The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France by Roger Shattuck
Published 1958 · 130,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France to read?
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Elegant literary-critical prose, more essayistic than technical.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Cultural-historical argument grounded in detailed accounts of specific works and events.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Richly documented without becoming a compendium.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Organizational logic is associative rather than strictly chronological.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Argues that the avant-garde itself operated through symbolic provocation.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Shattuck adopts something of the ironic spirit of his subjects.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Each chapter closes with a clear cultural-historical judgment.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Four-part structure organized by figure, with thematic chapters framing each.
How The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France is regarded
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.