Word: insularity
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Last week Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke out about the U.S.'s place in world literary culture. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular," he said. "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." His remarks may have been a reference to the fact that the works of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who today was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, are almost entirely out of print in the U.S. In its characteristically florid prose, the Nobel citation describes...
...Nobel Prize for literature to a Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. After all, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Academy, noted just recently that Europe is “the center of the literary world” and claimed that American writers are far too insular, brainwashed by their own cannibalizing pop culture to produce any literature worthy of the Nobel Prize. Not since Toni Morrison nabbed the honor in 1993, it seems, has an author from our shores been able to extricate him or herself from oppressive American groupthink in order to produce something worthy...
...isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature.' HORACE ENGDAHL, member of the Nobel Literature award jury, criticizing American writers for being "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture...
...worst aspects of fascist and totalitarian systems. Now, amid a surge in anti-American, anti-Semitic and antiliberal sentiments, the left appears "sometimes more right-wing than the right wing itself." It's quite a damning statement, but one that is undercut by Levy's reliance on insular and obscure historical examples that clearly resonate for him and his European partisans. The rest of us, however, are left firmly in the dark...
...that bestows the Nobel Prize—that American literature is too self-absorbed might throw cold water on the hopes that an American author will bring home the prize. In an interview with the Associated Press, Horace Engdahl called the United States “too isolated, too insular.” “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “The ignorance is restraining.” Engdahl added that American writers...