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7/4/2025, 9:38:05 PM
>>24521325
>Most concerning, for me, is that brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor guy, gets thrown around a lot. The problem, to be clear, is not these traits—honest-to-God masterpieces compose much of the brodernist corpus—but their reduction into a series of attributes to be repeated as kitsch. Not the literature of exhaustion but an exhausting, at times exhausted, literature. A zombie avant-garde.
>...
>It’s not that Krasznahorkai’s satire misses the target or that I expect him to have all the answers. But his point about complicity—in the end, Florian is a regretful Nazi redeemed by killing other Nazis—reeks of the trite centrism that governed the 2010s and gave rise to Alternative für Deutschland and their allies around the world. Fascism is bad: you don’t say! And, more damningly: as a uniquely powerful, fascistic Far Right reconquers much of the world, are neo-Nazis anything more than a fantastic trope or an evasion of the present? Such triteness, I think, hides behind the phantom of formal experimentation, of the “difficult” single-sentence novel whose inert, traditionalist politics fail to match its would-be radical form. But modernism—brodernism—without insight is just dull cliché.
Yeah, I care about what this guy thinks.
>Most concerning, for me, is that brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor guy, gets thrown around a lot. The problem, to be clear, is not these traits—honest-to-God masterpieces compose much of the brodernist corpus—but their reduction into a series of attributes to be repeated as kitsch. Not the literature of exhaustion but an exhausting, at times exhausted, literature. A zombie avant-garde.
>...
>It’s not that Krasznahorkai’s satire misses the target or that I expect him to have all the answers. But his point about complicity—in the end, Florian is a regretful Nazi redeemed by killing other Nazis—reeks of the trite centrism that governed the 2010s and gave rise to Alternative für Deutschland and their allies around the world. Fascism is bad: you don’t say! And, more damningly: as a uniquely powerful, fascistic Far Right reconquers much of the world, are neo-Nazis anything more than a fantastic trope or an evasion of the present? Such triteness, I think, hides behind the phantom of formal experimentation, of the “difficult” single-sentence novel whose inert, traditionalist politics fail to match its would-be radical form. But modernism—brodernism—without insight is just dull cliché.
Yeah, I care about what this guy thinks.
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