D.G. Myers believes Philip Roth is the greatest living novelist, and he hasn’t gotten a Nobel for Literature. Does he or any American deserve one?
American novelists, according to Nazaryan, have only themselves to blame for not winning a Nobel since 1993. And he knows exactly what American literature needs:
America needs an Obama des letters [sic], a writer for the 21st century, not the 20th — or even the 19th. One who is not stuck in the Cold War or the gun-slinging West or the bygone Jewish precincts of Newark — or mired in the claustrophobia of familial dramas. What relevance does our solipsism have to a reader in Bombay? For that matter, what relevance does it have in Brooklyn, N.Y.?
Prior to the announcement Bob Dylan was discussed as the American with the highest potential of winning the prize for literature.
http://www.startribune.com/world/131298909.html
In 1909 (IIRC) they awarded Rudyard Kipling the Nobel…
Different world, eh?
As for “relevance”… C.S. Lewis nailed the failings of modern liberal literary criticism in the 1950s in Experiment In Criticism… its just a shame that everyone ignored him and carried on down the same path of ideological criticism…