Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature

Nabokov, which incidently is one of the too-impressive great writers mentioned in the comments, beside writing some of the best novels ever, taught literature for years in Cornell. I cannot recommend enough his "Lectures on literature". His take on literature is not post-modern at all (he was not too fond of surrealism and he loved Joyce for his style and not his devices). In one of these lectures, the famous "Good readers and good writers" (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...) he said that "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter" (Nabokov himself strongly leans to the latter...) I will quote the end of this short lecture, as an answer (a very Nabokovian answer) to that nagging and essentially unimportant question: what makes a great novel? "It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." Yes, Ulysses is a precise work, full of riddles and references. Having an annotated edition may give you good grades, or give you insights on the making of the novel, but the device used are not that important - what makes it exhilarating is the joy of the language, the way it sings uniquely, and the way this song builds or subsums the world. That's my take on what Nabokov meant when he said a great writer is an enchanter. Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor" is an enchantment, as a whole and fractally, down to each single sentence, to each single word. Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is an enchantment, a very long river of neverending sentences. Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is the work of a mean and sarcastic enchanter who uses rythm as a weapon. Just as reading Joyce makes you speak in his special brand of English (or if you venture into Finnegans Wake, his special brand of Gibberish), reading Proust, Flaubert or Nabokov (or Céline or Pynchon) infects you with what they've made of their language to suit the needs of their work.