I have no idea what good prose is and neither do you

Odradek

It's a lie that was invented to outsell penny dreadfuls in the victorian era

Obā-san

i know it when i see it

Viani

good prose is like good fanservice

Odradek

Tamlin said:

i know it when i see it

Then why is writing about prose like dancing about architecture
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

This whole article is meaningless

Imipolex G

*excerpts from The Eye of Argon and Amanda McKittrick Ros*

there you go

Tachyon

B. R. Meyers said:

The "literary" writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like "ontological" and "nominalism," chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action—unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel's pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin's aptly titled Waiting, which won the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (2000).

this doesn't seem meaningless to me, i mean there are clear criteria being specified

i dunno about good prose but i can certainly identify prose that i enjoy and prose that i don't, and to some extent identify the reasons

Tachyon

this article is very long and opinionated and not to my taste, but i don't think it's meaningless

Sredni Vashtar

Agreed. It's coherent, it's just not necessarily *right.* For instance, I will agree that Proulx tends to go overboard with her wordplay fairly consistently, but that gruesome passage he cites as being "bad" is honestly a fantastic description of shock. He also doesn't seem to understand that "tonality" makes perfect sense in that sentence from Auster's Timbuktu, perhaps because he doesn't know a lot about music. The issue is not that his taste is narrow or bad per se, but that he has serious blind spots and seems to believe that all modern "literary" prose is somehow weaker than what preceded it, which is such a grumpy fussbudget position to take.

The last time I read it I was even less charitable, to be fair, but now that I'm past my irritation I just feel like I'm reading something with a clear thesis which is exceedingly biased and myopic rather totally ridiculous.

Odradek

Odradek said:

Tamlin said:

i know it when i see it

Then why is writing about prose like dancing about architecture
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

This whole article is meaningless

You wouldn't think talking about words would be so hard

You wouldn't think

Sredni Vashtar

Odradek.

Why are you fixating so hard on a moderately annoying article in the Atlantic.

Odradek

Tamlin said:

i know it when i see it

I thought this but then like

People will talk about good prose vs bad prose and none of it means anything to me, they are saying words, but none of them mean anything

Sredni Vashtar

Odradek said:

Tamlin said:

i know it when i see it

I thought this but then like

People will talk about good prose vs bad prose and none of it means anything to me, they are saying words, but none of them mean anything

Because a lot of people have ill-conceived opinions on things they don't need to have opinions about and yours may not align with other people's because fiction is inherently subjective?

Odradek

Okay but like

I literally have no idea what is being said

Sredni Vashtar

If you mean that article specifically, it makes sense with the examples when he breaks down the different types of prose he dislikes (and likes) and why, but I can see getting weary of it very fast.