Reich-Ranicki v. Grass

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 marcel reich-ranicki, who was among the very first to write about rolf dieter  
 brinkmann, is surely a literary critic if there ever was one. wrote brilliant 
 essays on heinrich heine, arno schmidt and wolfgang koeppen. actually, i like  
 reich-ranicki's vital intelligence quite a bit. he's got the style it takes ... 
 & fontane's "effi briest", the novel samuel beckett loved so much, is, of   
 course, ten times better than the collected works of mr. grass ...   

 kfl 

 ps: of mrr's autobiography "mein leben" (- my life), which i plan to read in 
 the near future, there will be an english but no american edition: the  
 publishing house wanted to take out the whole chapter on the time after 1945 
 (- which is the period when this man became the literary critic we know), and 
 so mrr decided, as he reported in a 'spiegel'-interview (- "das kommt natürlich 
 überhaupt nicht in frage"), that there will be no american edition at all. btw, 
 the two contemporary american writers reich-ranicki is most fond of are philip 
 roth and john updike. don't think he has actually read trp, but he once 
 mentioned him in a general positive way in his tv-show & he certainly knows 
 that pynchon is a big one. reich-ranicki's position towards 'pomo' is, however, 
 similar to the one of terrance flaherty. but then, i told you before, all this 
 is in wahrheit late modernity ...  

Otto schrieb:

> Thanks,
> that guy (MRR) is really an asshole. He may call himself literary critic but
> in fact is ... he is older than me and my mom told me not to talk bad about
> old people.
> I'm sure Grass has read his Fontane but for MRR it's unbearable to put such
> an icon of German literature (to me Fontane is simply boring, Grass could be
> the only one to make me read him) in a "postmodern" (MRR hates it, all
> pomo) novel.
>
> "The irony that this Polish Jew should have emerged as a champion of German
> civilization, berating Grass for his irreverent postmodernist games with
> Theodor Fontane as much as for his libels against a united Germany, would
> not have been lost on his readers and viewers (...)"
>
> Are you American p-listers still watching Oprah Winfrey? I've stopped
> watching "Das Literarische Quartett" because it became more and more
> unsatisfactory and a waste of time.
>
> A "champion of German civilization?" -oboy.
> MRR's only real achievement is a very questionable tv-show. He's no real
> literary critic and there's better educational entertainment at any English
> Department of many universities here and elsewhere, I bet.
>
> Every time I go online and get my mail I find more and most of all more
> important information concerning literature.
>
> Otto
>
> "Here comes another winter waiting for Utopia -
> waiting for hell to freeze over."
> (The The, Heartland)
>
> Original Message -----
> From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2000 2:23 AM
> Subject: Reich-Ranicki v. Grass
> >
> > Interesting article at
> >
> > http://www.smh.com.au/news/0012/02/text/spectrum2.html
> >
> > best
>
>
>
>