Did you know of him before he won the Nobel prize?

[Anonymous No.19186174]

[Anonymous No.19186236]

Pretty sure no one did anon

[Anonymous No.19186241]

Check warosu. He had been mentioned exactly once on this forum prior to today.

[Anonymous No.19186275]

Is it racist if I refuse to read black writers but would also encourage black people not to read white authors?

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.19186308]

>>19186174
>Lionel Richie
>>>/mu/

[Anonymous No.19186318]

>>19186174
No. I also had never heard of the white American woman that won the last one.

[Anonymous No.19186330]

Threadly reminder

[Anonymous No.19186345]

I don't think I know any living writer

[Anonymous No.19186362]

>>19186174
Never heard of him

[Anonymous No.19186563]

>>19186275
yes twice. read some books that challenge your views.

[Anonymous No.19186569]

>>19186330
even these low 5% are overrepresented because his readers care more to cast a vote than people who don't give a shit

[Anonymous No.19186598]

>>19186569
It’s a white pill desu. If that literal who won the Nobel, so can I :)

[Anonymous No.19186698]

>>19186598
You wish. Have you any idea how many other writers exist in the world who could have gotten the exact same label and praise he got along with the prize?

[Anonymous No.19187193]

>>19186275
Racist, yes.
Retarded, definitely.

[Anonymous No.19187218]

>>19186275
nah it's good to be familiar with your own tradition or you'll end up a deracinated schizo

[Anonymous No.19187223]

>>19187218
deracinated is a stupid pseudish word that has a perfectly good anglo-saxon equivalent in 'uprooted'

[Anonymous No.19188548]

>>19186330
Who cares?

[Anonymous No.19188594]

>>19186174
Of course I heard of him. When I first read him years ago, it was very clear he was one of the greatest living writers. His writing is of a depth that puts him up there with the all time greats such as Faulkner, Dickinson, Dickens, Wharton, Homer, etc.

[Anonymous No.19188833]

>>19186174
No, he was a nobody.
There was only one mention of him on /lit/, and there's a reason for it. Even the most obscure Eastern European or South American writers will get at least a few mentions here now and then, but he was unknown, *even though he writes in English*. He's never mentioned as a contemporary master by any important critic either. He was a nobody.
If you read a few pages from his books, you will know why.
There's nothing in them which is particularly interesting. It's the same old magic realism style (I don't even know if it's magic realism or not, but the style is the same) that we have grown accustomed to in the last decades. It doesn't surprise anyone anymore. His imagery is cliché ('out of myth', 'out of legend', 'darkest hour of the night' etc.) and his themes seem to be even more cliché, though I may be wrong here. However, his writing does have a nice musicality, nothing very impressive, but good. Anyway, it's nothing that justifies awarding him a Nobel.
In my opinion, the Academy is probably just trying to be unpredictable. You can see this is something they actually do. Surprises. They did it with Dylan, Gluck (why not Simic or Carson), Handke (they knew there would be controversy), Tokarczuk (not Zagajewski). Gurnah is an answer to the Thiong'o rumors, as if they were saying that no, he won't win, we prefer this other black. Just like they did with McCarthy and Pynchon and all other Americans when they awarded the prize to Dylan and Gluck. It also means Stoppard won't win it either.

Also, the Prize is getting more and more worthless. Amazing, really. Even after Borges and Nabokov they didn't learn a thing. No prizes for Herbert, Hill, Bonnefoy, Adonis, Bernhard (admittedly, he died young), Fuentes, Lobo Antunes, Pynchon, Butor, Ashbery. And they chose Dario Fo over Umberto Eco, Zanzotto, all the Italians who could have won it.
Also, they don't give the prize to important critics like Bloom, nor to screenwriters like Bergman, but they don't hesitate to give it to some random journo who wrote about Chernobyl or whatever. And even though I think Dylan is talented, Cohen would have been a better choice.

[Anonymous No.19188858]

>>19188833
Based. Also checked.

[Anonymous No.19188880]

>>19188833
>Cohen would have been a better choice
What a way to ruin a perfectly decent post.

[Anonymous No.19188905]

>>19188833
I still can't get it into my head that people seriously consider Dylan a remotely acceptable pick. He's not a fucking author of literature, can't be anything other than a stunt. No, at some point in the last decade I must have been awakened in the wrong dimension or some long con of a master prankster.

[Anonymous No.19188990]

>>19188905
picking Dylan was basically the boomer generation whipping out its fat cock and slapping it on the table while hooting BOOMER! BOOMER! BOOMER! BOOMER! like an enraged baboon at cowering millennials and gen x

[Anonymous No.19188996]

>>19188905
I don't consider him an acceptable pick either. Only when compared to others who had already been picked (Dario Fo, Bertrand Russell, and so on). But he did write good lines. There's more literary value in Blonde on Blonde than in the History of Western Philosophy. Russell is a good writer, obviously, but there's nothing original in his writing qua literature.
Christopher Ricks's studies are a good way to understand how Dylan did actually produce some interesting work, though you don't have to agree with Ricks's conclusions and methods. There is something there, though.

>>19188880
He would. Some of his song lyrics border on kitsch (he certainly knew this, and probably intended them as hits), but he did write some very fine ones, as well as some very fine poems. He even got praised by Northrop Frye early on his career.
I admit I haven't read his novels yet. They're said to be good, though.

[Anonymous No.19189009]

>>19187218
but when you become endogamically focused on your own tradition you end up knowing nothing.

[Anonymous No.19189099]

>>19188990
This. Bob Dylan was the most embarrassing winner they could have chosen. It should immediately discredit the Nobel Prize as a serious literary prize.

And I agree this was just another boomer thing to assert their dominance and to portray themselves as the greatest generation. They are just so far up their asses it's amazing. They legitimately think that the era they grew up in was the greatest in history. They legitimately think their music is the greatest in history.

The Bob Dylan hype was already dying out. Why? Because the generation that worshipped him, the boomers, was dying. In twenty years, once all the boomers die out, Bob Dylan will be forgotten. And it's almost like the committee knew this and gave him the prize to ensure that he would live on purely on the novelty of being a Nobel winner. It's like if millennials in 50 years gave the prize to the creator of Rick and Morty. That sounds so stupid, but that's exactly what the boomers did.

[Anonymous No.19189114]

>>19189009
Gurnah writes in English, so it's not really another tradition. He's using the same language as Chaucer and Shakespeare, his imagery ("out of myth" and so on) is all Western, English stuff. He may stuck in as many exotic Tanzanian details as he wants, but the style is English, the words are English, the imagery is English, so it's English. Conrad has a lot of exoticism too, but it's English, and he wasn't English either.
In fact, Shakespeare and Chaucer are more foreign to us than they, and a poet like Lorca, white or not, is even more foreign, by the sole virtue that he's writing in an entirely different system of signs. If the Academy wishes to praise diversity, they might start by not awarding one English writer after another, which is what they have been doing. Munro, Dylan, Ishiguro, Gluck, Gurnah, since 2013. How diverse!

[Anonymous No.19189133]

>>19189099
>It's like if millennials in 50 years gave the prize to the creator of Rick and Morty. That sounds so stupid, but that's exactly what the boomers did.
You jest but now you've gone and given that prophecy oxygen, errr, bandwidth.

[Anonymous No.19189175]

>for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents
Will there ever be another nobel prize awarded for writing the best literature, rather than writing about the most trendy social issues?

[Anonymous No.19189203]

>>19189099
This is better than anything you will ever write, and this is not Dylan's best:

"The sweet pretty things are in bed now, of course
The city fathers, they are trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous
The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun, she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper, who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce
Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley, he's lookin' for food
I'm in the kitchen with the tombstone blues
The hysterical bride in the penny arcade
Screaming, she moans, "I've just been made"
Sends out for the doctor, who pulls down the shade
And says, "My advice is to not let the boys in"
And the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside
He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride
"Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride
You will not die, it's not poison"
Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley, he's lookin' for food
I'm in the kitchen with the tombstone blues
Now, John the blacksmitht, he torturing a thief
Says to the hero, the Commander-in-chief
"Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"
The Commander-in-chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, "Death to all those who have whimper and cry"
And, dropping a barbell, he points to the sky
Saying, "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken"
Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley, he's lookin' for the food
I'm in the kitchen with the tombstone blues
Alright
Let's hear that back
He got to put the wall up over him"

You will never write as vividly and evocatively as that. Even the (self-aware) nonsense chicken line would be too hard for you.
Pic related is a celebrated Louise Gluck poem, one of the most reproduced on the internet.
Dylan's tone is incomparably messier and he doesn't know how to limit himself, but his innate talent is evidently there, while Gluck sounds like she learned to write by following academic advice. Craftsmanship and poetry are not the same thing. Identifying one with the other is a classic mistake of the amateur.
I wouldn't have given the Nobel to him, far from it, but Dylan is a poet, albeit a messy one with little knowledge of craft.

[Anonymous No.19189294]

>>19189114
I agree Anon, and I agree that there exists a general English tradition, but it's still more complicated than that. Reading someone like Gurnah, despite him being part of the English tradition, I'd argue is still important for someone who prizes himself to be a good reader as, while he's going to be deeply interconnected with said tradition as a whole, it's going to have certain aspects that make him, perhaps, very different from most American and British writers, and him being from Africa and Tanzania places him in his own separate tradition with which he engages with.
Have you read Gurnah already? I don't doubt that his imagery and style is very western, but I feel the divergences he could make within that framework can be significant. That is what makes, for example, Latin American literature special.
> If the Academy wishes to praise diversity, they might start by not awarding one English writer
I don't think the Academy is explicitly looking to praise diversity, but who knows. But I also agree, I'm actually disappointed that an English-speaker won the award, although I had been hoping for some years for another African to win the prize so that African literature would become more accesible for me.

[Anonymous No.19189344]

>for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents

This depresses me. Why have we become like this? What is this wankery? Has it always been this bad?

[Anonymous No.19189373]

>>19188833
>important critic like Bloom
He didn’t even write about anyone in all his Bloom’s Critical Guides, just introductions and prefaces. He did absolutely no literary criticism. You’d know this if you read or even went to university to study literature.

[Anonymous No.19189393]

>>19189373
Shelley's Mythmaking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Revised and enlarged edn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Anchor Books: New York: Doubleday and Co., 1963.
The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin.; edited with introduction. New York: DoubleDay, 1965.
Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean; edition with introduction. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism.; edited with introduction. New York: Norton, 1970.
Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. ISBN 0-19-501603-3
The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; 2nd edn, 1997. ISBN 0-19-511221-0

Among others.
Don't be an idiot, please. Bloom is not even my favorite. I am a Pound/Eliot guy myself. But Bloom's name would not dishonor the Nobel Prize, far from it.
Stop talking about things you have no knowledge of.

[Anonymous No.19189414]

>>19189393
Then why did my professor who is the top of Modernist studies call Bloom a scandalous figure who didn’t write anything after he got famous? Open any Bloom’s Guides and he writes like 300 words at best. Also Bloom said that Pound is shit so you’ve also got your allegiances mixed up.

[Anonymous No.19189463]

>>19189414
>>19189393
Stumped, are you? No reply? You impossible pseud. Nearly all the books you posted were from before Bloom was famous in the “canon wars”.

[Anonymous No.19189505]

>>19189414
>My professor said!!!!!
Not him but fuck off and think for yourself

[Anonymous No.19189510]

>>19189414
who cares about your gay professor dude, imagine being lame enough to come on 4chan to parrot your prof's opinions

[Anonymous No.19189527]

So who should have won? Obviously not this guy.

[Anonymous No.19189560]

>>19186174
I didn't know of him even after he won the Nobel Prize

[Anonymous No.19189581]

>>19189505
>>19189510
Thinking independently on here means believing COVID is a hoax and not taking meds.

[Anonymous No.19189596]

>>19189203
>Craftsmanship and poetry are not the same thing. Identifying one with the other is a classic mistake of the amateur.
Do tell me the difference, anon.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.19189615]

>>19189581
>Thinking independently on here means
>not thinking

[Anonymous No.19189705]

>>19186275
Why would you construct your sentence with a 'but', given that both shit are racist, being the second part even more so.

[Anonymous No.19189718]

>>19189505
>>19189510
the professor's not wrong though, bloom is one of those pop guys like zizek who write one impactful text and then just write pleb shit for money for the rest of their career

[Anonymous No.19189722]

>>19189203
>Pic related is a celebrated Louise Gluck poem, one of the most reproduced on the internet.
Holy shit this is the person who people say should've won a nobel prize? You cherry-picked a bad poem, right?

[Anonymous No.19189777]

>>19188833
HELLO
BASEDDDDDDDDD DEPARTMENT?????

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.19189796]

>>19189777
>HELLO
https://youtu.be/mHONNcZbwDY?t=155

[Anonymous No.19189803]

>>19187223
See Ulysses speech from Troilus and Cressida, and read more Shakespeare dumdum

[Anonymous No.19189809]

>>19188833
It isn’t magical realism you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.19189813]

>>19186174
>it's another idpol pick
At this point, they should give the Nobel Prize 2022 to James Mason for his keen foresight.

[Anonymous No.19189846]

>>19188833
Not that I care for Bloom at all but he would have thought Glück deserved to win.

[Anonymous No.19191479]

>>19189813
kek

[Anonymous No.19191585]

At least they picked an author not le unkempt lyric man. also well known =/ good on rare occasions someone can write /lit/ and still appeal to the masses but being obscure isn't a bad thing.

[Trox mf No.19192029]

I am amazingly bewildered by those who knew him before, how the fuck did anyone know of him while he is in Africa especially not that well-known !?

[Anonymous No.19193668]

>>19186598
No white person will ever be allowed to win again because that's racist

[Anonymous No.19193755]

>>19187223
“Uprooted” sounds very clunky compared to “deracinated”. If I say “the problem with our uprooted culture…” it sounds like maybe our culture got up and walked away or something. It conjures up images of plants.
Deracination is a better word to describe specifically a people who have been cut off from their traditions and their ancestral homeland. Jews have been uprooted 109 times throughout history but never fully deracinated.

[Anonymous No.19193782]

>>19188905
Intellectuals are just faggots. There’s a reason nobody takes them seriously in healthy societies. They might come up with one good idea every decade or two and outside of that are useless