Nabokov's Canon

Nabokov's Canon PDF Author: Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 Canon

Nabokov's Canon PDF Author: Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Strong Opinions

Strong Opinions PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679726098
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Strong Opinions offers Nabokov's trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita. • "First published in 1973, this collection of interviews and essays offers an intriguing insight into one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century." - The Guardian Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, among other subjects. Keen to dismiss those who fail to understand his work and happy to butcher those sacred cows of the literary canon he dislikes, Nabokov is much too entertaining to be infuriating, and these interviews, letters and articles are as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote.

Nabokov Upside Down

Nabokov Upside Down PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810134535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nabokov Upside Down brings together essays that explicitly diverge from conventional topics and points of reference when interpreting a writer whose influence on contemporary literature is unrivaled. Scholars from around the world here read Nabokov in terms of bodies rather than minds, belly-laughs rather than erudite wit, servants rather than master-artists, or Asian rather than Western perspectives. The first part of the volume is dedicated to surveys of Nabokov’s oeuvre that transform some long-held assumptions concerning the nature of and significance of his work. Often thought of as among the most cerebral of artists, Nabokov comes across in these essays as profoundly aware of the physical world, as evidenced by his masterly representation of physical movement, his bawdy humor, and his attention to gustatory pleasure, among other aspects of his writing. The volume’s second half focuses on individual works or phases in Nabokov’s career, noting connections among them as well as to other fields of inquiry beyond literature. Engaged in conversation with each other and, in his editorial comments, with Brian Boyd, the essays in this volume show Nabokov scholarship continuing to renew itself.

Transnational Russian Studies

Transnational Russian Studies PDF Author: Andy Byford
Publisher: Transnational Modern Languages
ISBN: 1789620872
Category : National characteristics, Russian
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
Transnational Russian Studies offers an approach to understanding Russia based on the idea that language, society and culture do not neatly coincide, but should be seen as flows of meaning across ever-shifting boundaries. Our book moves beyond static conceptions of Russia as a discrete nation with a singular language, culture, and history. Instead, we understand it as a multinational society that has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. We treat Russian culture as an expanding field, whose sphere of influence transcends the geopolitical boundaries of the Russian Federation, reaching as far as London, Cape Town, and Tehran. Our transnational approach to Russian Studies generates new perspectives on the history of Russian culture and its engagements with, and transformation by, other cultures. The volume thereby simultaneously illuminates broader conceptions of the transnational from the perspective of Russian Studies. Over twenty chapters, we provide case studies based on original research, treating topics that include Russia's imperial and postcolonial entanglements; the paradoxical role that language plays in both defining culture in national terms, and facilitating transnational communication; the life of things 'Russian' in the global arena; and Russia's positioning in the contemporary globalized world. Our volume is aimed primarily at students and researchers in Russian Studies, but it will also be relevant to all Modern Linguists, and to those who employ transnational paradigms within the broader humanities.

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov PDF Author: Vladimir E. Alexandrov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136601562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 978

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1995. This companion constitutes a virtual encyclopaedia of Nabokov, and occupies a unique niche in scholarship about him. Articles on individual works by Nabokov, including his short stories and poetry, provide a brief survey of critical reactions and detailed analyses from diverse vantage points. For anyone interested in Nabokov, from scholars to readers who love his works, this is an ideal guide. Its chronology of Nabokov's life and works, bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and a detailed index make it easy to find reliable information any aspect of Nabokov's rich legacy.

Vladimir Nabokov in Context

Vladimir Nabokov in Context PDF Author: David M. Bethea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108608094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 660

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

Vladimir Nabokov as an Author-Translator

Vladimir Nabokov as an Author-Translator PDF Author: Julie Loison-Charles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350243302
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring the deeply translational and transnational nature of the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, this book argues that all his work is unified by the permanent presence of three cultures and languages: Russian, English and French. In particular, Julie Loison-Charles focusses on Nabokov's dual nature as both an author and a translator, and the ways in which translation permeates his fictional writing from his very first Russian works to his last novels in English. Although self-translation has received a lot of attention in Nabokov criticism, this book considers his work as an author-translator, drawing particular attention to his often underappreciated and underestimated, but no less crucial, third language; French. Looking at Nabokov's encounters with pseudotranslation, Julie Loison-Charles demonstrates the influence this had on his practice as both a translator and a writer, arguing that this experience was crucial to his ability to create bridges between the literary traditions of Europe, Russia and America. The book also triangulates his practice and theory of translation for Onegin with those of Chateaubriand and Venuti to illuminate Nabokov's transnational vision of literature and his ethics of translation before presenting a robust case for reconsidering his collaborative translations in French as mediated self-translations.

Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time

Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time PDF Author: Will Norman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136264353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Charlottengrad

Charlottengrad PDF Author: Roman Utkin
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299344401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 at Cornell

Nabokov at Cornell PDF Author: Gavriel Shapiro
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801439094
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Table of contents