Nabokov Perversely

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Nabokov, Perversely

Author : Eric Naiman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2011-01-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801460234

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Nabokov, Perversely by Eric Naiman Pdf

In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.

Reimagining Nabokov

Author : José Vergara
Publisher : Amherst College Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 48,6 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.

Nabokov and the Question of Morality

Author : Michael Rodgers,Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Publisher : Springer
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2016-08-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137592217

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Nabokov and the Question of Morality by Michael Rodgers,Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Pdf

The first collection to address the vexing issue of Nabokov’s moral stances, this book argues that he designed his novels and stories as open-ended ethical problems for readers to confront. In a dozen new essays, international Nabokov scholars tackle those problems directly while addressing such questions as whether Nabokov was a bad reader, how he defined evil, if he believed in God, and how he constructed fictional works that led readers to become aware of their own moral positions. In order to elucidate his engagement with aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics, Nabokov and the Question of Morality explores specific concepts in the volume’s four sections: “Responsible Reading,” “Good and Evil,” “Agency and Altruism,” and “The Ethics of Representation.” By bringing together fresh insights from leading Nabokovians and emerging scholars, this book establishes new interdisciplinary contexts for Nabokov studies and generates lively readings of works from his entire career.

Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era

Author : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793628398

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Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers Pdf

Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era seeks to critique the novel from the standpoint of its teachability to undergraduate and graduate students in the twenty-first century. The time has come to ask: in the #MeToo era and beyond, how do we approach Nabokov’s inflammatory masterpiece, Lolita? How do we read a novel that describes an unpardonable crime? How do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content? This student-focused volume offers practical and specific answers to these questions and includes suggestions for teaching the novel in conventional and online modalities. Distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered nature of Lolita by sharing innovative assignments, creative-writing exercises, methodologies of teaching the novel through film and theatre, and new critical analyses and interpretations.

Art in Doubt

Author : Tatyana Gershkovich
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2022-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810145559

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Art in Doubt by Tatyana Gershkovich Pdf

Leo Tolstoy’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s radically opposed aesthetic worldviews emanate from a shared intuition—that approaching a text skeptically is easy, but trusting it is hard Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition—Tolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aesthete—seem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private and impossible to share through art. Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds reconceives the pair’s celebrated fiction and contentious theorizing as coherent, lifelong efforts to reckon with the problem of other people’s minds. Gershkovich demonstrates how the authors’ shared yearning for an impossibly intimate knowledge of others formed and deformed their fiction and brought them through parallel logic to their rival late styles: Tolstoy’s rustic simplicity and Nabokov’s baroque complexity. Unlike those authors for whom the skeptical predicament ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that skepticism can be overcome, not by force of will but with the right kind of text, one designed to withstand our impulse to doubt it. Through close readings of key canonical works—Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murat, The Gift, Pale Fire—this book brings the twin titans of Russian fiction to bear on contemporary debates about how we read now, and how we ought to.

Vladimir Nabokov

Author : D. Rampton
Publisher : Springer
Page : 139 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137292025

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Vladimir Nabokov by D. Rampton Pdf

A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time.

Nabokov's Canon

Author : Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810133167

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Nabokov's Canon by Marijeta Bozovic Pdf

Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic's insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov's ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain. Nabokov's scholarly work, translations, and lectures on literature bear resemblance to New Critical canon reformations; however, Nabokov's canon is pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice. The new angles and theoretical framework offered by Nabokov's Canon help us to understand why Nabokov's provocative monuments remain powerful source texts for several generations of diverse international writers, as well as richly productive material for visual, cinematic, musical, and other artistic adaptations.

Nabokov's Women

Author : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498503310

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Nabokov's Women by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers Pdf

This volume studies the enigmatic but silent heroines Nabokov brings to the page. Chapter 4, "Nabokov's Mermaid: 'Spring in Fialta'" by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, is not available in the ebook format due to digital rights restrictions. You can find the earlier version of the chapter in the journal Nabokov Studies.

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces

Author : Jacqueline Hamrit
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2015-01-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781443873024

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Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces by Jacqueline Hamrit Pdf

Whereas literary criticism has mainly oscillated between “the death of the author” (Barthes) and “the return of the author” (Couturier), this work suggests another perspective on authorship through an analysis of Nabokov’s prefaces. It is here argued that the author, being neither dead nor tyrannical, alternates between authoritative apparitions and receding disappearances in the double gesture of mastery without mastery which Derrida calls ‘exappropriation’, that is, a simultaneous attempt to appropriate one’s work, control it, have it under one’s power and expropriate it, losing control by loosening one’s grip. The intention of this is to approach, through one’s experience of reading and interpreting, the experience of self-effacement and impersonality pertaining to writing (cf. Blanchot). Prefaces are considered to be suitable places for the deconstruction of the classical image of Nabokov’s arrogance through the unearthing of his reserve and vulnerability. This work provides an account of the mere intuition (which, therefore, does not pretend to be a conclusive and definitive interpretation) of another image of Nabokov whose undeniable talent for deception seems in accordance with a need for discretion and secrecy.

Charlottengrad

Author : Roman Utkin
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2023-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780299344405

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Charlottengrad by Roman Utkin Pdf

As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states. Utkin provides insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.

Nabokov and his Books

Author : Duncan White
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-09
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780191081880

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Nabokov and his Books by Duncan White Pdf

At the outbreak of the Second World War Vladimir Nabokov stood on the brink of losing everything all over again. The reputation he had built as the pre-eminent Russian novelist in exile was imperilled. In Nabokov and his Books, Duncan White shows how Nabokov went to America and not only reinvented himself as an American writer but also used the success of Lolita to rescue those Russian books that had been threatened by obscurity. Using previously unpublished and neglected material, White tells the story of Nabokov the professional writer and how he sought to balance his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace. As Nabokov's reputation grew so he took greater and greater control of how his books were produced, making the material form of the book—including forewords, blurbs, covers—part of the novel. In his later novels, including Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things, the idea of the novelist losing control of his work became the subject of the novels themselves. These plots were replicated in Nabokov's own biography, as he discovered his inability to control the forces the market success of Lolita had unleashed. With new insights into Nabokov's life and work, this book reconceptualises the way we think about one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century.

Transitional Nabokov

Author : Will Norman,Duncan White
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 3039115251

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Transitional Nabokov by Will Norman,Duncan White Pdf

This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov's works as operating between categories of various kinds - whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov's oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov's work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline.

Nabokov and Nietzsche

Author : Michael Rodgers
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2018-04-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501339585

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Nabokov and Nietzsche by Michael Rodgers Pdf

Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives addresses the many knotted issues in the work of Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita's moral stance, Pnin's relationship with memory, Pale Fire's ambiguous internal authorship – that often frustrate interpretation. It does so by arguing that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as both a conceptual instrument and a largely unnoticed influence on Nabokov himself, can help to untie some of these knots. The study addresses the fundamental problems in Nabokov's writing that make his work perplexing, mysterious and frequently uneasy rather than simply focusing on the literary puzzles and games that, although inherent, do not necessarily define his body of work. Michael Rodgers shows that Nietzsche's philosophy provides new, but not always palatable, perspectives in order to negotiate interpretative impasses, and that the uneasy aspects of Nabokov's work offer the reader manifold rewards.

Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time

Author : Will Norman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : History
ISBN : 9780415539630

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Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time by Will Norman Pdf

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov's fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself -- that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism -- this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author's characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov's understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov's major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov's attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov's heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov's location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.

Nabokov and the Real World

Author : Robert Alter
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691218663

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Nabokov and the Real World by Robert Alter Pdf

From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas, pain, and exaltation of the human condition Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these illuminating and exquisitely written essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values. Offering timeless insights into literature’s most fabulous artificer, Nabokov and the Real World makes an elegant and compelling case for Nabokov's relevance today.