Who's the most pretentious writer you've read? Mine is Nabokov hands down

Well, instead of refuting my point, you're just resorting to insults so, good talk.

Joyce no question. The man literally has nothing to say. Aesthetics and allusion abound but he is the least profound thinker of the “greats”

Nabokov is the most prententious writer I've ever read. He reads exactly like what a collegiate english professor would read like. The reason Lolita works so well was because Nabokov's writing was perfect to imitate a character like Humbert.

>Joyce is the least profound thinker of the greats
have you even read Finnegan's Wake

That post isn't even me, the one you originally responded to. And either way your point is nonexistent, you do realize that right? So even if it were a back and forth exchange, you'd have done nothing anyone who hasn't read a single book couldn't do to back up your stance or give me any responsibility in responding, but I will anyway. What I'm implying is that calling something pretentious is saying (generally) that it doesn't have any depth, yet pretends to. In what way does this apply to Nabokov? Can you give even one example or at least expand on how you came to that conclusion?
But yes, what you said does apply as well, unfortunately: people regularly call literature they struggle with pretentious without being able to provide any reasons for this, people on this board. The irony here being that calling something pretentious without being able to clearly state why is far more pretentious, as an action, than anything the writers being listed here ever wrote.

>imitate
Nabokov is Humbert and Lolita is a self satire. Nabokov is basically the Same Hyde of literature

Sam Hyde isn't self satire.

what is he then

Did you read the brilliant takedown of Nabokov in the current issue of New Criterion too?

Updike.

He is un-ironically smarter than most people though. I don't understand the problem.

>current issue
its not in the current issue senpai thats from a 1991 issue, they're trying to increase web traffic
there's a good piece on burgess in the current issue tho

...

Faulkner, probably. Beautifully written long sentences. I mean, three pages for one paragraph, like, holy shit, what's the point. Bernhard comes to mind, but without the pretentiousness.

I read the Burgess piece but yeah, you got me there about the Nabokov. I just saw it on the front page and clicked without realizing it was from an older issue. The articles by Nuechterlein and Conrad Black were also great. I'm a great fan of Black's writing and plan on reading his biographies of Roosevelt and Nixon someday... however, they don't appear to be light reading considering their length. I love Mr. Kimball's work as a writer and editor for the New Criterion. I pray he'll live long to continue at it!

Yes, and he wasn't bullshitting. He had the creds to back himself up. He's an intellectual icon, because he not only has that snobbery, but is entirely justified in it.

which illustrates again the disconnect between those that 'know' and those that don't, and the oft futility of aiming pretentiousness at the canon. not to say they're sacred but something as puerile as 'it's pretentious' or, as above, [what's the point] reveals more about the person than the thing referred to

Bertrand Russell got cucked by a strapping American journalist who made two kids with his while he was still married to her

>you will never cuck Bertrand Russell

bukowski

Though I nonetheless like him, sadly D. H. Lawrence. His Travel books are excellent, however.

Nique ta mère

I just hope that those that are arguing that Nabokov is pretentious aren’t doing it because of his densely metaphorical prose, his rhetorical flowery.

There’s a lot of people today that just want plain and simple journalistic prose, and anything that uses inventive and bold imagery is seen as “pretentious”.

The problem is that the same people that see Nabokov’s style as pretentious for this reason – I am not saying that is the case of the people of this thread, but it is with writers of articles, with critics, and with novelists such as Milan Kundera (Kundera thinks that metaphors should be used only when they are absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to put the idea more clearly) – are also the people that think that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in all literary history.

Usually this same people think that what makes Shakespeare great is his character creation, the dilemmas and messages of his plays, the philosophy of his work, his “invention of the human”, his “knowledge of every single human feeling and emotion, of our fears and hopes and passions”, while ignoring that what really makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is his unmatched poetic power, his language, the greatest and most beautiful ever created (and in great part due to his metaphors).

I wonder: why it’s OK for Shakespeare to be bombastic, with a language that is extremely metaphorical and exploding with imagery almost in every line, while any modern writer that does the same is “pretentious”? To say that something is permissible in one age and time but not in another age “well, Shakespeare could write like that because it was the style of his time, but Nabokov is a twentieth century writer, so what he does is simply Kitsch”, to state something like that is just nonsense: that’s the real pretentiousness, to say that you cannot disobey the spirit of your time.

bump

dfw

...

why is it so hard to accept that there are a lot of people a lot smarter than you?

R-raycis!

Thomas Pynchon or Vladimir Fraudikov

fucking this

James Joyce, writes 800 pages of literally nothing and pretends he is a gift from God. If only Homer knew what this dilettante is using his poem for...

Plebs think being pretentious is bad, but it's often the opposite. Most of the greatest authors in history were pretentious, arrogant and shamelessly over-dramatic and over-ambitious (in style, not biographically). Case in point: Nabokov, Nietzsche, Joyce, Baudelaire, Pound, Pessoa, Goethe, Molière, Proust, Bataille, Burroughs, Rilke...

this.

Anyone writing like Shakespeare today would be called pretentious

It really isn't a bad thing.

If your work is actually important, and you act like it is, well, that doesn't detract at all from its value.

If Einstein were a huge pretentious wanker he wouldn't have been any less of a physicist.

>mfw Nabokov described part of the process of disrupting the order of a set of encyclopedias and used the phrase 'burs an appendix'

Joseph McElroy

I actually do think Nabokov is a master craftsman in terms of style, he's just lacking in the idea department. Don't downplay the ideas in Shakespeare just to make your point that part or most of the appeal of Shakespeare is his skill at language. Essentially Shakespeare learned how to use just about every tool in the kit, whereas Nabokov just learned how to use one tool very well. Novel ideas are also part of a great artist's toolkit and I don't think Nabokov had much going for him besides language... but this is just coming from someone who has read Lolita twice, Pale Fire and Speak Memory once. Shakespeare on the other hand I've read his complete works and revisited many times.

Shakespeare of course does have his limits. He wasn't a great poet like Homer, Virgil, Dante, Baudelaire, Whitman, etc. But what he did for theater hasn't been imitated since. One need only look at the Restoration theatre or his predecessors to see clearly how unique Shakespeare's talent was. Not only was he a master of language, his ideas have been completely incorporated into Anglo culture.

Except all of the authors you mentioned ARE one-trick ponies besides Goethe. Goethe was a Da Vinci who could write.

No one can imitate genius. Even making a true satire of Shakespeare's genius would be difficult because you'd more likely be mocking conventions of his speech rather than the actual ideas in his plays.

>He wasn't a great poet like Homer, Virgil, Dante, Baudelaire, Whitman, etc

I am actualy quite interested on this view. Why do you think that Shakespeare,with all his gift for language,was not a great poet?

Are you not counting the texture of the plays as poetry?

>Are you not counting the texture of the plays as poetry?

This. The texture is poetic, but they are not formal poems. It's important to remember an artist's intent when we judge his work. Shakespeare's intent wasn't to produce poetry, but plays with great language.

On the other hand, the poets I mentioned were chiefly poets who had at least one great enterprise that was meant to be their best work such as The Iliad, the Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Les Fleurs du Mal, Leaves of Grass, etc. Shakespeare's equivalent are the sonnet sequence, which is brilliant, but it is not really grand the way that the aforementioned are because he's frying smaller fish.

These are correct

This is pretty much what I'd say as well. Nabokov was a master prose writer, and one of the most linguistically talented men ever but there isn't anything to intellectuality grapple with in his works- no ideas. His most idea-loaded book was Bend Sinister and it's a very shabby and uninspired critique of collectivism which reads like a well-written Hunger Games with less violence. You can't pretend to be a genius and not have any fucking ideas about anything. He was a linguistically talented but on the whole uninspired man with little to offer the world except le aesthetic.

>there isn't anything to intellectuality grapple with in his works
>he's just lacking in the idea department
I actually disagree, but I also just don't think about literature in that way. I don't think there's such a thing as ''only aesthetic'' or ''pure style'' in literature, and I find Lolita specifically to be a very overlooked book when it comes to philosophical critique. I started writing some stuff about it, maybe I'll publish it someday.

Good luck on the article. In mean time, please explain to the rest of us why you think literature is not about representation and ideas.

You don't know what "pretentious" means, and in many of those cases they weren't arrogant in quite the way that you probably are.

This fucker right here. He's great, brilliant, don't get me wrong. But you can feel him preen in every verse. He's an arrogant and incredibly pretentious guy.

Well, I wouldn't mind hearing your ideas about it. I think at most he is doing some stuff with point of view and subject-object relations. And he had some stuff to say about time. But it's the least impressive quality of his writing and not very original at all.

Tim & Eric rip off

Arrogant, but not remotely pretentious

I don't believe that any good art lacks ideas. If it's beautiful it already is meaningful: the aesthetic ecstasy itself is tied with truth, we're moved by the beauty of a work because it reveals something to us.

he's a conservative who thinks "all people are made equal" and that the "intelligentsia" is evil

>conservative
>all people are made equal
what

>Any kind of post ironic humor is a rip off of Tim and Eric
Only people who are extremely butthurt about Sam's political views think this

Pretty sure he's admitted as such like h3h3.

Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is pretentious in a non self aware way. Nabakov just loved language and I don't agree he didn't have good ideas.

Sauce?

One of the podcasts he's been on. Either way most of his skits are pretty clearly heavily by TAAS.

Post Ironic humor doesn't stem solely from Tim and Eric, you do realize though? I don't really see any similarities between their styles? I don't remember their being any social commentary or real cinematography in Tim and Eric.

MDE was post ironic like them, but I'm a completely different vein. It's like comparing TS Elliot to Ezra Pound , they're both modernist but totally different at the same time.

youtu.be/JQIyYN0ZsSs

youtu.be/NFTaiWInZ44

Better example
youtu.be/Q1yrH4qS2RA

youtu.be/kjTtM0p-VCY

anyone saying joyce is a mental wastrel—a subcharlatan decrying shakespeare out of resentful ignorance

This is the generation that received medals for participation.

this

if it's actually good then it's not pretentious because nothing is being pretended

Nabokov is a writer's writer. It's not that he has no great ideas, it's that the great ideas come in the actual writing itself: the ways he engages with the medium. Experimentation with unreliable narrator, metanarrative, everything about Pale Fire, etc. It's strange that he reached such prominence even in non-literary circles during his own lifetime. These sorts of writers often don't.

Nabakov wrote the way he did because he felt that the post-modern idea of mediums was a hasty rehash of what was in the beginning an attempt at maintaining quality. The term is only ever used in self-parody.

Bret Easton Ellis

you dont know what pretentious means either

Philippe Sollers (still love his work).

>really makes me upturnpikepointandplace

George Saunders
David Foster Wallace
Henry James
Rupi Kaur

Gene Wolfe

There'a another great article from the archives of the New Criterion available on Nabokov: newcriterion.com/issues/2006/5/shades-shadow

>He wasn't a great poet
you have supreme retardation, mon frère

>Kundera thinks that metaphors should be used only when they are absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to put the idea more clearly

When should you use metaphor, Veeky Forums?

I'd agree with Kundera if it weren't for the fact that she seems to be using the word "clearly" in a completely different way than I tend to. It sounds like what she's actually getting at is more like obviousness rather than resolution. I would say image resolution is what I prioritize; if metaphor gives the reader a more distinct impression of what you're getting at, then I think it's fine to make them jump through some extra hoops to get there. Though if not, I wouldn't use metaphor for its own sake.

How do you think people should prioritize these things?

this. I love his work but literally, most of his books are
>muh upper class lifestyle
>muh city life moral wasteland
>drugs and brown blonde kids
>Tanning beds

idk if it's pretense or just shitty writing but i sorta go with this. really difficult to get anything concrete or intelligible out of his writings. brilliant word soup with great ideas that don't actually stand up to any questioning because they are so non-specific.

georges bataille