Hec, did you actually enjoy any of those writers? Did they tickle something, anything, other than the cerebral? Was there a kick in the soul for you, with one single book by any of those people?
Well, what's wrong with a cerebral tickle?
Aside from that notion, that's not all I get from my reading. It's not an exercise in mental masturbation, or lining up allegorical symbols into neat orderly rows.
eta: or getting Teppy's nerd joy of making connections.
I think that reading a good novel is the closest you can get to being inside somebody else's head. So it's not all about the narrative to me, but rather encountering an entirely different sensibility. It's seeing the world differently, and understanding people's motives differently, and noticing things that I wouldn't normally notice, and processing it all in a completely different way and coming to new conclusions.
If a writer is very intimately concerned with creating a character's interior landscape, and can take me there, that is very valuable to me, aside from the story being told. So yes, all of the writers I alluded to give me something more than a puzzle to cogitate on. And the more critically I can read them, the more I understand their intent, and their context (see, Nutty's point re: Walter Scott and Austen) the more closely I can follow the subtle turns of their prose.
Shakespeare's sonnets are another example where context is key. He was actively pissing on and destroying the rather dopey romantic cliches of his day. He was taking a very formulaic medium - something as rigid as a Harlequin romance - and investing it with almost perverse glee, self laceration, layered psychological insight and incredible language. That's exactly the context that generates a line like "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day."
And, Aimee, it's completely fine with me that you don't enjoy Shakespeare, but I will note that his nearest contemporary in spirit would probably be Eddie Izzard. Shakespeare can be difficult to penetrate because so much of his language is rooted in the folklore and politics and history and faux-science of his era. But that's not much different than Izzard's quick, witty allusions to our culture today. And Shakespeare, like Eddie, is bawdy, playful, light-footed, sexy, transgressive, polymorphously perverse.
Also Shakespeare's theater didn't really use sets. So much of Shakespeare's language is really storytelling to set the scene. And instead of dry exposition, he allows each character a particular sort of metaphoric schema that both defines that character and fills the language with imagery. Iago being one of the classic examples, where all of his references are bestial and debased.