The Fuck Franzen Manifesto
macaron
May 28, 2025 4:38 PM
Recently online theres been a lot of sturm und drang about a category of books that don't really have a particularly strict criteria but generally are lauded by a subset of literary cliques on twitter and usually published by New York Review Books, Dalkey Archive Press, or Deep Vellum or maybe Archipelago Press. These books can be long, short, translated, untranslated (in the anglophone context), Modernist, Post-Modernist, usually male authors but not universally so, the only criteria about the works themselves is they're capital L literary, in the difficult and dense way. For specific examples I'll quote from the Los Angeles Review of Books article (Against High Brodernism) that caused the most recent flare-up of micro-discourse :
William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015), William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories (2005), Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (1999), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men (1987), Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh (out later this year), Miquel de Palol’s The Troiacord (2001), Jon Fosse’s works, Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43), Mark de Silva’s The Logos (2022), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy (2006–09), and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971).
The argument hinges on whether these books are lauded by pretentious posers more concerned by the aesthetic import these works have or whether they're the bulwark of literature against the tide of pulp literature, Young Adult dominance, or Romantasy depending on the time and circumstance. It can be a frustrating argument to see play out from the sidelines but there is a real comfort to know that this same argument has been waged decade before and likely since time immemorial.
