Which writer do you believe best captures the soul of your nation?
When it comes to the United States I’d have to go with DeLillo’s bizarre brand of paranoia and a desperate searching for something which can’t be explained and is often substituted, an illustration of America’s schizophrenic split between Hollywood and the Puritans
>t. hasn't read pynchon or gaddis yet
Bob Dylan desu
George Washington's or John Adams' letters
No one is more american than donald trump
I'd back up DeLillo for America as it is, and add that his lack of an answer to the state he sees it in is a key part of his critique - America can't change.
Steinbeck for America as it sees itself. East of Eden will always be, to me, the great American novel, for better or worse.
shut the fuck up
Walt Whitman
>America in the 1800s
Melville and Blood Meridian
>America 1900-1950
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner
>America 1950+
Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, DFW
bit obvious but dickens, pretty embarrassing no english writer has come close since then in capturing britain while in the time america has had twain, stienbeck, fitzgerald, pynchon, burroughs, or even DF wallace (just the writers who give me the strongest impression of american life)
don't know what blood meridian could mean other than Cormac McCarthy's novel, which was published in the 1980s. Good choice though
Yeah, that’s what I meant. All of McCarthy’s works wouldn’t fit there, so I just picked BM
Emile Nelligan
at least name some of his fucking books that most resonate with this jesus
More like Don Dullilo
>gaddis
Fuck you.
White Noise, Underworld, Mao II
Unironically Philip K. Dick.
The US is too kaleidoscopic too be defined by a work of literature.
England is best defined by Defoe. Crusoe IS the enternal anglo
>The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a knife-grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe.
>the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow but effective intelligence, the sexual apathy, the practical and well-balanced religiosity, the calculating silence
sounds interesting user ill give it a read
The US
American Psycho.
Somerset Maugham
Baudrillard
Updike, at least for the 70s. Just finished Rabbit Redux, hell of a book and really gives you a sense of the different generations and kinds of people that coexisted at the time
this is true - but partially because generations of Englishmen read Robinson Crusoe and imitated what they saw there to a greater or lesser extent
Hm. Idk. Luis Rafael Sanchez is the most Puertorrican wrkter i know.
>soul of your nation
I'm French so my nation is soulless. But for its spirit I' have to say Chateaubriand and Montaigne.
I intentionally pick two writers with very different outlooks on life because it is central to the French spirit that we both idolize and despise ourselves, and because unlike other Europeans country every single major French literary figure as one of several counterpats that many people judge better than or even a antidote to it.
If you insist on keeping a soul I replace my two picks with Maistre/Baudelaire and either Montaigne or Hugo.
Can you elaborate a bit more? I can understand it as the English internalizing Crusoe as a reflection of their imperialist colonialism. It'd be damn near indefensible to argue that Crusoe influenced English colonialism, which is what's required to argue that it had a lasting and practicable impression on English worldviews—that they imitated it in a demonstrable way.
This is is ungodly cliched, but I think that Cervantes summed up the Spanish spirit very well in his works, specially that clash of romanticism and cynicism that's still present in our culture.
whoever wrote peep show desu
That quote doesn't explain Obama very well. Guess he really was just an outlier.
Not that other guy, but it's not really hard.
Art imitates life. Life consumes Art, and becomes self-conscious. Life, being self-conscious, will either reject Art out of shame or embrace it out of vanity. Life imitates Art through vanity, or rejects Art through same which leads only to new Art.
Pretty similar to how people think psychology and neurology are purely dichotomous things, when we have solid scientific evidence that thoughts and feelings chance the physical structure of the brain, while the physical structure of the brain determines thoughts and feelings. It's really not a difficult thing to understand once you let go of stuffing everything into false dichotomies and realize that, more often than not, everything human is reliant upon and informing everything else in feedback loops.
American Psycho might be the most authentic portrayal of the pseudo-high class American whose social status is purchased by post-Vietnam success. Completely flaccid, synthetic people substituting consumerism for culture, obsessed with being something they just aren't, to the extent of inventing some special persona.