US literature sux!

[BayBuck]

This guy must be a BP mod (ie, elitist)

Swede rips literature from US

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- The man who announces the Nobel Prize in literature says the United States is too "insular" and ignorant to compete with Europe in the realm of great writing.

Horace Engdahl said yesterday that "Europe still is the center of the literary world."
Engdahl is the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which selects the literature prizewinner. He is expected to announce the winner in the coming weeks.
Engdahl calls the United States "too isolated, too insular" and says it doesn't really "participate in the big dialogue of literature."

Also here (for those who can read at a European level)

Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon say hi.

 

[Mike80]

errr ummm they give out awards for this?

[buckyle]Give me a Penthouse or give me death![/buckyle]

EDIT: and, as always, Fuck Europe.

 

[Bleed S & G]

Hey Europa,

Eat ass.

Sincerly, (intended btw)

Us

 

[LoKyBuckeye]

reading is stoopid.

 

[BayBuck]

Adam Kirsch fires back at the Nobels on Slate:

the real scandal of Engdahl's comments is not that they revealed a secret bias on the part of the Swedish Academy. It is that Engdahl made official what has long been obvious to anyone paying attention: The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.

As long as America could still be regarded as Europe's backwater?as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel?it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn't exist.

What does distinguish the Nobel Committee's favorites, however, is a pronounced anti-Americanism [Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, Jose Saramago, Gunter Grass] ... But to prove the bad faith of Engdahl's recent criticisms of American literature, all you have to do is mention a single name: Philip Roth. Engdahl accuses Americans of not "participating in the big dialogue of literature," but no American writer has been more cosmopolitan than Roth ... Unless and until Roth gets the Nobel Prize, there's no reason for Americans to pay attention to any insults from the Swedes.

Zing!

 

[PlanetFrnd]

Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon say hi.

And Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller say go fuck yourself.

 

[3074326]

Hey, just because we don't give a shit about it doesn't mean you're better. Fucking Swedish fish.