Nobel lit jury:USA::Sox:Twins

buckweaver · Sep 30, 2008

Nobel lit head to U.S.: Drop dead

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: The top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: "Put him in touch with me, and I'll send him a reading list."
As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European.
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names.
Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work.
"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."
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U.S. to Nobel lit head: Suck it.

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.
"You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."
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Snip:

The most recent American to win the award was Toni Morrison in 1993. Other American winners include Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

The Nobel Prize announcements start next week with the medicine award on Monday, followed by physics, chemistry, peace and economics. Next Thursday is a possible date for the literature prize, but the Swedish Academy by tradition only gives the date two days before.
Engdahl suggested the announcement date could be a few weeks away, saying "it could take some time" before the academy settles on a name.
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What a fuckhead.

Bubbler · Oct 1, 2008

Damn shame we never finished the SJ novel. We could have shoved it up his ass.

slappy4428 · Oct 1, 2008

Obviously, he's never stayed in a U.S. Cellular press box after a game and filed without going to a locker room.

spnited · Oct 1, 2008

I blame George W. Bush (and anyone who ever voted for him) for the world thinking America is stupid.
I mean, it's hard to blame the rest of the world.

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Nobel lit jury:USA::Sox:Twins

buckweaver Active Member

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