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Oh no he di’n't: Horace Engdahl, “the top member” of the Nobel Prize jury, dissed American literature, big-time (“Nobel literature head: US too insular to compete,” by Malin Rising and Hillel Italie, AP):

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Several notable American literati offered stern rebukes, including this one:

“You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. 

Given that Engdahl also said, ”Europe still is the center of the literary world,” I think we can assume that his dis extends to Asian, African, Australian, South American, and Antarctican literature, too.

I’m sure bookmakers have adjusted their odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which may be announced as early as next week, accordingly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Awards, Feuds, I on the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.