Feeds: 
symbol identifies content for paid subscribers only.
IN DEFENSE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.
There's been a dust-up in the literary world as Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said yesterday that American authors are too "isolated," "insular," and "ignorant" to compete for the Nobel Prize this year. Predictably, the American literary establishment is outraged, with folks like David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, urging consideration of both the boomer generation (Updike, Roth, DeLillo) and younger writers dealing with issues of culture and identity.
The executive director of the National Book Foundation, Harold Augenbraum, countered, "One way the United States has embraced the concept of world culture is through immigration. Each generation, beginning in the late 19th century, has recreated the idea of American literature."
Indeed. Though the Nobel Prize is usually awarded to older authors with a long career behind them -- such as last year's deserving recipient and a personal favorite of mine, Doris Lessing -- Engdahl's comments about American literature couldn't have been more parochial or, yes, "ignorant." Consider our newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, who experiments with two languages, street slang, and mythology to write about the Dominican immigrant experience. There's National Book Award winner Ha Jin, who survived China's cultural revolution to write in exile in the United States. And then there are wonderful authors such as Annie Proulx and Denis Johnson, who have mastered both the novel and the short story with tales that open up whole new corners of the North American experience, from the icy shores of Newfoundland to the addled road trips of the drug addicted.
I could go on, but suffice to say, the United States is an immense country with an immense, diverse culture, and we're lucky enough to have a literary tradition that encompasses much of it. Our literary writers should be translated more, that's true. While the French government devotes over $13 million annually to translating its writers and promoting their work abroad, the U.S. provides only $200,000 for such projects. Considering the work we should be doing to improve our cultural and political image abroad, that's not enough.
--Dana Goldstein
COMMENTS (6)
IMO, the leading US candidate for a Nobel in Literature is William Vollmann. There are many terms that spring to mind in discussing his work, but "insular," "ignorant" and "isolated" are not among them.
Posted by: Rob Salkowitz | October 1, 2008 12:18 PM
Well, if they passed on Mark Twain (not to mention Tolstoy), what do you expect?
But seriously, I have a problem with you young whippersnappers -- if Roth and Updike are part of the boomer generation, then why not Lincoln and Shakespeare? I'm just barely young enough to be part of the baby boom, and Roth and Updike were set texts when I was in college.
Posted by: Gene O'Grady | October 1, 2008 3:10 PM
Ditto with O'Grady. Roth (b.1933) and Updike (b. 1932) are "boomer" writers? That would make me a boomer too. Gosh, I'm feeling younger already. I almost forget that I remember WWII.
Posted by: Henderstock | October 1, 2008 4:58 PM
I teach world literature and I have done so in the US and in other countries. While I do profoundly disagree with Engdahl, there are some points to make. The writer that is mentioned the most as a Nobel candidate from the US, Roth, is not a particularly relevant writer outside the US. I personally think of him as an epigonal modernist. The most influential one is Paul Auster, who is also one of the most worldly authors in the US. The second one is perhaps Updike. I feel Don DeLillo's time has passed without him ever achieving true greatness and that Joyce Carol Oates, as much as I love her, is pretty illegible if you are not an American. I believe the American Nobel of the future is one of the fascinating writers currently in production: Junot Diaz,Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss.
Posted by: Ignacio Sanchez Prado | October 7, 2008 7:19 PM
The last consideration Goldstein brings up here is based on a rather funny misunderstanding. Engdahl naturally meant that too little is translated to English, not from English.
Posted by: Arvid | October 12, 2008 6:03 PM
The Nobel Price of Literature is not the Nobel Price of Immigration. Selling a lot of American books overseas does not make them of better quality just as MacDonald and other junk food does not make American products a part of Haute Cuisine. Ignorance of the rest of the world, seclusion in one own world, ineptitude at foreign language, lack of translation, result in Mac Cain, Sarah Palin, and other less important insulated minds that are blind to their blindness and react as a reflex to any criticism as an outrageous anti- or un-Americanism. A country that can produce freedom-fries among its political elite is no doubt a culturally poor country indeed,and obviously a country that likes itself so. Well, be happy, you are excelling in science and economics and other important technical and specialized knowledge.
Posted by: angio belloni | October 18, 2008 7:35 PM