alt Hacker NewsEnglish majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention. If you like anyone else, you're just too inexperienced or partisan to appreciate real literature. To hell with them.
The answer is Brandon Sanderson who is freely sharing his knowledge of how to write with the world. His teachings will touch more in the coming years than any stodgy 1920s writer ever cared to.
Replies
As much as I love just about everything about Sando, he doesn’t hold a candle to Mark Twain.
I think this is a recency bias in effect.
But damn, Sanderson writes some great stories.
Someone else brought up Spielberg and I think a pretty good argument could be made there. But Twain has already stood the test of time.
What on earth is "politically charged" or "inaccessible" about Frost or Ingalls Wilder? It's not like they threw in Gertrude Stein or William Gaddis.
>>English majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention
Tell me you're an Engineer/don't hang out with actual "English Majors" (I'm 41, I don't spend much time on The Quad these days) without telling me as much.
Lit nerds love nothing more than fighting over the Canon (which, is the point of the article). To hell with banishing whole groups because you're lazy and stereotyping (this sentence is ironic considering the start of the paragraph...)
This would make a great stand-up bit. You know, the kind you do on stage, to make people laugh.
Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.
Brandon Sanderson writes forgettable stories for pubescent children. His characters fill very specific plot roles and those plots don't really deviate in any interesting way. Saying he's Temu Terry Pratchett is doing a giant disservice to Pratchett.
Which of the proposed answers in the linked article would you characterize as one or both of "inaccessible" and "politically charged"?
I think a couple are bad answers (Wilder? She's fine-ish, but America's Homer? Very, very, no) but can't figure out which ones might be striking you that way.