/lit/ - Literature

>>17610852
>searching for yourself
>In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.

>>16484079
>message

>>16479084

>>13997450
>social utility

>>13265580
Nabokov.
End the Lolita shitposting.

>>13113417
Finnegans Wake: formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

>>13007645
>Most of its quality is from sheer aesthetic beauty alone
oh no

>nfw someone makes a judgment of a work they've only read once

>>12122673
good thing relating is irrelevant

>>11210808

>>9740572
explain yourself, pleb

>>25592
this
we need to inform our guests about nabakovian aestheticism

>>9287643
>relatable

Does anyone else here /insomnia/?
Nabokov called sleep "the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals."

>>9019600

>>8830007

>>8640784
>Going into a longer book already knowing the story is going to be a bit boring.
>tfw plebs

>>8553115
>why would you waste your time with something where you already know what happens?

I'm basically Humbert, except I didn't score at 13.

>He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: BTFO

Nabokov:If the book has great philosophical themes and it doesn't have good prose... then who fucking cares?

Bret Easton Ellis:Well, let's just say hypothetically ok? What if the book has good philosophical discourse?

[pause, all laugh]

Bret Easton Ellis:I know, I know.

[all in unison]

All:There are no novels with good philosophical discourse!

Dickens:A good philosophy consists of a book with a little hard cover, which will satisfy all storyline demands without being too plot driven about things, and will essentially will keep its dumb fucking themes unexplored.

Nabokov:The only novels with good philosophies which are smart or maybe funny or halfway intelligent or insightful, though god knows what the fuck that means, are badly written books.

Dickens:Absolutely.

Nabokov:And this is because they have to make up for how fucking awful their prose is.

Who has the best poetic prose? Why?

>thinking your "big ideas" can in any way make up for your shitty writing

Nabokov was so fucking right about everything.

I've read Lolita, what else by him is essential?