Žižek and literary modernism

One other point about the Žižek interview I forgot to mention (and you know someone’s a great interview when you keep thinking about aspects of the interview days later)…

He makes a pretty blunt assault on literary modernism in that interview. Viriginia Woolf is overrated, he says, and Daphne du Maurier is better. James Joyce is overrated, and went downhill after Dubliners.

I don’t always agree with his literary judgments (Patricia Highsmith is very good, but I don’t agree that she’s better than Chandler), but they’re always out-of-the-box in ways that are helpfully challenging.