Greatest insults in liturature?

[Anonymous No.20963131]

Hemingway about Wyndham Lewis:

>I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

[Anonymous No.20963156]

Look up Mark Twain on Jane Austen. Endless keks

[Anonymous No.20963188]

chandler about hemmmingway:

>Ninety per cent of it is the goddamndest self-imitation. He never really wrote but one story. All the rest is the same thing in different pants – or without different pants. And his eternal preoccupation with what goes on between the sheets becomes rather nauseating in the end. One reaches a time of life when limericks written on the walls of comfort stations are not just obscene, they are horribly dull. This man has only one subject and he makes that ridiculous. I suppose the man's epitaph, if he had the choosing of it, would be: Here Lies A Man Who Was Bloody Good in Bed. Too Bad He's Alone Here. But the point is I begin to doubt whether he ever was. You don't have to work so hard at things you are really good at – or do you?

[Anonymouṡ No.20963337]

>>20963131
I gave 100 in a quiz a little while back.

https://archived.moe/lit/thread/20123287

[Anonymous No.20963349]

L'assaut du puceau

[Anonymous No.20963390]

>>20963156
>Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

[Anonymous No.20963516]

>>20963188
pretty weak desu

[Anonymous No.20963553]

Frog-pondians

[Anonymous No.20963616]

Nabokov is the undeniale, all-time champion of insulting other authors. He even managed to insult those he liked. For instance, Joyce was one of his favorite authors, but this is what he said about Finnegan's Wake:
>A 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.

On Mann, Pasternak and Faulkner:
>That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered “masterpieces,” or at least what journalists call “great books,” is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

And of course Plato:
>Not particularly fond of him.

[Anonymous No.20963746]

>>20963616
nabokov is like every esl who's a bit too impressed he knows the language and feels the need to pepper his speech with meaningless adjectives at every possible turn, to indicate the "mastery" of the language, all context aside

[Anonymous No.20963819]

>>20963746
He was like that in Russian and French too, whereas you're you.

[Anonymous No.20963853]

>>20963819
maybe he should've concentrated on one language then, given his limited capabilities to provide a non-parodic impression of pomp which he takes desperate stabs at in all his writing, not realizing he sounds like a 15 year old imitating the speech of the upper classes. He's the "indubitably," meme but he takes it for real.

[Anonymous No.20963877]

>>20963853
>not only does anon not take his own advice on pomp, he doesn't know that Nabokov is frequently bathetic
Ok

[Anonymous No.20963892]

>>20963877
you might note that my style wasn't based on simply dropping adjectives but moreso intelligent use of sentence structures. i'm a far more gifted stylist than nabokov could ever be and that's a fact

[Anonymous No.20963909]

>>20963616
Nabokov was write about nearly everything. Shame his own books suck too though.

[Anonymous No.20963918]

>>20963746
t. monolingual

[Anonymous No.20963919]

>>20963892
>But my mom thinks I'm smart
Ok

[Anonymous No.20963922]

>>20963892
>i'm a far more gifted stylist than nabokov could ever be and that's a fact
Post sales numbers

[Anonymous No.20963945]

>>20963853
Nah. You're saying this only because he gave you a hard time the first time you read any of his book (most probably Lolita). It's okay to admit you're intellectually insecure my dude.

[Anonymous No.20963967]

>>20963853
He was from an aristocratic family and spoke English before he spoke Russian. I don't blame you for not knowing this, but don't act like an expert when you're blatantly uninformed.

[Anonymous No.20964002]

>>20963945
lmao the seethe
>>20963967
yes, he spoke enlgish as taught by a bunch of esls, never really catching up to mastering the english style. from an esl perpsective, it's easier to write pseudo-pompous stuff than actually stylistically good prose. Moby Dick for example is just in a completely different league than anything Nabokov wrote.

[Anonymous No.20964011]

>>20964002
>it's easier to write pseudo-pompous stuff than actually stylistically good prose
Cf Ibid.

[Anonymous No.20964025]

>>20963616
>vilely written
esl alert

[Anonymous No.20964036]

>>20964025
Not really. Things that are ESL alerts are usually things like knowing the indicative from the subjunctive, not confusing homophones, etc. You know, the things native speakers usually don't know.

[Anonymous No.20964072]

>>20964036
Ah yes, maybe Nabokov realized how silly his attempt at pomp was and tried to pepper it with a blatant, elementary error of suffixing a single-syllable word with -ly, but unfortunately this just made the mishmash seem all the more ridiculous, especially since the sentence where the mistake was made was supposed to critique the writing skills of some much better author.

[Anonymous No.20964082]

>>20963909
>write

[Anonymous No.20964084]

>>20964072
Isn't not noticing irony a sign of autism?

[Anonymous No.20964086]

>>20964082
EFL tell

[Anonymous No.20964089]

>>20964025
I'm etl. What's wrong with vilely?

[Anonymous No.20964090]

>>20963131
in Might is right there's a line where Redbeard says something like such and such be -, followed by a footnote after the dash. the footnote then says this: (you are invited to imagine what uncivil words might appropriately appear at the dash)

I'm quite fond of this.

[Anonymous No.20964105]

>>20963337
>A gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on

Jesus christ. Who the hell is Swinburne talking about here?

[Anonymous No.20964115]

>>20964089
try to say it out loud, it sounds stupid.

[Anonymous No.20964129]

>>20964089
EFL kids get told not to use adverbs because they don't use them well. They can't tell if a sentence needs "well" or "good"', so teachers obviate the problem by telling them to never use any.

[Anonymous No.20964138]

>>20964105
Reminds me of a review that Pope published of some epic poem:

>Wit pass’d thro’ thee no longer is the same,
>As meat digested takes a diff’rent name;
>But sense must sure thy safest plunder be,
>Since no reprisals can be made on thee.

[Anonymouṡ No.20964209]

>>20964105
Emerson. He had apparently called Swinburne a "perfect leper and a mere sodomite" or something, so Swinburne got a bit irate.

https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-dish-of-beastliness.html

[Anonymous No.20964715]

>"There was gathered in him, I believe, the whole bouquet of human stupidity."
-Nabokov, Despair

[Anonymous No.20965871]

>>20963131
That's a lot of shit coming from a guy who killed himself

[Anonymous No.20966611]

>>20964089
Nothing, nor is there anything wrong with "vilely written". No idea what that anon is on about.

[Anonymous No.20966733]

>>20964089
Nothing. That anon is a retard who was brought up in amerimutt education.

[Anonymous No.20966750]

>>20966733
i sense serious cope that you would not admit that vilely just sounds highly stupid and unpoetic, for an author that is purportedly known for his poetic finesse. Nabokov got a name and you're just mouthing it, this is all the proof I need.

[Anonymous No.20966790]

>>20963131
>“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
-W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

[Anonymous No.20966835]

>>20964002
Pretty sure he learned english primarily from his english governess. Who was english, in case that wasn't clear.

>>20966750
>sounds highly stupid and unpoetic
Thank you for telling us that you're the type of mouth-breathing retard who moves his lips as he reads and uses this to judge writing rather than the actual rules of grammar.

[Anonymous No.20966846]

>>20966835
>anything that satisfies grammatical rules is good
lmao youre a legitimate idiot, go back to reading instruction manuals then

[Anonymous No.20966859]

>>20966846
Now if only I'd actually said that. Are you the retard who erroneously called Nabokov an ESL because "vilely" sounds funny when you (personally) lip read?

[Anonymous No.20966870]

>>20966859
you still don't realize it's extremely obvious that's the basis of your stupid fucking argument. imagine that you cared enough to type all these response and still only succeed at embarrassing the nabokov fanbase you try to defend.

[Anonymous No.20966913]

>>20966870
My only point was that whoever concluded Nabokov is an ESL because he used the completely unremarkable (to any literate person, at least) phrase "vilely written" is both objectively wrong and utterly retarded. I don't have an "argument" beyond calling attention to the fact that you're illiterate and stupid.

[Anonymous No.20966944]

>>20963156
Fpbp

[Anonymous No.20966949]

>>20966870
>Why did anon's teacher let him use adverbs when I'm not allowed?
He probably did A levels instead of O levels.

[Anonymous No.20966963]

>>20966913
if hes not an esl, hes on the level of one, which is actually even more damning. you yourself criticized me, though, for "judging writing for how it sounds rather than by rules of grammar", implying that rules of grammar would be sufficient to judge the writing. if he uses the obviously stupid sounding and looking, he is on the level of esl. nabokovcels have ahard time with this but this is just the harsh truth about him.

[Anonymous No.20966975]

>>20966963
You only think it looks and sounds stupid because you were maleducated.

[Anonymous No.20966989]

>>20963131
Nice thread derail, faggots

[Anonymous No.20966994]

Turdsworth

[Anonymous No.20967763]

>>20964129
god damn Americans are retarded, that explains a lot