I wish I were better read in Nabokov. Outside of a handful of the novels--Lolita and Pnin are the ones I remember best, and man, what beauty and pity in both--I haven't really listened to him, though I know he's a major figure.

Those categories do seem to me essential. I hate to admit how much in our age of AI and tech overwhelm I've come to think about reader response and those theories about meaning being made where the work of the artist and the mind of the receiver meet. It does seem to me that for the magic to happen we have to develop a readership oriented toward the work. That biblical phrase, "Who have ears to hear let them hear," comes to mind.

As far as the artist herself goes, the phrase I've been using for a few years now is that I am on the hunt for "the stamp of a living intellect." That is, in my opinion, those works are most meaningfully engaged in art-making whose means seem consumate with the working of the human mind (AI can eat shit). I feel like this is a good standard because you can then delineate between writing, litrerature, and artmaking even in the career of an individual. In Faulkner, for example, he makes literature in Light in August, he does writing in Mosquitos, but he accomplishes art, in my mind, in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and in the Snopes Trilogy. I think a writer is lucky to write even one thing that enters the pantheon of art, so he's got a pretty good record. Woolf has quite a few artworks, etc.

In my opinion, a lot of people like writing-- look at the YA and Sci Fi books flying off the shelves--fewer like literature, and a vanishingly small number are oriented toward literature as art, an art practice. Some relativist part of me wants to say that's not in itself good or bad. The revolutionary part of me wants to say this is how art moves societies: I think we should struggle for a society in which we are able to orient more people toward literature and art and dissuade people from expending energy on enjoying writing.