Philosophy major speaking: Hegel is a dreaded PITA in every language known to man - not only because the man writes in prose that in matters of illegibility is second only to the ever-controversial Heidegger, but also because Hegel refuses to abide by any sort of good compositional taste de res philosophiam. Phenomology of the Spirit is, verily I kiddeth ye not, an ontological investigation and proposition of an All-Consciousness made manifest in all phenoms, and Hegel formulates this as a Bildungsroman. That’s right, a coming-of-age novella!
Frankly, Phenomology of the Spirit is in such surreal taste compositionally that it would have passed into the oblivion of irrelevance long ago, were it not so brilliant in content. Still, its style is, when compared to that of Hegel’s peers and even modern works, no less odd than if say, Russell and Whitehead had decided to replace every Q.E.D. with: “Fo’shizzle, ma’ niggers!”
There was a lot of discussion about how difficult Anathem was due to it using so much original terminology. Someone even torrented a version of it with all the terminology replaced by our versions of the terms to make it easier to read. I did find myself frequently checking the included glossary.
Surprisingly, given his reputation, Proust is no more difficult to understand than Dickens or Austen - you have to keep track of a few more characters than usual, perhaps, but he’s so good at creating distinctive and memorable characters that this isn’t too hard.
I haven’t tried lol. I could imagine the obstacle being the pure volume. But then I managed to get through the entire Mission Earth dekology (and 60 other books one summer) for a contest.
Sokal and Bricmont rather famously hoaxed the world of post-modern theorists with a piece called “towards a hermeneutics of quantum gravity” (or similar), and then wrote a book, called variously Fashionable Nonsense or Intellectual Impostures, taking to task high profile post-modernists for portentiously but wrongly adopting scientific ideas to their supposed aid.
The result is a distillation of extended extracts from the work of such people, followed by a patient explanation of why it is nonsense. It is, therefore, a mother lode collection of impenetrable prose in the Pomo tradition which has the added delight of being gleefully wrong.
It’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” There is also the story of SCIgen, which randomly generated a nonsense computer science paper. They took it to a conference, although it seems it wasn’t peer reviewed.
Put me down as another one for As I Lay Dying. We had to read it junior year of high school and I was practically in tears halfway through from frustration. I think it was a combination of the narrator changing seemingly every other page and the stream-of-consciousness style, which I can barely tolerate even when I understand what’s going on, which I certainly didn’t in this book. I mean, I completely had no clue. Somebody had died and they were dragging her corpse around and that was about all I gleaned independently. After 3 failed attempts, I finally bought the SparkNotes so as not to fail the class.
