Seeing as last post, I got on a mini rant about Atwood, I thought I'd throw out some Nabokov just to further my point about the "literature of ideas",
"Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake" ...there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." -Nabokov
Atwood's drivellings will never withstand the effects of larvae and rust...
I guess Nabokov had a similar hate-on for Ryand, as I have for Atwood.
As evidenced by:
""Ryand? God, no. She is one of the cheapest, most bombastic, thoroughly tired writers around -- I can't for the life of me figure out why scores of angry young men and women waddle through jungles of scribblings and grandiose little tropes (.... is right about Ryand's overuse of similes) to end up with a few bumper sticker-type slogans. "
"Writing, at any rate, is not about ideas but about words. Ryand might have amounted to something had she put as much thought into shaping a paragraph as she did in telling a couple of hundred-thousand readers that they were all individuals. That her books are embraced by millions, that her thesis seemed to be that you, of all people, are meant to do great things and that the rest of the world is made up of a foolish, sheepish flock -- that's the great irony about that drudge. Hasn't anyone caught on?"
From a New York Times forum on Ayn Ryand .
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