Stalking Nabokov

Stalking Nabokov PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231158572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.

Stalking Nabokov

Stalking Nabokov PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231158572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.

The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov

The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov PDF Author: Paul Benedict Grant
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399519247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The first in-depth study of Vladimir Nabokov’s humour, investigating its physical aspects such as farce, slapstick, sexual and scatological humour Offers the first in-depth study of Nabokov’s humour Presents a revisionist reading of Nabokov Examines the metaphysical aspects of Nabokov’s humour Examines the sexual and scatological aspects of Nabokov’s humour Applies humour theory (e.g. those of Hobbes, Bergson, Freud) to Nabokov’s texts Compares Nabokov’s humour to that of his Russian predecessors (e.g. Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov) and to literary humourists such as Rabelais, Swift, Joyce Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov’s writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

Nabokov's Canon

Nabokov's Canon PDF Author: Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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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 Shakespeare

Nabokov's Shakespeare PDF Author: Samuel Schuman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628922710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"Nabokov's Shakespeare is a comprehensive study of an important and interesting literary relationship. It explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, the finest English prose stylist of the twentieth century. As a Russian youth, Nabokov had read all of Shakespeare, in English. He claimed a shared birthday with the Bard, and some of his most highly regarded novels (Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada) are infused with Shakespeare and Shakespeareanisms. Across a gulf of over three centuries and half the globe, Shakespeare was an enormous influence on the twentieth-century Russian/American author. Nabokov uses Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, from the most casual references to deep thematic links (e.g., Humbert Humbert, the narrator and protagonist of Lolita sees himself as The Tempest's Caliban). Schuman provides a taxonomy of Nabokov's Shakespeareanisms; a quantitative analysis of Shakespeare in Nabokov; an examination of Nabokov's Russian works, his early English novels, the non-Novelistic writings (poetry, criticism, stories), Nabokov's major works, and his final novels; and a discussion of the nature of literaryrelationships and influence. With a Foreword by Brian Boyd"--

Troubling Late Modernism

Troubling Late Modernism PDF Author: Doug Battersby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019267806X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist writers developed new techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires that revolutionized the novel form—a revolution novelists and critics are still reckoning with today. Troubling Late Modernism tracks how those techniques have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once exploit and extend modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments to protagonists compelled by violent or exploitative sexual desires. By interrogating the expressive power and ethical liabilities of modes of writing that give us intimate access to characters' inner lives, late modernism poses fundamental philosophical questions about emotion and its inseparability from knowledge and ethical deliberation. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterized late modernism's formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Charting late modernism's characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty with emotional and ethical provocation demands an approach attuned to the experience of reading these disturbingly erotic narratives. In dialogue with recent debates about critical method, Troubling Late Modernism presents a new way of closely reading prose fiction that brings together the lessons of formalism and affect theory.

Nabokov’s Secret Trees

Nabokov’s Secret Trees PDF Author: Stephen H. Blackwell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487554435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In nearly all his literary works, Vladimir Nabokov inscribed networks of trees to create meaningful patterns of significance around one or more of his passionate interests – in consciousness, memory, creativity, epistemology, ethics, and love, with a deep connection to nature serving as a constant undercurrent. Nabokov’s Secret Trees explores this neglected area of his art, one that positions nature as a hidden but vital core of his work. The book presents an entirely new, previously unsuspected Nabokov, one who crafts intricate patterns of arboreal imagery lurking behind his often-baroque psychological narratives. It reveals how Nabokov activates arboreal potentials by exploring the hidden ubiquity of trees, their essence as complex natural phenomena, and their role as quiet presences that have accompanied and fostered human civilization and art since their beginnings. The book uncovers how trees offer a rich and intricate field for structural, semantic, allusive, and metaphorical exploration. Based on the published corpus as well as archival materials, Nabokov’s Secret Trees demonstrates that trees not only populate Nabokov’s art in stunning, yet furtive, abundance, but also as mysterious natural entities, directly animating his works’ worlds and his readers’ experience of them.

The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works

The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works PDF Author: Marie Bouchet
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030454061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This collection of essays focuses on a subject largely neglected in Nabokovian criticism—the importance and significance of the five senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, poetics, politics and aesthetics. This text analyzes the crucial role of the author’s synesthesia and multilingualism in relation to the five senses, as well as the sensual and erotic dimensions of sensoriality in his works. Each chapter provides a highly focused and sometimes provocative approach to the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and narrating of Nabokov’s memories and in his creative process.

Pale Fire

Pale Fire PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults

Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults PDF Author: Maureen Turim
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000960706
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book presents an innovative comparative view of how the issue of adolescent sexuality and consent is differently treated in various media. Analyzing teenage sexual encounters with adults across a variety of media, including films, television, novels, and podcasts, the volume takes a positive stance on the expression of teenage sexuality, while remaining sensitive to the power of adults to abuse and manipulate. The anthology treats these representations as negotiations between conflicting forces: desire, sexual self-knowledge, unequal power, and the law, the latter both actual legal statutes and internalized law in the philosophical and psychoanalytic sense. Questions of unequal power inherent in such relations are theorized. The authors examine variations of this configuration of sexual relations between teenagers and adults from different perspectives, to consider how various forms of expression rework it formally. These essays are attuned to both nuances of presentation and contexts of reception, and they consider how aesthetics play a role. Contributing to the general debate about the ways that societies construct and regulate adolescent sexuality, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, sociology, and gender studies

European Writers in Exile

European Writers in Exile PDF Author: Robert C. Hauhart
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498560245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
European Writers in Exile collects a series of original essays that address the writers’ universal existential dilemma, when viewed through the lens of exile: who am I, where am I from, and what do I write, and to whom? While we often understand the term “exile” to refer to writers who have either been forced to leave their home country or region or chosen self-exile, this term need not be defined so narrowly, and the contributors to this volume explore a range of interesting and evolving definitions. Various countries in Europe have long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and a strife-torn region which has forced many to flee within the continent or beyond it. The phrase “in exile” involves writers moving across borders in multiple directions and for multiple reasons, including for reasons of duress or personal quest, and these themes are addressed and critiqued in these essays. This volume naturally examines the cataclysmic and near-universal exilic experiences relating to the world wars, including essays on Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Additionally, essays address the unique early twentieth-century experiences of Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. More contemporary essay subjects include Milan Kundera, Norman Manea, Eva Hoffman, Caryl Phillips, and W. G. Sebald. This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world—when seen from exile—affect a view back towards a country or region left behind? Or, conversely, how does exile push a writer to look outward to new (trans-)nationalized space(s)? These and other questions are important to investigate. Taken in sum, European Writers in Exile offers an academically rigorous, important, and cohesive volume.