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Originally Posted by Levin
Have we forgotten what the Nobel Committee person said about American literature this past year? I wonder if his view of Bush and the War in Iraq had anything to do with his sentiment, at a deep level?
Waters is mostly right that we should just judge the work on its own terms.
Problem is that prizes and accolades are great signaling mechanisms for us to know which work to judge on its own terms with the finite and limited time we have. Are we going to discover a great novel by browsing the bookstacks? Hard to do.
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For several years now a white from an Anglo country has been automatically disqualified unless he or she has written a lot of stuff critical of America or the UK. I'm not going exute on you, it's absolutely true and they don't hide it. Hemingway, with his opaque protagonist males, would have been the last respectable writer considered today. For a while they picked American Jews who wrote about the Holocast but that isn't a ticket to the Nobel any longer. That being said, I tend to agree with them that American writers are for the most part provincial, insular and boring.