Talk:Extinction (Bernhard novel)

This book review is NOT copied & pasted from a website, but is a synthesis of the numerous reviews the novel received at the time of its publication (in German 1986, in English 1995) as well as this Wiki-user's own opinions. As to the style and tone of the article, they only reflect the internationally recognised importance of this classic and its profound literary value. To support and substantiate this, I have added additional footnotes and references, and changed some of the text (to eliminate some of the too laudatory statements). Readers are invited to contribute more and more worthily if possible. Thank you! --Daubmir (talk) 20:22, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Some ideas for improving this article
It's been nearly seven years since Daubmir (the commenter above) posted on this talk page and, apparently, contributed most of the substance of this article. His talk page says he has gone on "lifelong sabbatical" and I don't begrudge him this. However, there are several serious flaws in this article that I'd like to address. First off, Daubmir's approach-- and I don't want to disparage him for his positive contributions to the article-- violates several key tenets of Wikipedia. He says in the comment above that the article "is a synthesis of the numerous reviews the novel received at the time of its publication (in German 1986, in English 1995) as well as this Wiki-user's own opinions." Now, Wikipedia articles are not supposed to represent the editor's opinions and they are not supposed to be a synthesis of original research. As the article currently stands, it contains highly subjective, and often highly laudatory opinions on Bernhard's novel. The "Imagery, style, and themes" section is especially laudatory and reads more like a glowing review than something you'd find in an encyclopedia. Now, before I make any major changes, I would like to solicit other editor's opinions on the article. But here are a few ideas I have in mind: First, I think a decent amount of the article's content can be salvaged; it's just a matter of radically changing the tone from celebration to a more dispassionate perspective. The plot summary section contains some accurate and fairly objective information; I think we could improve it by supplementing it with more information in a similar vein, which should be extractable from the fairly sizable body of Bernhard criticism generated over the years. This leads me into my third point, which is the need for a better citation style throughout the article. The article has references, but they're not directly cited in the text. Now, as for the "Imagery, style, and themes" section, I think this will have to be largely scrapped, as it provides little in the way of objective information and is mostly an encomium to Bernhard; expressions like "Bernhard wouldn't be Bernhard if..." and "musical pitches of extraordinary beauty (and beautifully rendered by translator David McLintock)" aren't encyclopedic and should be excised. Also, I don't know what the policy is on excerpts (I've noticed them in a lot of Wikipedia's Bernhard articles) but I don't know how helpful they are and I'd be tempted to remove them entirely. So, these are my opinions on the subject. I will give a little time for other editors to offer their opinions and then I (or hopefully we!) will set about cleaning up the article. As a final note, it would be especially helpful if we could get a contribution from an editor who speaks German and would thus have access to the German critical material. Tigercompanion25 (talk) 22:51, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Largely agree on modifying the tone, scrapping the Imagery, style, and themes section, scrapping Excerpts. Ferngreen (talk) 21:17, 1 May 2018 (UTC)