The four main writers merely act as barriers between which a lot of exciting stuff happened and do not serve to preclude, only maintain, discourse — though rather auspiciously placed, as both pairings represent their respective vastly different approaches in writing, however within the same social contexts and under similar preoccupations. Much of the chart, hopefully, is self-explanatory; I will only mention how Faulkner brought Joyce’s “high modernism” from Europe to the States (as Pollock did, or was delegated to do, with painting), and to the South, of all places. I’ve always found this moment very important in literary history. One wonders what would have happened without that. It was also difficult to link Joyce as coming from anything, other than loosely to Flaubert, due to the latter’s incipient play and self-consciousness with language. Hemingway also does this odd straddling thing: he wrote existential novels in the context of American social realism, and much of it war. As simple as his books — or at least sentences — were, he was a very complicated writer. Most of the others fit somewhat easily among their contemporaries.Addendum in Response to Commentary Concerning the Canon, and Other QualmsThis is being written the day after this post was first published, in a way that is both emotionally petty i.e. defensive, but more so, verily, out of a sense of responsibility, as my hand has been again led into the fervent political waters which many of our more dissenting readership, perhaps in need of a jacuzzi, like going. When I made the graph, I knew it only represented the mainly White Male canon, and that our more educated (though a quick wikipedia search will explain it perfectly well) would undoubtedly mention it in a kind of impulse which sustains — but never attempts or wants to resolve — the ongoing grad school-y argument over [whatever the current word for bad is e.g. "power," "patriarchy," "canonical"] vs. [whatever the current word for good is e.g. "the other," "minority," "queer," "post-{something}"], and no matter what disclaimers, caveats, or preemptive apologies this contributor would propose in this post’s very explicit text, pale angry people with most likely more than one cat and degree would serve me with: (1) a list of authors they felt were unfairly omitted, with implications of my being coerced; (2) an open, or at least implied, call for an apology for not having a more inclusive chart, or having a literary orientation different from them; and (3) an attack on the very medium with which this post is conveyed, namely, a blog on the internet, with allusions to a collective truncated attention span or learning. I will now address each concern.