3. Twain

4. Hawthorne

5. Bellow

6. Nabokov

7. Pynchon

8. Steinbeck

9. Hemingway

10. Poe

11. Whitman

12. Dickinson

13. Eliot

14. James

15. Updike

16. Wharton

17. Miller

18. Tennessee Williams

19. William Carlos Williams

20. O'Brien

21. Dreiser

22. O'Connor

23. McCullers

24. Cather

25. Vonnegut

26. Frost

27. Chopin

28. Pound

29. Penn Warren

30. Wallace

31. Thompson

32. London

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23970674)

cather? mccullers? dreiser? tennessee williams? thompson?

eta: you left out several writers who are clearly better such as wallace stevens

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23970682)

I stand by all of the selections made, even if you boldly put question marks after their names.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23970711)

And even Fitzgerald's minor talent for pretty sentences is so carelessly deployed, you begin to wonder if he's writing a parody. There's a line in Gatsby about wedding unutterable visions to her perishable breath or something like that, which has me in stitches every time. It's masturbatory. But this is exactly what you'd expect from a tiny pink-dicked Princeton faggot with a drinking problem and a cheating nymphomaniac wife.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23970927)

Believe it or not, the job of a writer isn't necessarily to "impress" you. For someone who parades his literary taste so freely, you suck at reading comprehension. I've already conceded that Dreiser's prose can be clumsy. I could make that case better than you've even tried to. His sentences are often stilted. He runs to the ungainly five-dollar word where an elegant ten-cent word will do. He overqualifies descriptions, something "deadline journalism" would have disciplined (even your insults, such as they are, miss the mark). We already agree on the prose. Why do you think your response is relevant or even amusing?

Great stories require more than just great sentences. They require a mastery of human psychology. This is the crucial difference between Dreiser and Fitzgerald. By the way, it has nothing to do with "big ideas" (your cut-paste criticism will have to wait for a discussion on Dostoevsky). An aspie shut-in like you may have contempt for "soft skills" like understanding motivation or, say, reading facial expressions, but for ordinary readers, these are pretty important qualities.

Fitzgerald writes about cartoons, not people, which is why none of his novels are interesting. Name a single character in Gatsby who has anything like human complexity. Gatsby is an obsessive dreamer. Nick is a passive voyeur. Daisy is an airhead, Tom a brute. Even Nabokov, who famously compared characters to chess pieces, would have been embarrassed to write such hackneyed cliches.

Dreiser's characters, on the other hand, are complex and fully realized. They face real conflicts. None are perfectly wicked, though almost all are tragic. Clyde Griffiths and Sister Carrie, for example, cannot be pigeonholed like the Gatsby cast can.

In the most gifted writers, like Shakespeare or maybe Faulkner, improbable psychology can be overcome by sheer linguistic force. As I already said, any attempt to do this with Fitzgerald just makes it even more obvious how hackneyed and boring his characters really are.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23973948)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23977575)

The rest of your poast is irrelevant. Dreiser and Steinbeck clearly aren't in Faulkner's class. But Fitzgerald is far behind the whole back.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23979281)

Dreiser will survive long after the last copy of Gatsby has been burned. People like you were crowing over Nahum Tate in the seventeenth century.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23979293)

The book "The Top Ten" asked 125 contemporary writers to rate their favorite works of all time and The Great Gatsby finished 6th overall and 2nd out of all 20th century novels behind only Lolita.

You mad my little philistine breh?

ETA-- Oh snap, in the updated compilation that now includes 152 lists, Gatsby jumped Lolita and is now the top ranked book of the 20th century and 4th highest all-time.

http://www.toptenbooks.net/top-ten-works-20th-century

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23979298)

LOL sorry I shat on your point breh.

It's actually not a fallacy at all but an appeal to appropriate authority. The inclusion of works in the canon ("great" literature) is based entirely on public, literary, and artistic opinion and consensus. What else is there? So saying "hey there are a lot of well respected writers and critics who think X is a major novel and/or influenced their own writing" is a simple statement of fact. That Johnson regarded Tate's Lear as a masterpiece just goes to show that even great critics can be wrong, not that there is no such thing as sophisticated, informed opinion. Go back to your awful Dreiser shit dumbass, you're done here.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23981491)

What a childish view of literary criticism you have. This is what happens when pretend lawyers opine on anything outside of their actual realm of experience (in your case, no doubt masturbation, video games, and Pop Tarts).

Artistic and literary consensus changes. That's because it's achieved through *argument*, rather than critics simply farting Amazon star ratings at each other. It's entirely pointless to say "Lionel Trilling said X is a major novel..." without referring to his analysis. Trilling was sometimes brilliant, sometimes wretched. That's true of every critic (hilariously, you tried name-dropping Nabokov, who would have been the first to roll his eyes at such a cheap argument). That major critics have been mistaken about Gatsby doesn't bother me at all; that's the point of the Johnson reference. Johnson was wrong about Tate, not because some stupid canonical appellate process overruled his findings, or because he was just less impressive in the critical stakes, but because his criteria--the appeal to nature, the prohibition against excess--were poorly reasoned and ultimately unpersuasive.

There's no such thing as a Supreme Court of Literature, so no amount of "respect" will sustain an aesthetic argument. It's the arguments you should be evaluating, but that would require you to actually read more than the by-line. Tough, I know.

I've already explained, rather patiently, why Fitzgerald's prose is (a) not that impressive and (b) counterproductive to his aesthetic aims. You've said nothing of interest against this argument. Thanks for playing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23982558)

(guy who thinks carson mccullers is a greater writer than fsf)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23983722)

FYI, just to clarify why you sound so faggot: You are leveling precisely the same charges against Fitzgerald (fatal shallowness, untenable elevation of style over substance, "pretty pretty" style, reliance on cartoonish melodrama over creation of genuine pathos, etc.) that have so often been leveled at Tchaikovsky by butthurt critics and musical theorists determined to reframe him as a third-rate composer because fuck that guy, [academic composer that you have never heard of] is soooo much better!

The problem with your argument (and theirs) is that it presumes a rigid ex ante definition of "greatness" in a given artistic field and then includes or excludes artists based on how they measure up. Tchaikovsky struggled with form throughout his career and was often guilty of writing vulgar and obvious music? Overrated second-string hack. Fitzgerald's character development is laughable and his plots lack depth? I can name 50 better American writers in a single breath.

It's all very edgy and controversial. But how about this for a truly meaningful measure of greatness: after a century has gone by and time has rendered its verdict, are they still widely beloved by diverse audiences who were born decades after their respective deaths? If so, then I would say that they're probably pretty fucking great in some important and meaningful way and if your definition excludes them from the pantheon, then the flaw probably lies with your definition. And of course at the end of the day, there is a reason why educated and intelligent people still read Fitzgerald (indeed, list his books as some of their favorite literary works) and why discerning listeners who are perfectly capable of appreciating objectively more "advanced" music will still pay hard-earned money to buy a ticket to a Tchaikovsky symphony (and indeed, often rank them among the greatest achievements in that field): because both men possessed a rare gift that may escape easy academic analysis, but which obviously strikes right at the basic human capacity for appreciating aesthetic beauty qua beauty.

You can draw as many diagrams as you want to "prove" that Tchaikovsky was a worse composer than, say, Babbitt (who?) and you can write treatises on all of the ways that Fitzgerald sucks shit, but at the end of the day, Tchaikovsky is widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest melodists/harmonists in history by music lovers and Fitzgerald is widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all American prose stylists. Academics are always looking to discount "soft" factors like that because they defy easy definition (which also makes them maddeningly difficult to copy, which is precisely why folks who possess such gifts are rare and unique), but audiences instinctively recognize and respond to those factors (which only serves to piss of the butthurt academics even more because on paper their music is so much more rigorous and beautifully conceived, why can't these philistines get it?!)

And I would bet a lot of money that this analysis is still valid another century down the road, although I'm sure that you will hie to your time machine and list all the reasons why that's a foolish prediction.

But then, you're faggot. And so we come full circle.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985007)

He whines:

"You are leveling precisely the same charges against Fitzgerald (fatal shallowness, untenable elevation of style over substance, "pretty pretty" style, reliance on cartoonish melodrama over creation of genuine pathos, etc.) that have so often been leveled at Tchaikovsky by butthurt critics and musical theorists determined to reframe him as a third-rate composer because fuck that guy, [academic composer that you have never heard of] is soooo much better!"

Leave aside for a moment some major differences between music criticism and literary criticism (a music critic must judge by a performance, for one--i.e., at one remove from the composer; it usually takes time for performers to interpret great compositions with sufficient attention and care). And assume for the sake of argument those critics really are wrong--again, you can't seem to grasp the difference between conclusions and analysis. So what if some critics level the same charge at Tchaikovsky? The charge could be inappropriate in that case, but a perfectly legitimate indictment of Fitzgerald. As usual, you're too cowardly to deal with the actual argument, so you resort to evasions like this. It's embarrassing, reminiscent of a lousy public defender phoning it in ("Your Honor, innocent people are sometimes accused of murder. My client has been accused of murder. Therefore, my client must be innocent.").

"The problem with your argument (and theirs) is that it presumes a rigid ex ante definition of "greatness" in a given artistic field and then includes or excludes artists based on how they measure up."

It does nothing of the sort. I ask a simple question, "Are the artist's methods consonant with his aims?" That involves a study of methods and aims. I have no problem with "light" novels. Fitzgerald's shallowness would be fine if he didn't take his thin creations so seriously. But he does, and the result is the opposite of what he intends. He's also fatally boring, even by his own admission.

"It's all very edgy and controversial. But how about this for a truly meaningful measure of greatness: after a century has gone by and time has rendered its verdict, are they still widely beloved by diverse audiences who were born decades after their respective deaths?"

This is the worst possible standard for evaluating aesthetic merit.

It's woefully ignorant of historical contingency. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine was popular for centuries; today, only students of medieval literature are likely to encounter it. This may come as a great shock to you, but the quarter-century you spent in your mother's basement does not qualify you to say anything interesting about what has or has not "stood the test of time." This doesn't mean interesting comments on literature are impossible, but they should strive for something other than the tautological or non-falsifiable.

It also appeals uncritically to mass taste, without even the slightest awareness of the obvious pitfalls in this approach. Most American high schools assign Fitzgerald. More American adolescents will read (or pretend to read) Gatsby than The Sound and the Fury or Moby-Dick. They'll do so at a period in their lives when its shallow story holds maximum appeal. That tells us absolutely nothing interesting about the respective qualities of these works.

"If so, then I would say that they're probably pretty fucking great in some important and meaningful way and if your definition excludes them from the pantheon, then the flaw probably lies with your definition. And of course at the end of the day, there is a reason why educated and intelligent people still read Fitzgerald (indeed, list his books as some of their favorite literary works) and why discerning listeners who are perfectly capable of appreciating objectively more "advanced" music will still pay hard-earned money to buy a ticket to a Tchaikovsky symphony (and indeed, often rank them among the greatest achievements in that field): because both men possessed a rare gift that may escape easy academic analysis, but which obviously strikes right at the basic human capacity for appreciating aesthetic beauty qua beauty."

What a tedious proof by assertion. Your mom may find this method of argument charming.

For someone who insists dogmatically on the beauty of Fitzgerald's prose, you don't even bother to demonstrate by quotation. The most plebeian admirer of Tchaikovsky could still hum the bits of the 1812 Overture he likes best. You can't muster a sentence in defense of Gatsby. Of course, my critique is broader and I've consistently argued for holistic judgments in this exchange, but it's revealing how minimal your defense has been.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, your next paragraph simply repeats points I've refuted. I will just address this final bit of false bravado:

"And I would bet a lot of money that this analysis is still valid another century down the road, although I'm sure that you will hie to your time machine and list all the reasons why that's a foolish prediction."

Your final abortive insult explains exactly why this is shoddy "analysis" and a foolish prediction: you and I will be dirt long before this argument could meaningfully be evaluated. That's why it's better to focus on the text, instead of some pointless horse race you won't be around to see completed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985315)

Holy fuck this is a lot of typing (and again, I say that as someone often guilty of logorrhea myself).

Lol, just lol if you think that I have posted ITT under any moniker other than my own; because it's surely inconceivable that more than one badly misguided individual could possibly disagree with your intentionally controversial (and perhaps intentionally retarded?) thesis.

"Leave aside for a moment some major differences between music criticism and literary criticism (a music critic must judge by a performance, for one--i.e., at one remove from the composer; it usually takes time for performers to interpret great compositions with sufficient attention and care),"

said the blowhard who obviously has absolutely no idea what a "music critic" does or does not need in order to levy scholarly criticism (in point of fact, academics leveling charges of mediocrity at Tchaikovsky love nothing more than to pull out his scores and engage in deep technical analysis wholly removed from performance, and in fact many of them unconvincingly attribute his unflagging popularity with the philistine public to the fact that he enjoys many fine performances that successfully *mask*, rather than reveal, his glaring deficiences as a draftsman and an architect).

Of course the analogy was not intended to be airtight, but rather to highlight the most obvious idiocy in your own thesis: ignoring what the consuming public has to say. It's one thing for Beiber to have a #1 hit single in 2013 and for us to brush it off as meaningless pop bullshit (as we ought to). But if he is still just widely beloved by people born decades after his death in 2113, then the wise and the thoughtful will have reason to pause and evaluate whether perhaps he did have something meaningful and lasting to say. Is that likely? Of course not. But time is the greatest and most perceptive critic, and efforts by preening overly-educated high-falutin faggots to tear down, inter alia, Tchaikovsky and Fitzgerald amount to nothing, because both artists have proven themselves many times over in the only gauntlet that really matters.

"It does nothing of the sort. I ask a simple question, "Are the artist's methods consonant with his aims?" That involves a study of methods and aims. I have no problem with "light" novels. Fitzgerald's shallowness would be fine if he didn't take his thin creations so seriously. But he does, and the result is the opposite of what he intends. He's also fatally boring, even by his own admission."

This is all drivel and unqualified opinion, save for the last bit which attempts to invoke the author's testimony against himself as proof. Of course, such testimony is meaningless--Tchaikovsky (again, a curiously good analog) would often decry his own body of work and bemoan that it was almost all just meaningless bombast and bullshit. Critics then and now were happy to agreed with this assessment. Audiences dismiss such whining as self-flagellative bullshit, and continue to shell out tons of money to hear this "meaningless bombast and bullshit" a good 125 years after he stopped writing it.

"It's woefully ignorant of historical contingency. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine was popular for centuries; today, only students of medieval literature are likely to encounter it. This may come as a great shock to you, but the quarter-century you spent in your mother's basement does not qualify you to say anything interesting about what has or has not "stood the test of time." This doesn't mean interesting comments on literature are impossible, but they should strive for something other than the tautological or non-falsifiable."

I agree, it's a terrible test. Much like democracy is a terrible form of government. (...until either are compared to their alternatives, which are even more obviously lacking and prone to idiocy. Which is the entire point. Welcome to our imperfect world.)

And of course you ignore the fact that the lack of audience sophistication and competition in the field of entertainment c. the middle ages renders your analogy to the present day a very poor one. When there is no mass consumption and most days are filled with monotonous hard work and poor health leading to an early grave, it's not surprising that audiences that would seem to us to be literal retards would shower uncritical approval on works that do not meet the standards imposed by more demanding generations down the line. Why you think this is an apt analogy for the popularity that Tchaikovsky and Fitzgerald enjoy in the 20th and 21st centuries--when the consuming audience is unimaginably more sophisticated, and the competition posed by alternate forms of entertainment (even within the respective realms of classical music and American literature) is incomparably greater--is beyond me.

"It also appeals uncritically to mass taste, without even the slightest awareness of the obvious pitfalls in this approach. Most American high schools assign Fitzgerald. More American adolescents will read (or pretend to read) Gatsby than The Sound and the Fury or Moby-Dick. They'll do so at a period in their lives when its shallow story holds maximum appeal. That tells us absolutely nothing interesting about the respective qualities of these works."

Again, this is a tired and a tiresome argument. Perhaps if the philistine masses were the *only* champions of Fitgerald or Tchaikovsky, you might have a point. But as has been pointed out in detail upthread, many serious writers--including writers you include on your list--have offered unqualified praise for Fitzgeralrd. Just as many great composers of the 20th Century (including the darlings of the band of butthurt academics I keep referencing) have expressed unqualified praise for Tchaikovsky. But since we're invoking the ad hominems here, of course an XO poaster like you is better situated to better recognize genius, or lack thereof. Oh, what a scholar! All that you're missing is a pumoniker; please correct that post haste.

"For someone who insists dogmatically on the beauty of Fitzgerald's prose, you don't even bother to demonstrate by quotation. The most plebeian admirer of Tchaikovsky could still hum the bits of the 1812 Overture he likes best. You can't muster a sentence in defense of Gatsby. Of course, my critique is broader and I've consistently argued for holistic judgments in this exchange, but it's revealing how minimal your defense has been."

Your response here is that my failure to *quote* Gatsby in my post belies my argument? What a curious rejoinder; after all, it's not as though the last sentence in the book is one of the most famous final sentences in the entire literature...

In summation, your trolling is shit, your analysis is shoddy, and I respectfully invite you to work harder on your flame next go 'round. Or blow me. Or both.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985843)

1. You make no substantive attack on the minor distinction I drew between literary and musical criticism (i.e., the interloping role of the performers), proving that you can't even handle the subsidiary elements of this discussion.

2. You simply repeat that "TIME WILL TELL" without in any way engaging my arguments against this boring posture. For one, you have no special access to this "gauntlet" (or you over-value the very small slice of it you'll occupy in your miserable lifetime). It's also a remarkably capricious standard. Surprisingly, even works that have lasted for centuries have been forgotten; others are ignored for equally long periods before new readers revive them. But please, just stamp your feet and repeat your dumb slogan.

3. It's hilarious that you, like your alter ego, childishly insist on some special qualification to evaluate literature. At the same time, you have this weird bit of anti-establishment junk where the "masses" rescue art from the unperceptive critic. Charitably, we can call this muddled. The main problem is that you nowhere address the major work of criticism, i.e., arguments. You're content to stick with personalities, because you're stupefied by names (YO FITZGERALD BE ON WIKIPEDIA HE MUST BE GOOD).

4. You ludicrously compare literary criticism to governance. They're different problems. Poets are only the "unacknowledged" and not the actual legislators of the world. More importantly, you miss the crucial point about appeals to longevity. Your test isn't merely "imperfect"; it's impossible. Nothing interested can be gleaned from it, because we don't have the long view of history necessary to make it functional.

5. Again, you have nothing useful to say about literature because you're too moonstruck by personalities or "famous sentences" (in case you forgot, your argument was premised on "beauty qua beauty", not fame) to make arguments from the text. I don't care which "brilliant" people have endorsed the book. I care about their arguments and whether those arguments are persuasive or not. The only reliable method of testing those arguments is to advance the contrary thesis, to see if they still hold water. You, on the other hand, are content to mindlessly parrot others (perhaps a habit picked up from haltingly repeating the porn quotes your father would grunt as he anally violated you in your tender infancy). It's hilarious that you want to discuss anything except the text of Gatsby itself. And it's also ironic given your pointless detour into political analysis. Had we relied on your primitive arguments in that realm, we would still be in the grip of silly superstitions like the royal touch (I DOUGH NO KNOW HOW IT WORK BUT THE KING BE FAMOUS AND LONG-LASTING YO).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23986001)

(Guy who starts off a 3,000 word post by complaining about someone else's "verbal dysentery")

The rest of this post is garbage that has already been addressed, although the ebonics parantheticals were admittedly real thigh-slappers. Have you ever considered dropping the shitty trolling and just doing comedy? I have a feeling you would suck at that too, but I don't really know how to end this sentence so DIAF.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23987585)

(Nigger.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23989772)

You seem like a pretentious know-nothing faggot, and that is a malady I am particularly well-qualified to diagnose.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985004)

titcwtf?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985014)

And Stravinsky loved Paris above all else and lived there for years and spoke fluent French, but that doesn't make him a fucking French composer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985017)

Oh, what a rejoinder!

I light of this brilliant point, invite you to fill in the blank:

"Joseph Conrad was a(n) [insert nationality] writer."

And even assuming that I am willing to discount Stravinsky's serial compositions (and many academics believe that they are among his greatest achievements--and we know much you value what the darling academy has to say, so perhaps you should reconsider your own position on the matter in light of that revelation), your dismissal of Stravinsky's widely acknowledge neo-classical masterpieces is laughably ignorant from both a musical and a historical perspective: Stravinsky adopted his middle-period neo-classical approach after moving to France, of course, because that was the "French" style en vogue at the time (see, e.g., late Ravel). So all of Stravinsky's middle period masterpieces were in fact written with a purposely French bent, using French musical idioms and styles that had been adopted by a composer living in France who loved France, and who actually purposely turned his back on the "Russian style" of lush orchestration and orientalism/folk tune assemblage that had characterized his earliest period. But of course he's not a French composer under your definition!

(Idiot)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985899)

I didn't "dismiss" Stravinsky's later works. I merely said his major works belong to his Russian period. Anyway, I've already stipulated that musicians are different. A violin is a violin whether played by a Russian or a Frenchman. Writers use language itself as the medium, so when we say "X is an American novelist," we're not speaking only about citizenship, but also about their work. Nabokov considered himself an American and wrote about America. I'll take his word over yours.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23986029)

"Anyway, I've already stipulated that musicians are different."

And I'm stipulating that if you truly believe this [for the reasons cited below], you don't know enough about the subject to be weighing in on the validity or invalidity of the analogy.

"A violin is a violin whether played by a Russian or a Frenchman."

Even putting aside that performance =! composition (and I shouldn't have to explain to you why writing a symphony, as opposed to performing one, is the appropriate analog to writing a novel), the nineteenth and early 20th centuries saw the rise of a host of expressly "nationalist" schools in musical thinking. Great composers began self-consciously styling their compositions and tailoring their chosen musical idioms to reflect the musical legacy of their country of nationality. Suggesting that art music from the Romantic period is truly a "universal language" in practice the way that you are evinces a profound ignorance of the medium: the emotional power of great works from different traditions certainly appeals to a wide range of audiences, but there is a reason why (for example) Stravinsky's early period is often referred to as his "Russian period," and it has very little to do with the fact that he was physically located in Russia when he wrote Petroushka, Rite, etc. His adopted style at that time could be traced back on all levels--harmony, melody, orchestration, approach to form, etc--to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, who traced their own lineage directly back to Glinka, etc. And suggesting that anyone with any education on the subject would ever mistake a Russian symphony written c. 1900 for a German symphony written c. 1900 is pure idiocy. There are extremely profound differences in the fundamental aims of (again, for example) Russian vs. German classical music from that period. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonies_by_Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky#Russian_versus_Western.

And as I said above, I won't even get into performance traditions, which were just as disparate throughout the nineteenth century (the Russian school vs. the French school vs. the German school, etc.) for much the same reason.

But you obviously know what you're talking about here, so please continue to enlighten us all with your profound scholarship.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23986293)

(Guy who pwns souls by unilaterally declaring his own victory on internet message boards)

Fuck bro if only I were as smart and erudite as you. Thanks for joshing with the proles, now back to the hallowed halls of industry or the ivory tower of fairest academia from whence you came, oh scholar.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23989788)

Dvorak's "American" symphony/quartet (two of his greatest compositional achivements) both clearly owe a lot to American folk music traditions, and he lived in the States when he composed them and openly acknowledged his debt of inspiration--GOAT American composer? Ridiculous. You would be laughed at if you seriously suggested as much.

But Nabokov, who spent his formative years in Russia/Germany, retired to Switzerland, and only lived ~25% of his life in the States, is somehow rightly counted as an "American" writer? Blast your'self.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985016)

"This is a shitty analogy for obvious reasons that I won't bother explaining."

Thank God these reasons are so patently obvious that no explanation is necessary for your rejoinder to be effective.

*blank stare*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23985881)

Great Gatsby is one of the GOATs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23970952)

Thoreau

Emerson

Kingston

Baldwin

Didion

DFW

Raymond Carver

Woolf

Delillo

O'Connor

Roth

Lee

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23971505)

I did a page search for "flannery" and "david," and got nothing. You're right. I missed them.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23972187)

cheever too if short stories count

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23972810)

and i'm not so sure on DFW.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23974032)

'Is this right Mr. Wayne?'

Chu says '...that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.'

'Plateaux,' Wayne says, looking at the celing and pushing the back of his head isometrically against the door. 'With an X. Plateaux.'

The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. Chu's cross-legged posture is textbook. 'What John's saying is the types who don't hang in there and slog on the patient road toward mastery are basically three. Types. You've got what he calls your Despairing type, who's fine as long as he's in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can't stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?'

'Germonimo!' the other kids yell, not quite in sync.

'He bails, right,' Chu says. He refers to index cards. Wayne's head makes the door rattle slightly. Chu says, 'Then you've got your Obsessive type, J.W. says, so eager to plateau-hop he doesn't even know the word patient, much less humble or slog, when he gets stalled at a plateau he tries to like will and force himself off it, by sheer force of work and drill and will and practice, drilling and obsessively honing and working more and more, as in frantically, and he overdoes it and gets hurt, and pretty soon he's all cronically messed up with injuries, and he hobbles around on the court still obsessively overworking, until finally he's hardly even able to walk or swing, and his ranking plummets, until finally one P.M. there's a little knock on his door and it's deLint, here for a little chat about your progress here at E.T.A.'

'Banzai! El Bailo! See ya!'

'Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You've got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he's made to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still -- his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day there's a quiet knock at the door.'

'It's deLint!'

'A quiet chat!'

'Geronzai!'"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23974059)

ljl at a boring turd like steinbeck getting on the list

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23974116)

Sandburg

Sinclair

Mamet

Seuss

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2351022&forum_id=2#23982050)