BIG FOUR of Literatures, which is the best?

oy vey

threatened to start this at the FAP the other night, now i am following through.

more srsly, i know there are big russian & french stans round here & i guess it's just showing love for your fave big tradition, excuse for name-dropping corners you love, chiding me for leaving out Spanish, Latvian etc.

I'm voting English fwiw.

Russia owns the 19th Century but sadly I think the 20th Century may knacker its chances. Not read enough French to qualify, so voting English.

Leaving American out of this is st8 challops.

i was trying to edge round that with 'languages' in the poll q, but it's a bit of a muddled fudge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocentrism

Hold on, does English mean 'from england' or 'in english'?

xp that was, though I see that you're not answering

I intended 'in english'.

wait, srsly why are you leaving out spanish or comparing it to latvian? spanish is the 2nd/3rd most common language in the world, tied w/ english at abt 350,000,000 speakesr, with a v., v. rich literary tradition, whereas latvian has ~1.5m. french has only abt. 1/6th as many speakers, and a literary tradition that springs (mostly) from one geographic region. is this a funny challops thread, or is it just brit-think? even if we're acknowledging eurocentrism, spanish, italian, and german have just as much a right to be front and center as french.

fuck a novel about infidelity over croissants, madelines, and a bicyclette while wearing a tuxedo

screw a gaul right in his cleft pamplemousse

my man remy

No love for Galdos, I see.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2009/10/23/1256318754404/ASTERIX-THE-GAUL-001.jpg

when i was in spain i went to la fontana del oro and threw back a pitcher of spanish red in galdos's honor, then got a mild case of food poisoning from bad tapas. seemed... appropriate?

English -> Russian ---> French -----------> Classical

The Bible, though; that ought to be represented here.

the problem with going with any of these choices other than English is that you're gonna be claiming a handful of translators are better than literally hundreds of english authors

xxps

it's stupid (i wouldn't say funny) challops to get real opinions. a bit of old-fashioned belle-lettrist posturing - i really don't think these are the only real literatures, or that there's some crazy distinction between 'a literature' and good books and writers, or that spanish, German, Japanese, etc etc etc should be actually be excluded.

It sort of springs from reading a lot of that 19th/early 20th century crit that take these baffling, unsupported, batshit claims as accepted truths - eg, mediterranean countries can't write novels.

dammit i am breaking kayfabe 10 posts in. Should be insisting that, no, Spanish largely produces 'entertainments' or something similar.

It's not massive challops to posit these as The Big Four, to be fair.

Amis was going on in this vein in the Telegraph the day:

You are what you are, and the idea of being ashamed of being English is ridiculous. You know England, we now lead the world in decline, but we used to lead it in progress. We had our revolution a century before the French did. I think only Holland is more evolved than England. We had parliamentary democracy in the 17th century, and there used to be a fashion for saying that, for instance, Russian literature is so much more dynamic and powerful because it’s drenched in blood, but England has the greatest poetry on earth. Perhaps the only rival is Iran. To have the most advanced polity and the greatest body of poetry is, I think, an incredible combination. EM Forster says the English novel doesn’t rule the world; it fears the Russian novel and the French novel and some might say the Spanish novel, but English poetry fears no one. It’s a tremendous tribute to a nation to have such great literature and such a civilised political arrangement with no great blood baths, no huge injustices on British soil, no slavery on British soil, and England the country above all others that put an end to slavery. I’ve lived there for 50 years, and the idea that you would be ashamed of being English while living there is moronic.

I hate him

If we're including everything in English, including two centuries' worth of American literature, there's no way I could vote for anything other than English.

this is all too contrived for words but i suppose if yama emptied the souls of the major literatures into hollowed skull-censers, the austro-german would outweigh any of its contemporaries

Having read two French novels, I can reveal that French literature is not the best.

lol

haha

nice to see amis keeping the attitude alive & sincere. Getting a 'just starting to read some surveys of British history ' vibe from that, looking forward to the Lionel Asbo novel.

i thought it was a nuanced exploration of political history tbh.

he's right about the absurdity of being ashamed to be English, it's about as absurd as being proud to be English, paddling along the edges of the absurdity of all kinds of national/regional pride.

i find the thing that shames me most isn't any of the historical unpleasantries of the British Empire so much as the fucking whininess of a certain kind of Englishman

However much lit you have to have read to vote in this, I know I'm not there yet.

no Germans no credibility

also:

which foreign literature do you like best?

Voted Germa...

Such a ridculous and unhelpful question...

Or as I just posted elsewhere:

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto"

voted for video games

ahhhh! I finally understand what is the use for the sb feature.

Oof, if it was 'from England', or 'from France' etc then I'd probably choose French. But it being 'in English' means I have to choose English.

if this is about language and nationality its nuts not to include spanish which has some killers on both sides of the atlantic

gonna vote english due to *waves flag, places THIS IS AMERICA SPEAK ENGLISH bumper sticker on car, murders immigrant* but i feel obliged to say that everything good that the other three did was already done by the classics guys in fewer words

voted cave paintings

The most writing I've loved that wasn't English was translated from German, but I'm monolingual anyway

"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him."

Such a ridculous and unhelpful question...

― Muammar for the road (Michael White), Friday, 21 October 2011 Bookmark

Lolz can we chill about it? woof sorta acknowledges it.

I'm happy its restrictive bcz for me it wd be French quite easily. I think in terms of big 3/4 comparison between French and Russian (Proust-Genet-Celine vs Platonov-Grossmann-Shalamov) its tough but if you evaluate in terms of sheer quantity and quality, depth of types of writing, engagement with other literary and pulp cultures the French beat anyone fairly easy. Plus Beckett is practically French.

English for me is pulp writing. Not as interested in Joyce and Pynchon as I was at one time and never got into Delillo-Updike-Roth or whatever.

Think if you included Italian, German and Spanish (South Americans -- alomost nothing from Spain itself) it would be tough.

This is all 20th cent so classical doesn't come into it. Its all bloody fragments anyway...

wait why are you comparing 20th century writers?

if we were only doing 20th cent. id think japan could give any of the rest of these literatures a run for their money

also platonov-grossman-shalamov as the big 3 russians of the 20th century??

voted English just on bulk of classic lit alone, nothing compares. but if quality was the only marker, i'd say russian.

English for me is pulp writing. Not as interested in Joyce and Pynchon as I was at one time and never got into Delillo-Updike-Roth or whatever.

To my eyes, this is a weird and kind pf restricted way of looking at the canon. Modernists on one hand, and late 20th c. post-modernist (meaning after/influenced by modernists, not intentionally "post-modern") craftsman on the other. I'd include Isherwood and Huxley and Jean Rhys and Henry James and Evelyn Waugh and Faulkner before I'd even consider Delillo or Roth.

classical lit obv

who is to say literature tout court is of any great value anyway what about football which has only been around for a fraction of the time but continues to produce winners every year

bragging that there was 'no slavery on british soil' is such a terrible reading of history; it's like explaining to your wife that you only sleep with prostitutes when work takes you out of the country

To elaborate a little on initial response - I can't not vote English in this poll, but the comparison doesn't make sense - it's simply taken up too much of my life. I realise the English thing is pathological with me at this point, like if I am left to my own devices I just end up wandering down a warren of dead minor writers, & getting into a airless system of comparisons & league rankings.

I was surprised by just how little Russian fiction I've read when I thought about it - basically, it's Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and a few bits and pieces. Barely anything from the 20th century. I go through short bursts of enthusiasm & will read maybe a book a year, but I never have the full-on 'To Russia!' passion for the idea of Russian Literature that I had in my youth. That kind of aspiration/fascination moved for me maybe - I would be tempted by the German/Austro-H write-in, especially for the 20th century - I mean Kafka, Musil, Mann, Mann, Rilke, etc etc + Benjamin & Adorno thinking stuff. It looks like the most serious lit of the 20th.

now trying to take no apols, no explaining attitude to this poll, but awful at it:

really hate the WHO ARE THE BIG FOUR thing - there's a big four of thrash because there were four thrash bands who rose above the pack

sorry aero. tbqh it was going to be three, but then doing some BIG FOUR shit gave it an extra level of inappropriateness. I threw in 'classical' to make up the numbers. And yes:

like Greek and Roman literature are so different (despite Roman authors' constantly asserting that they're not innovating, just following Greek models - a claim which is a narrative strategy, not really factual; also, satura tota nostra est per Quintillian + he's right. "Classical" isn't a body of literature, it's like saying "English and Spanish" for one of the categories.

yeah, definitely. They're very, very distinct for me in reality - like I love the Greeks & am endlessly fascinated by what their overheated culture engine threw out in antiquity, esp classical athens - the dramas that kick into places nothing else has really reached, the stream of ideas, the endless, endless arguing, & the big blasts of utterly clear-eyed analysis + thought in eg Thucydides. Whereas Rome is a strange sort of blind spot, mostly because this Eng Lit pathology blinds me - like Jonson to Johnson, they've had so much Latin lang, lit and history drilled into them (& they're forever translating this or emulating that) that it's inseperable from them for me - don't have a classics base myself, so I've read it in their translations, have looked up the history to understand them, etc. I've never really engaged with it as its own thing.

this is hugely wrong in plenty of ways but you can temporarily think Greek Lit = Brit Lit & Roman LIt = Am Lit for a sort of potentially illuminating temporary lens if you follow me.

greek like = aeroplane; roman lit = starship

lol sorry airplane, what am i, british

I was working with something where Greek Lit = Roman Lit & Roman Lit = c17th English Lit but it looked a bit recursive.

The Greek:Roman = Eng:US fits with some bits of English self-image in earlier part of the 20th: C. 19th philhellenism set up the thing where Britain tries to see itself as the athens supplying culture to nascent American Rome. Think Hitchens has a chunk on this in Blood, Class and Nostalgia.

I think that self-image is pretty strong, at least among the upper-political classes.

How true is it though? From my (mostly ignorant) point of view I'd've said New England and much of the south had grown from British culture, but other places probably have stronger strains at the fore. So Henry James or Mark Twain, say, could be argued to be almost part of the British body of literature, but bringing in Roth or Hemingway is a stretch.

I think the specific form of it - 'we are athens, you are rome' - has largely passed, but yeah that kind of thing is constitutive of british self-image at all sorts of levels.

for how true it is, I don't really know - I think the fact that the 17th/18th British America is grounded in communities that chose to leave England really complicates it – & would think US posters could speak more confidently, but I will say Twain looks totally American to me, like he doesn't fit in Brit lit at all.

I was thinking about some kind of Dickens line, but I'm way out of my comfort zone here.

I think he's just too deliberately, distinctively and self-consciously American, in content and style - he's building an national idiom (while being an extremely idiosyncratic figure in his own right - anything I say feels a bit glib tbh - part of him is, like Dickens a brilliant journalist, then another part is Lucian - Voltaire - Swift skeptical satire, then another part is Huck Finn, etc etc).

http://www2.cruzio.com/~varese/dickens/gallery/images/james.jpg

His reaction to this thread.

well damn HJ can just clear off & write a story about a sad heiress who's lost a carpet or something, this thread is going brilliantly.

Of course any thread like this will be reductive. In this case I have reduced the question to: which literature formed the basis of my present understanding of literature, iow, from which tradition did I learn the most about literature as a form of high art?

A: Classical literature. I embraced classical lit at precisely the time I was most passionate about literature and the mst receptive to learning its ways and means. When I was weaned off kid lit, it was obv English/American lit that was my first solid food. But When I was 20 and on fire for lit, it was classical lit in translation that fed me on nectar and ambrosia.

well damn HJ can just clear off & write a story about a sad heiress who's lost a carpet or something

haha

hmm. Aimless, I'm super jealous of your classical nectar and ambrosia. Would you please recommend one of those books so I can drink a little bit of that stuff as well?

btw I'm reading grossman right now and dude is fuckin awesome imo

Which one, Aero?

'Be my knife' ranks among the best ten novels I ever read.

spanish shares the advantage english has where it co-dominated the postcolumbian new world and so all the literature of several related-but-different cultures happens to be written in the same language by people who could read each other's books, which helps. french has great stuff of course but it's hard to compete with those advantages.

russia's golden age is very golden indeed (and i probably like mah-tin amis more than most here but i don't think it's right to say english poetry doesn't "fear" pushkin, or even that shakespeare doesn't "fear" chekhov) but save for the continuation of their rad old dissident strain (in solzhenytsin and politkovskaya) they didn't accomplish much in the 20th century -- had a bad environment for it. they could certainly make a comeback; things are as bad as ever there but at least writers can breathe again. i'm sure there's already cool stuff i don't know about; i haven't read any post-soviet fiction at all.

i bet chinese should be on here but i don't know anything about it.

anyway i don't know what to vote for. i've read the most english. cuz it's in english, which i speak.

realize of course that french was THE LINGUA FRANCA but it seems like mostly people just talked it at dinner parties and diplomatic retreats and then went home and wrote novels in their own language

should also correct myself: there is a burst of fantastic stuff (babel, zamyatin, akhmatova) in the early russian 20th, especially in the 1920s when everyone was super excited and hadn't started mass-dying yet: the "silver age" for russialit. after that things kinda buckle.

i bet chinese should be on here but i don't know anything about it.

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Monday, October 24, 2011 3:27 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

you would think, but, the cultural revolution

don't really know of any works from post-19th century that are gonna be dropped in the same breadth as these guys, maybe lu xun?

xp

yeah, from what I can tell the first half of the century is positively a golden age for their poetry - Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Blok, Mayakovsky.

Apart from the 'top 3' and Russian poetry (and much of the prose I've read by them is good) I'd agree it all falls off by the 50s.

Brodsky pretty much argues this when discussing it in one of his essays in the 'Less than one' collection, which is key when looking through Russian poetry and prose.

He doesn't include himself but he should, a brilliant (and English) essayist.

Could never quite get on w/Lu Xun when I tried it earlier this year.

There is also Lao She - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickshaw_Boy - not read that one. Might buy the paperback and report.

Beyond that I'm out of ideas.

there are the ancient classics like the three kingdoms, water margin, etc. and the ancient poets and philosophers, but it all seems to end around the Dream of the Red Chamber, and then the West and turmoil and strife happened

Lolz I forgot Gao Xingjian - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Xingjian - again, no read him

Brodsky pretty much argues this when discussing it in one of his essays in the 'Less than one' collection, which is key when looking through Russian poetry and prose.

He doesn't include himself but he should, a brilliant (and English) essayist.

Just started reading him last night and, wow, is this otm

brodsky had a gr8 moment when on trial for parasitism and the prosecutor was like WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION and brodsky said poet and the prosecutor was like WHO ENROLLED YOU IN THE RANKS OF POETS? and brodsky said he wasn't sure but he thought it probably came from god. although to be fair: softball question.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I would be tempted by the German/Austro-H write-in, especially for the 20th century - I mean Kafka, Musil, Mann, Mann, Rilke, etc etc + Benjamin & Adorno thinking stuff.

Did you read Colm Toibin on the Mann brothers (latest LRB) before you put them together? Found Thomas' Magic Mountain to be a bit of a struggle.

Maybe poor Klaus got a raw deal.

But strike Mann off, replace it w/Bernhard and that's a p great top 4. Much more fun (and funnier) than all the stereotypes suggest.

Was thinkng what were some of the annoyingly SMALL literatures: never found a major writer in Dutch, the Danes are Scandinavia's poorer relations...

the danes have kierkegaard!

maybe not a major writer, but i liked cees nooteboom

using the phrase "major writer" makes u sound like a jerk anyway

u 'know what he means'

kinda feel dutch are disadvantaged by lack of exoticism, compared to say kadare or cioran or w/e

same problem that the dutch wine industry has faced for years

Arnon Grunberg is huge, but not too well known abroad yet, I think

It was through this book Chambermaids and Soldiers (2009) that an idea was born. On page 101 Grunberg writes: “I want to leave the world a wine with the name Grunberg.” Aris Derksen, a wine entrepreneur and management consultant from Winter Business, Group in Madrid (winterbusinessgroup.net) would help Arnon Grunberg fulfill this wish.

see if even the dutch go to spain to make wine, what hope is there for their national viticulture

Yeah we thoroughly lack a viticulture, and I can't see it ever taking off tbh

the danes have kierkegaard!

― max, Saturday, 29 October 2011 Bookmark

and the Dutch have Spinoza -- but hey if there is a novel anywhere then I can run w/this!

Shouldn't be too hard on the Dutch as Van Persie is killing it right now.

Nahhhhh it's not the same - Kierkegaard's using fictional or quasi-fictional forms in Repetition, Either/Or & elsewhere. He's definitely post-romantic literary (w/e it means etc).

hans christian andersen is another Dane with a lot going on - not sure if that 'a lot' is just hyper-Romantic emo-ness or whether he's got a streak of Hoffmann-style fabular/fantastic genius.

Did you read Colm Toibin on the Mann brothers (latest LRB) before you put them together? Found Thomas' Magic Mountain to be a bit of a struggle.

no, I mistyped. I mean to write Broch. :(

lol

isak dinesen was also danish, though i dunno if shes thought well of now. never read her.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Better than all the rest put together *fist pump*

I'm thinking that "11 out of 20 ilxors agree" just doesn't have the same weight as "nine out of ten doctors agree".

for me this reductively and dumbly ended up being shakespeare vs. tolstoy, and i forgot to decide.

"no, I mistyped. I mean to write Broch. :("

Its an ok article but I gotta say the Mann family aren't that interesting, writing about them seems like literary scene bullshit to me.

Whereas the LRB should write on Broch or Doblin.

And maybe compile German writers on each other -- that's more bullshit, but funnier -- the best bit of the article was Mann's quip on Brecht.

I'm a big Broch fan, but the Manns not interesting? Sibling rivalry, Thomas Mann's "I'm a hero for making a stand!" except that I waited for ages to make one and let my braver brother cop all the flack, Klaus & Erika (& Auden), the fleeing to America...

Well I guess there is a fascination w/dysfunctional families that is off-putting. See a similar thing over here w/members of Bloomsbury. You get the feeling its propping up something, a cheap-ish way of building interest.

bigs