Nabokov And Indeterminacy

Author : Priscilla Meyer
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2018-08-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810137455

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Nabokov and Indeterminacy by Priscilla Meyer Pdf

In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work. Meyer first focuses on Sebastian Knight, exploring how Nabokov associates his characters with systems of subtextual references to Russian, British, and American literary and philosophical works. She then turns to Lolita and Pale Fire, applying these insights to show that these later novels clearly differentiate the characters through subtextual references, and that Sebastian Knight’s construction models that of Pale Fire. Meyer argues that the dialogue Nabokov constructs among subtexts explores his central concern: the continued existence of the spirit beyond bodily death. She suggests that because Nabokov’s art was a quest for an unattainable knowledge of the otherworldly, knowledge which can never be conclusive, Nabokov’s novels are never closed in plot, theme, or resolution—they take as their hidden theme the unfinalizability that Bakhtin says characterizes all novels. The conclusions of Nabokov's novels demand a rereading, and each rereading yields a different novel. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable.

Author : José Vergara
Publisher : Amherst College Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2023-02-03
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781943208500

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Reimagining Nabokov by José Vergara Pdf

In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together. "It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives... this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov's literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity."--Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University "[A] valuable study for any reader, teacher, scholar, or student of Nabokov. Amongst specific and urgent insights on the potential for digital methods, the relevance of Nabokov for students today, and how to reconcile issues of identity with an author who disavowed history and politics, are much wider and timeless questions of authorial control and the ability to access reality."--Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Nabokov Online Journal Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.--Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.

Author : Dana Dragunoiu
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2021-09-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810144019

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Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu Pdf

Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.

Author : John D. Morgenstern,Michelle Witen
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2024-01-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781350248724

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Modernism in Wonderland by John D. Morgenstern,Michelle Witen Pdf

Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Author : Leona Toker
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0801422116

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Nabokov by Leona Toker Pdf

"In each chapter Toker carefully reconstructs a novel for us those are not mere plot summaries, but mature products of several re-readings and proceeds to make her way through the novel's numerous patterns, images, themes and motifs in an attempt to..."

Author : BRUCE. STONE
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2023-10-05
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781685710989

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Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight by BRUCE. STONE Pdf

Author : Jessica R. Feldman
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2021-02-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813945125

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Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys by Jessica R. Feldman Pdf

Saul Steinberg’s inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg’s work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the specific ways in which Steinberg meant drawing not merely to resemble writing but to be itself a type of literary writing. Jessica R. Feldman's Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys, the first book-length critical study of Steinberg’s art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his affinities with modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized. Feldman begins her study with a consideration of Steinberg as a reader and writer, including a survey of his personal library. She explores the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his "teachers"—Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Studying Steinberg’s art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman explores fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for parody and popular culture to their status as mythmakers, émigrés, and perpetual wanderers. Further, Feldman relates Steinberg’s uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe. Generously illustrated with the artist’s work and drawing on invaluable archival material from the Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg’s art.

Author : John Burt Foster, Jr.
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1993-02-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400820894

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Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism by John Burt Foster, Jr. Pdf

Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history. In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism. Tracing his interests in temporal perspective and the mnemonic image, in intertextual "reminiscences," and in individuality amid cultural multiplicity, the book begins with such early Russian novels as Mary, then treats his emerging art of memory from Laughter in the Dark to The Gift. After discussing the author's cultural repositioning in his first English novels, Foster turns to Nabokov's masterpiece as an artist of memory, the autobiography Speak, Memory, and ends with an epilogue on Pale Fire. As a cross-cultural overview of modernism, this book examines how Nabokov navigated among Proust and Bergson, Freud and Mann, and Joyce and Eliot. It also explores his response to Baudelaire and Nietzsche as theorists of modernity, and his sense of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin as modernist precursors. As an approach to Nabokov, the book reflects the heightened importance of autobiography in current literary study. Other critical issues addressed include Bakhtin's theory of intertextuality, deconstructive views of memory, Benjamin's modernism of memory, and Nabokov's assumptions about modernism as a concept.

Author : Barbara Wyllie
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2010-04-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781861897282

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Vladimir Nabokov by Barbara Wyllie Pdf

Best known for his deeply controversial 1955 novel, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is celebrated as one of the most distinctive literary stylists of the twentieth century. In Vladimir Nabokov, Barbara Wyllie presents a comprehensive account of the life and works of the writer, from his childhood and earliest stories in pre-revolutionary Russia, to The Original of Laura—a novel written almost entirely on index cards published for the first time in 2009, perhaps against Nabokov’s wishes. This literary biography investigates the author’s poetry and prose, in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur throughout his works. His expertise as a specialist in butterflies complemented his wide knowledge of Russian and Western European culture, philosophy, and history, and informed the themes of transformation and transcendence that dominate his work. Wyllie traces his lifelong preoccupations with time, memory, and mortality across both his Russian and English works, and she illuminates his distinctive through detailed analysis of his major novels. Wyllie assesses his poetry and prose style alongside Nabokov’s own autobiography, letters, and critical writings—as well as the only recently-published The Original of Laura—in order to create a complete and updated picture of the writer in the context of his works. Vladimir Nabokov presents a fascinating portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most eclectic, prolific, and controversial authors. It is an essential read for fans of Nabokov and scholars of twentieth century English and Russian literature.

Author : Eric Naiman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Paraphilias in literature
ISBN : 0801448204

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Nabokov, Perversely by Eric Naiman Pdf

Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore, particularly in Lolita, Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada.

Author : Paul D. Morris
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 481 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2011-09-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781442698840

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Vladimir Nabokov by Paul D. Morris Pdf

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the eminent Russian-American writer and intellectual, is best known for his novels, though he was also the author of plays, poems, and short stories. In this important new work, Paul D. Morris offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov's Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. Morris' unique and insightful study re-evaluates Nabokov's poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial - lyric - voice. After offering a critical overview of the multi-staged history of the reception of Nabokov's poetry and an extensive analysis of his poetic writing, Morris argues that Nabokov's poetry has largely been misinterpreted and its place in his oeuvre misunderstood. Through a detailed examination of the form and content of Nabokov's writings, Morris demonstrates that Nabokov's innovations in the realms of drama, the short story, and the novel were profoundly shaped by his lyric sensibility.

Author : Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400861712

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Nabokov's Otherworld by Vladimir E. Alexandrov Pdf

A major reexamination of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as "literary gamesman," this book systematically shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of "nature" and "artifice" as synonyms. Beginning with Nabokov's discursive writings, Vladimir Alexandrov finds his world view centered on the experience of epiphany--characterized by a sudden fusion of varied sensory data and memories, a feeling of timelessness, and an intuition of immortality--which grants the true artist intimations of an "otherworld." Readings of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and Pale Fire reveal the epiphanic experience to be a touchstone for the characters' metaphysical insightfulness, moral makeup, and aesthetic sensibility, and to be a structural model for how the narratives themselves are fashioned and for the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. In his conclusion, Alexandrov outlines several of Nabokov's possible intellectual and artistic debts to the brilliant and variegated culture that flourished in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. Nabokov emerges as less alienated from Russian culture than most of his emigre readers believed, and as less "modernist" than many of his Western readers still imagine. "Alexandrov's work is distinctive in that it applies an `otherworld' hypothesis as a consistent context to Nabokov's novels. The approach is obviously a fruitful one. Alexandrov is innovative in rooting Nabokov's ethics and aesthetics in the otherwordly and contributes greatly to Nabokov studies by examining certain key terms such as `commonsense,' `nature,' and `artifice.' In general Alexandrov's study leads to a much clearer understanding of Nabokov's metaphysics."--D. Barton Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Jose V. Ciprut
Publisher : Mit Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UOM:39015078802918

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Indeterminacy by Jose V. Ciprut Pdf

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the concepts of indeterminacy and indeterminability and the distinctions between the two. Formal thinking about certainty/uncertainty gained greater focus in scientific domains with the advent of particle physics and quantum mechanics. Concern with the exact predictability of events under guidance from scientific determinism led to speculation, then acknowledgement of quantum indeterminacy. But distinctions were made between what is physically indeterminate out there and what is indeterminable by human observation or in human action--over here, on the inside, right now. The implications of these insights into indeterminacy and indeterminabilities for practical and theoretical knowledge span physics, philosophy, ontology, causality, and the philosophy of mind. In this book, contributors from a range of disciplines consider the concept of indeterminacy and a few varieties of indeterminability, with attention to the distinctions between the two phenomena, appropriate approaches for examining both, and the differences vis-à-vis uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity.

Author : Michelle Balaev
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 165 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2012-06-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810128194

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The Nature of Trauma in American Novels by Michelle Balaev Pdf

"This book examines literary trauma theory from its foundations to its implementations and new possibilities. ... [A]n analysis that reconsiders the meaning and value of traumatic experience by demonstrating the diversity of its forms in contemporary Amerian novels in an effort to deepen the discussion of trauma beyond that of the disease-driven paradigm in literary criticism today. ... [The author's] model views trauma and the process of remembering within a framework that emphasizes the multiplicity of responses to an extreme experience and the importance of contextual factors in detemining the significance of the event. In order to demonstrate this new approach, [she focuses her] discussion on late-modern canonical and emergent American novels that deal with trauma. In analyzing the narrative methods authors employ to portray suffering, [she] found two major patterns: the use of landscape imagery to convey the effects of trauma and remembering, and the use of place as a site that shapes the protagonist's experience and perception of the world."--Introduction.

Author : R. Trousdale
Publisher : Springer
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780230106888

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Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination by R. Trousdale Pdf

Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.