/lit/ - Literature

>As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

The Final Boss of Pseud Magnets.

Nabokov is all style no substance, art for arts sake is for pretentious fags playing word games and jerking themselves off, its barely better than checkers or fortnite. If you aren't offering any philosophical or spiritual knowledge, introspection it becomes base entertainment. Many prosefags should reconcile this fact.

>>22729103
>One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

A favorite between the ages of 20 and 25, but no longer. A parody man; a cowardly artist and pseduo intellectual intellgentsia who shields his true sentiments with unreliable narrators.

>Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos.

What did he think of Fitzgerald?

1/?

My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.

"How to be a Good Reader" or "Kindness to Authors"—something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Commel'on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.

The neil druckmann of literature

not every 2 dollar word sounds pretty

Is ok.

Why is he such a polarizing figure when it comes to his criticism? At first I thought it was just /lit/ but the more I read the more it seems almost everybody who has bothered to read his nonfiction agrees that he's a blowhard and a pseud. Is there something I'm missing? Because it doesn't come off like that at all; the more of it I read the more he makes sense

anons help. I don't get him. I've read Pale Fire, Pnin, Transparent Things, King Queen Knave, Speak Memory, half his poetry, and all of his criticism. Sometimes his prose stuns me with beauty, but most of the time it reads like a flabby, bespectacled old fuck jacking off over an index card. His characters feel flat and uninspired. His novels drip with narcissism. Any semblance of a "story" suffocates under paragraphs of turgid prose. What am I missing?

I was gifted a copy of Pale Fire in a large book lot, but I've heard it can be a little too demanding of those new to his style.

Lolita looks long as shit, even though I've heard that's the classic.

halp

>Martin, George R. R. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. A great artist, my favorite writer when I was a boy. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, but his romances and fantasies are superb. A far greater artist than Tolkien. A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration.

>Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley’s copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.

>Thug, Young. A favorite between the ages 20 and 40, and after. Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Genius.

>>20046759
get filtered you absolute faggot. nabokov agrees with me

contemplating the style of a work of literature is a vastly superior method than reading for messages

Shakespeare isn't so celebrated for his plays' messages, which are a dime a dozen, but how they are written

go back to high school pleb

>>20003457
He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

>My private tragedy… is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way

What did Nabokov mean by this 'second-rate brand of English'? Or was he saying English itself is second rate?