The very best teachers are those who make a clear and detailed argument assessing something, usually from a negative point of view. This is especially effective with students who disagree. Those students are then forced, in defense of their own ideas, to make a much deeper and fuller investigation of the subject at hand. Nothing is better for expanding one’s mind. What an excellent teacher you are.

I’d love to see your seven deadly sins of philosophy as well. That would be interesting.

Every single person in my life who loves the work of Cormac McCarthy or Ernest Hemingway is also a fan of numerous of the following writers: Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Atwood, EM Forster, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Julian Barnes, AS Byatt, Andrea Barrett... But I have to say, this video is perfect as a tutorial in how to write Dude Bro Lit. I may have, at last, a NANOWRIMO project in mind for 2020...😉 In all honesty, this was an awesome video, Steve. One with which I largely disagree, but awesome all the same.

Thank you, I enjoyed this. I'd definitely watch a video on your 20 antidotes.

Awesome. I was directed here after I was lambasted in a forum for expressing my distaste of Cormac McCarthy.

I feel personally attacked by this highly relatable content.

Excellent. I'm still grappling with the idea that dudebro authors depend on the idea of surprise rather than development AND are so predictable. How do those work together? I'm not at all disagreeing that they DO both work, but I don't understand HOW. Thoughts?

This is excellent! I really want to read Lonesome Dove now.

This video puts into words things that I hate about some books so well. I didn't know how to describe some of these things, but here they are.

Ohhhhhh boy, we’ve been waiting for this one

Absolutely fascinating discussion! Thank you.

Better than a Dudebro lit starter kit, "DO YOU (Lift)READ BRO! By the way, thank for doing the Lonesome Dove readalong earlier this year. it was and still is my favourite read for 2019.

Moby Dick = masterpiece The Old Man & the Sea = dudebro Meg = killer dudefish

Your drugification of DudeBro Lit is spot-on, Steve. I am happy to be celebrating roughly 8 years of DBL sobriety today, and I am thankful for your reminder, that the (reading) life I am living today is the right kind of life (for me).

Huzzah!! So glad you made this video. I am thoroughly with you on your choice of book pairs and how those pairs reflect the differences between DudeBro Lit and literature. Here is my score card on your seven sins of Dudebro Lit: Sin One -- agree completely Sin Two -- agree completely Sin Three -- ok ,but with questions Sin Four -- ok, but with questions Sin Five -- Maybe, but . . . Sin Six -- Maybe, but . . . Sin Seven -- doesn't really seem like a sin I did, of course, think about you when I made my last Saturday video. But what directly prompted my question was a tweet from a female booktuber regarding Murakami. I had jotted down some ideas before seeing your video and will make a video covering those and will also respond to your video.

Oh my, we will end up agreeing on books. Scary.

Fascinating. All the Pretty Horses is on my list to read before the end of the year so watching this was very timely. Sounds like it should fit well with all the pulp trash I’ve been reading lately 😂

I love Palahniuk. I find his writing above all humorous. He doesn't offend me at all. Of course reading him is different from reading literature. You most likely have a point about the addictive quality, but I don't think being addictive is a bad thing when it comes to books in this age. There are worse things one can be addicted to.

This was great. Yeah, when a female character reads as a clay statue (only to seduce, nag, or die) it would be a time to think about the value of the book. The character is a placeholder for beliefs, not a human. I would think reading better stuff would help in undermining the enjoyment of plots using clay statues and create a critical eye about the beliefs. I personally like humans in my literature. Thanks Steve , you’re an exegetical ninja.

Imagine unironically calling Cormac McCarthy a bad writer.

Santiago, in TheOldMandtheSea, more truly represents the old generation of Cubans who became enamoured with American media and sports culture. Hemingway would have never seriously held Joe Dimaggio up as a hero. I suggest reading it someday soon with the perspective that it's a cold war political satire about Batista loyalists. Hemingway was a socialist. The bit at the end about the dumb American tourists says it all: they think the carcass (Cuba) is something other than it is.

Great! What would you do with David Foster Wallace if he came to your place for tea?

"Dudebro lit" is just another genre, so you could level many of these criticisms at most genre fiction: cliched, unimaginative, lowbrow, addictive, etc. A lot of those genre fiction books are also just as page-turningly addictive. Also, there are vast quantities of "chick lit" which is essentially the same thing, except it appeals to women.

Yes. Thank you.

While I would agree that what you are describing here is a real phenomenon, and that misogyny is a constituent part of that phenomenon, I cannot agree that this holds true for the other "sins" as you describe them - simply because I don't think they make sense. There is a basic assumption here about single works of literature as ontologically real as single works of literature, possessed of definite, measurable qualities that one may interact with through reading a given work, and thereby, hypodermic needle-like, experiencing it as it definitely, 100%, no two ways about it, is. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - one of my all-time favorite novels - produces, as you describe it, tingling sensations, indicating real intellectual stimulation and movement of the soul; The Road or Infinite Jest - also among my all-time favorite novels - produce vulgar, brute excitement, indicating the dude bro emptiness which such works fail to conceal. You claim that these assumptions will hold true, without fail, and that merely possessing knowledge of them will reveal them to be true. Here's the problem: this has not been my experience. The two kinds of experience that you describe, the first kind of which I've had in essentially the same way with all the novels listed above, I simply call "enjoyment"; the other experience I call "lack of enjoyment". There is nothing in your account here that simply cannot be reduced to either that, or gendered assumptions about what one ought to enjoy. I also find your distinction between outer action and inner action rather arbitrary. I have had equally profound experiences reading Dostoevsky or Flannery O'Connor, as I've had reading Robert E. Howard or M. John Harrison - whose novel A Storm of Wings I would argue is a prime example of why this kind of distinction is problematic - so the idea that one has to be, as it were, led by the hand to an aesthetically meaningful, intellectually stimulating experience of literature through the characters doing a lot of thinking instead of a lot of sword-fighting, I find kind of dubious. There are other points of disagreement, and I would love to discuss them further, but if you don't feel like it, that's cool :)

Ah, addiction. And misogyny. Now I understand my binge on Richard Stark novels. But I do read other things, I swear!

I found this to be very interesting and I will check the validity of these points with my reading in the future. Thanks for that! Regarding Infinite Jest: I am working through that tome atm and it strikes me as pretty much anti-entertainment. It might so some of the sins here, but it doesn't strike me as being written to be addictive at all tbh. And I guess that's also kind of the point? Maybe I'll reconsider this once I am finished with it, but atm I just don't see it

I’m curious to know your stance on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I keep finding his fixation with girls very upsetting, it brings me out of the story completely.

Curing addiction through willpower is doubtful. What is needed is Dudebro Anonymous where the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Are those Gore Vidal's essays I see behind you?

So, are you saying that DudeBro lit is related to dreaming and relating dreams?

I am a casual fan of Cormack Mccarthy, but I have a male friend that is a hardcore fan and really the part where he is obsessively searching for new releases of him all the is so relatable jajja

So would you consider the Iliad Dudebro Lit? Seems to meet all your criteria: absence of -or sexist treatment of - women; obsessive lists (of armour, weaponry and wounds inflicted); and a bloody and exhilarating video game like push toward a final goal. But since Homer largely defined literature, it wouldn’t then make sense to say Dudebro Lit wasn’t literature. This is a serious question btw, although I take it your video was intended largely for entertainment. Grateful to the KZfaq algo for bringing me your channel; been obsessively bingeing it - like a pile of Cormac McCarthy novels.

Hemingway is a great writer with actual depth and capability, and even compared to Melville. This is purely based on your own prejudices and dislike of the man and his love of hunting - in which he killed many animals. When I have the time, eventually, I will counter-argue this.

This is absolutely spot on. I read Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk earlier this year and it was basically a textbook example of the seven sins you've just explained. The 'itemisation' was the thing that really stood out to me. It was like the book was a strand of DNA and half of the words in it were junk non-coding DNA which is there but doesn't actually do anything. The author had this annoying affectation where he repeated whole phrases over and over (for example: he kept on repeating 'testing testing: one, two, three' - we get it, the narrator is on a flight but what purpose does recycling these junk sentences serve?). Despite the fact that the book annoyed me with examples like this on every page, it was still compulsively readable.

Murakami has always been accused of dude-bro renderings of women in his novels but I have always liked them. Perhaps it makes me a dude bro for not caring.

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves."

Oh, my.

I loved Clara so much 💜

#6 The Martian ... and a few other sins

Melville is dude bro lit, he's ours! You can keep McCarthy. But I love that masculine overconscious voice in a story. The kinda narrator who watches an inchworm cross his leg, and finds in it's marching some lesson about traversing life's whirlwind, then assesses his own valor compared to that of the worms. Maybe it's all too much moralizing, but even when Melvilles shipmates have their throats torn by liquor they still have the pretense to wonder about the will of God. I guess it's all a bit overly sentimental But I love more literary works too, and maybe they are enjoyed deeper I think you're right. There are many aspects that are richer in those kinds of books.

Ah. I see that 'forgotten value of inventory' crap from KZfaq comment trolls all the time. Fortunately or unfortunately, I haven't read your DudeBro examples. I may have read some other books of the genre, but I don't recall.

Love me some dude bro lit. Well... except Cormac, he's just a Trainwreck.

New terminology to me DudeBro Lit. I'd categorize Ian Fleming as DudeBro, but John Le Carré not.

I don't believe dude bro literature is an actual thing.

>Critiques writing >Can't be bothered to write a script Ah yes. Weaponized cringe.

alright. I have had some time to think on this. I'm lost, but I have my Chuck and Cormac, my own male protags. And I try so hard not to capitalize the word MALE----Jesus, you are on point. You got it. My shit wife left me with; a pen, a dark colored piece of construction paper, a 1970s era Swiss army knife, 6 feet of fishing line and a well worn copy of Infinite Jest. God Help me. I keep hitting F5 on the McCarthy page, why does he write so slow? I need it. Maybe you should write the next great novel, MR. oh, what's your name? oh, right. Donoghue. FEED ME.

I watched this again, the sheer arrogance and condescension expressed in the video is breath-taking.

Sounds like you might be projecting. So how do you set up a strong male with testosterone and a understanding of somethings you might not...all the pretty horses paints a very emotional picture if you understand ot

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

Yeah, you're a genius. Clowns like Hemingway and Cormac and David Foster Wallace etc. etc. etc. don't know how to write, right? What paragraph have you written lately, a single paragraph that has the power of that any of our modern greats could pack into one, succinct declarative sentence? Oh, that's right, you gotta be a dudebro to write like that, right?

goon

'Dudebro lit'. Okay, American culture is so bizarre. 26 min video, some boomer is explaining his frustration with literary straw-dog. Inventing a tag and then discriminating books by it is what happens when you've given up on any kind of serious engagement with literature. Articulate it better, write it down, you are all over the place.

To chastise "dudebro" lit in the twenty first century, when literature has become the domain of liberal women and small souled bugmen, who are also liberal women in spirit, I repeat, to chastise this "dudebro" lit, which consists of authors dead or about to die soon, comes off as... stunning and brave, I guess?

Funny he uses Harold Bloom to prop his argument yet meanwhile, Harold Bloom so praised Cormac McCarthy, he espoused his opinion that Blood Meridian was an addition to the great literary canon of western civilization. Wrong person to cite in your video trying to discredit & put down Cormac McCarthy's great literary genius. Just say it isn't for you and you prefer girly novels. Nothing wrong with that.

So broadly speaking this video can be boiled down to: Books I like are literature and I don't like brolit so it mustn't be literature. I would also really like to see where the rule saying that novels can't stimulate the prefrontal cortex and has to stimulate only the parietal lobe. You are also making some incredibly broad assumptions. I feel like you are just trying to lord over people with the idea that what you read is higher than what other people read which I feel is a bigger problem than what you were saying about people who read "dude/bro lit" bring 'addicted' to it.

What is wrong with this guy, complaining about books that apparently aren't boring enough for him? Lol talk about pretentious gate keeping...There is so, so much wrong with this video & this dude's perspective. The only critic I've ever found & appreciated was Harold Bloom. Because he advocated for immersion into greatness. Bloom championed greatness. This guy isn't great and he doesn't even seem to value thr greats. He compliments & then insults Hemingway in the same video. Seems confused, probably from consuming too much nonsensical fairyland liberal propaganda. Probably the kind of guy to write off Shakespeare. 🤮🤮🤮 I truly pity liberals who will never find happiness. They're too busy complaining, playing the victim & tearing down the few in history & presently, who were and are exemplary artists & humans, etc...

Dude, Colonel Sanders wants his moniker back. -Moby Dick, "dudebro?" The great American novel thrown in with crass trash like Cormac McCarthy and western serial tripe? This is hackery! Expounding on sins from someone who doesn't believe in the concept of sin and perhaps morality is less than encouraging. Please reread the sermon from Melville's epic. Hemingway's embarrassing Old Man thrown in with Melville's experiential great American novel? You should change the channel's name to the Spouter Inn, spouting such vapid, insights. The dendrites on your pre-frontal cortex can thank me later, bro.

This is such a great video! I have always despised Fight Club and have never understood the status it has. It is hateful in spirit from the first page and never redeems it. Just awful!