Sentence examples for pretentious literary from inspiring English sources

Described as "poetic," the letters to Muriel were pedantic, flowery, romantic, and pretentious — "literary" in the worst sense of the word.

He regarded them as representative of a formidable and dangerous historical development: the rise of a shallow and pretentious literary and intellectual culture for people who were educated but essentially uncultivated, living, as he put it, beyond their "cultural means".

The literary quarterly n+1 published an entire book of essays devoted to the topic, while last season's Girls featured a storyline in which the Lena Dunham character dropped out of an MFA program full of smug, pretentious literary bullies.

As the rest of the cable drama landscape grew increasingly grim and heavy-handed, it was a welcome respite, like picking up a fast and punchy Charles Willeford novel ("Miami Blues," say) after slogging through a well-reviewed pretentious literary mystery.

At the ceremony that night, "an eminent member of the SFWA," as Delany later put it, gave a speech about changes in science fiction, a supposed shift away from old-fashioned storytelling to "pretentious literary nonsense," or something along those lines.

In doing so, she creates a blackly comic, Waugh-esque portrait of a newspaper called The Monitor that is peopled with hacks, has-beens, poseurs and some genuine reporters, rabidly ambitious youngsters and weary old-timers, pretentious literary types and gutter-minded twits.

Much of the affecting testimony quoted in Mr. Amis's book is drawn from classic works by writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eugenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, while Mr. Amis's own commentary tends toward the pretentious and gratuitously literary.

This kind of writing can easily become pretentious -- indeed, the "literary" soldier keeping notes for his eventual novel is a joke in most military units.

Description by "Historian" of Molotov's Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky: "This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published … Her writing is so dense and pretentious, itself so tangled in literary allusions, that it is hard to follow or enjoy".

Less pretentious and more accurate titles for literary masterpieces.

WHEN asked to name the influences on my fiction and nonfiction, it's become fairly customary, and perhaps a little pretentious, for me to cite the literary gods Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and George Orwell.