This is just too good not to link to.
Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.
Thoughts? Comments? Thoughts?
(hint: I don’t happen to agree.)
There might be some kind of broad argument to be made about the insularity of American culture, in that I suspect if you are, say, Norwegian, you almost inevitably read more foreign literature than if you’re American. And it’s quite possibly true that Americans overvalue their own culture and undervalue that of other countries (and so do the British, probably). But still, it’s a ridiculous thing to say.
Quite so.