Re: Team Me: Foxing around
Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2017 8:19 pm
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We talk languages
http://forum.language-learners.org/
http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1902
blaurebell wrote:Argentinian Spanish intensive reading SC - this will be so much fun!
Literary road-trip through Argentina - one book for every province of Argentina. Since the country is very centralised, Argentinian literature is often set in Buenos Aires city or province. I want to get to know more regional literature and do a little literary road trip through the different provinces. I still dream of a proper road trip, but this is a good substitute for now.
De viaje (literario) por España - I actually got the idea for my Argentinian literary road trip from this list and might as well follow the original list, when I'm through my Argentinian literature reading list.
Like a message from a bottle I pick up your request about hardware ten years later and hereby answer.reineke wrote:Hardware: Two computers hooked to 2 TVs, a 400 DVD changer, one 1TB external hard disk drive, media players, wireless earphones. I'd like to hear from others regarding their use of hardware in language learning. Hopefully I will not prove that fancy gadgets do not a language learner make. Edit: Powerful stuff. In 2007.
reineke wrote:Xmmm wrote:reineke wrote:Ellen Chances, Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University
The question, in my mind, is meaningless. One of the worrisome tendencies of contemporary society is its impulse to rank. Who is better? Who is Number One? The question should not be, “Who is the greater novelist?,” but rather, “What do I learn from reading the books of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or of anyone else?
Why does everything have to be a race? Why does everything have to be competitive? This implies that there is a winner and a loser. Why does the reading of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or of anyone else have to be part of a “success” or “failure” story? Framing the question, “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: Who’s the better novelist?,” in this way does a disservice, it seems to me, to the act of contemplating the meaning of these writers’ books.
Asking the question is equivalent to asking, “Which is the greater food, milk or orange juice? Which is the greater food, blueberries or strawberries? Which is better, the sky or the grass, night or day?”
Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Virginia
All mediocre novelists are alike; every great novelist is great in his own way. Which is why the choice between nineteenth-century Russia’s two supreme prose writers ultimately boils down to the question of which kind of greatness resonates with a particular reader. My own sympathies are with Tolstoy, and even my criteria for judging a work of fiction, I admit, are relentlessly Tolstoyan.
Gary Saul Morson, Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
A Soviet anecdote has it that Stalin once asked the Central Committee: which deviation is worse, the right or the left? Some fearfully ventured “the left,” others hesitantly offered, “the right.” The Great Helmsman then gave the right answer: “Both are worse.” I answer the question, “Who is the greater novelist, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”: Both are better.
Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth century. He was unique in foreseeing that it would not be an era of sweetness and light, but the bloodiest on record. With uncanny accuracy, The Demons predicted, in detail, what totalitarianism would be.
Tolstoy speaks more to the 21st century. His novels’ key concept was contingency. At every moment, however small and ordinary, something happens that cannot entirely be accounted for by previous moments. Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy also denied the possibility of a social science, which must always wind up resembling the “science of warfare” preached by the generals in War and Peace. Like macroeconomists today, these “scientists” are immune to counter-evidence. To use Tolstoy’s word, social science is mere “superstition.”
If social scientists understood people as well as Tolstoy, they would have been able to depict a human being as believable as Tolstoy’s characters, but of course none has come close.
If we once acknowledge that we will never have a social science, then we will, like General Kutuzov, learn to make decisions differently. We intellectuals would be more cautious, more modest, and ready to correct our errors by constant tinkering.
If we have left the age of ideologies behind, we may need Dostoevsky’s warnings less than Tolstoy’s wisdom.
https://themillions.com/2012/04/tolstoy ... eater.html
reineke wrote:De gustibus etc but you suggested a different pecking order of greatness and asked what Russians thought. I obliged. A couple of the lists I mentioned reflect the opinions of American and international authors.
Fair enough. You've clearly demonstrated by use of facts that a new dark age is upon us.
Let's play the game a different way. The experts have declared Tolstoy is the best.
1. Have you read Anna Karenina or War and Peace? All the way to the end?
2. If you have read one or both, would you agree with this mighty consensus of experts that Tolstoy is the greatest author of all time?
3. If you haven't read one or both, why not? Seeing as how he is the best, why procrastinate?
If you choose not to answer, I will have to assume that either:
a) You were afraid to read either of them because you were worried with good cause that they might be terminally boring
b) You did try to read one of them but gave up a third of the way through.
Honestly (and I'm not trying to get political here as I already have a warning), I think that in literary circles it's hard to say you're pro-Dostoevsky or pro-Solzhenitsyn. Because they both have an authoritarian streak. Whereas Tolstoy was a fat happy 1%er who talked a good liberal game (I can see him spending a couple hours a month with his sleeves rolled up helping his peasants with manual labor before he went back in the mansion for lemonade right now). Try to tell me that has zero influence on either lit professors or authors who run in literary circles.
Anyway, this is your blog ... thanks for putting up with the rant and I'll desist now.