The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[Keith Davis]

So you're saying that because some authors aren't good at condensing their
ideas into shorter forms, they're not as good as those who are able to do
so? Not sure I agree with that, though it's an interesting idea. Is a two
hour Coltrane solo less telling than a two minute Miles solo? How to judge?
Is a sketch by Leonardo more important than the Sistine Chapel? Apples and
oranges.

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 6:35 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> I like the suggestion that a study of American authors would begin, or
> might begin, with the exemplary stories, short stories, or tales of
> great writers and not focus on novels these authors wrote. If this
> were done, of course, there would be little or nothing of Pynchon
> worthy of study. Though Entropy has been anthologized, though The
> Secret Integration is more an apprentice work than the juvenile
> hackings P released as Slow Learner, even these two stories, though
> often studied,  are not worth study, not if we plan to study
> excellence. We might call CL49 a long short story; sometimes the term
> novella is used by German, Italian, French ctitics to describe works
> the length of CL49, Bartleby, The Open Boat, Gatsby...In any event,
> and I won't argue the definition by length, though I wouldn't mind
> looking into Poe's claims about tales and their length, we might take
> some pleasure from these discussions were we to focus on short tales
> and, maybe a good way to proceed is to look into the elements, see how
> they work, in other words, do some analysis of tales written by
> Americans that are said to be great. There is nothing wrong with the
> trite opinions offered, but that they are trite: Faulkner is the
> Early 20th Century master and so on is such crap anyone can read at
> Wikipedia. Someone with balls might argue that Faulkner is greater
> only if we put emphasis on what he does better than most, mainly point
> of view. If we are searching for a better ironist, we need look no
> further than O. Henry. So on...of course, no one said ladies first,
> but I couldn't resist, so...
>



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