Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1451568" data-attributes="member: 812">Re: The subjective nature of artistic analysis.While it's certainly possible to compare authors on objective grounds -- to, for example, compare the number of grammatical errors their prose contains, or the number of adverbs used or any other objective measure one might wish, this doesn't lead you to any sort of conclusion regarding who is the better writer.Great writers may or may not be great pose stylists. I happen to like great prose stylists, which is why I love writers like Brust and Calvino and Ondaatje. They can take the rules of the English language and USE them to create thrilling tales.But I also love writers like Henry Miller or Edgar Rice Burroughs who are working in entirely different worlds, with different priorities -- Miller just ignoring the rules and letting the headlong rush of his language propel his writing and Burroughs who (like Howard, who I bet is better but I haven't read enough to say) is just so frickin' excited about this story he has to tell that you don't care that his language is so flat, he hauls you along with such energy.All that said, I don't think there can be much doubt that Tolkien is a far superior stylist to Jordan. I suspect that Jordan would not dispute that point. I suspect that if you compare the finished writings of both men you would find superior grammar and usage in Tolkien. You would find greater variety of sentence structure, more imaginative metaphor, a far, far broader vocabulary and superior use of poetical devices like scansion and assonance in Tolkien.Which means nothing when comparing them as "writers", unless you happen to really like that stuff. Which I do, but well, there you go. Nice for me. There are certainly things that Jordan does better, and not all of the things listed above are objectively "better". Jordan uses a smaller vocabulary -- that can be seen as an advantage as much as a disadvantage.  I prefer one to the other, but that preference is purely subjective.To use textual analysis to "prove" one author is superior to another is impossible. What you CAN do is analyze what an author actually does, and discuss why you do or do not like it, or talk about what you think that might demonstrate as far as the author's point of view, or suggest that it illustrates some particular philosophical notion behind the story -- but to use it to say one writer is simply better than another is kind of pointless. And fraught with difficulty. And unnecessary -- isn't it enough to just say, "I like so-and-so better and here's why" rather than need to say, "So-and-so is BETTER!"  ?The former is a statement of opinion offered as a point of discussion. The latter is a declaration of faith masquerading as fact in order to stifle discussion. I reckon.</blockquote>

Verification