Fløgstad juxtaposed working-class talk with intellectual theory in his writing and persona.

Evidence

For example, when I had to interview the writer Kjartan Fløgstad for a student magazine, and Yngve suggested we did it together, which I agreed to without a murmur. Fløgstad, with his mixture of down-to-earth talk and intellectualism, his theories about all things high and low, his undogmatic and independent, almost aristocratic, left-wing views, and not least his wordplay, was Yngve’s favourite author. Yngve was himself infamous for his wordplay and corny puns, and his principal academic theme was the notion that a work of art’s value was created in the receiver, and not in itself, and that authentic artistic expression was just as much a question of form as inauthentic artistic expression. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1845

Categorization

• DEFINE: Characterizes Fløgstad’s literary persona: down-to-earth talk plus intellectualism, aristocratic leftism, wordplay — a distinctive authorial contrast worth remembering.