I could not get beyond
the second page of Kevin Ohi's article in the latest "Nabokov Studies"
because the article is an example of the "new" literary criticism which I
gave up reading years ago. Every third word in Ohi's article is
a Huge Concept word, even the verbs, and these words are technical jargon
terms crudely appropriated from psychoanalysis, law, business, and
the very unsocial social sciences. These Huge Concept words pile up,
sentence after sentence, page after page, until the whole thing collapses
into a stupefying mess. Whatever happened to elegant, readable prose
which Nabokov himself favored? It is a shame that this kind of writing
appears in a publication devoted to Nabokov, who would have laughed this
essay out of existence. I hope in the future the editor will offer us more
literate contributions.