Week 6 How the Ideas of Sex and Gender are Rooted in Culture Vasilina Orlova (original) (raw)
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Nabokov’s Critics: a Review Article
Several insights should by now be clear to all students of Nabokov who have assimilated the critical literature of the past twenty years: that he is a Romantic who views this world as a parody of the otherworld, causing his works to abound in doublings, mirrorings, and inversions; that the glimmerings of another existence beyond our own may occasionally be discerned in nature, in fate's workings, in art; and that the puzzles and rich referentiality of Nabokov's texts to other literature are designed to send the reader on a quest for the transcendent.
Introduction: the many faces of Vladimir Nabokov
2005
Vladimir Nabokov was acutely aware of the image that readers and critics held of him. Deriding the notion that he was a “frivolous firebird,” he predicted that the day would come when someone would declare him to be a “rigid moralist kicking sin” and “assigning power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (SO, 193). Not only did Nabokov’s prediction come true, but critics continue to discover new facets of the writer’s legacy to highlight and explore. As a result, it has become clear that the man and his work evince enormous complexity. The facile labels applied to Nabokov early in his career – the “cool aesthete,” “impassive gamester” – have been replaced by other labels (if not “rigid moralist,” then “highly ethical” writer, metaphysician, philosopher). Yet all of these labels are proving to be simply one-dimensional; the full depth of Nabokov’s talent has yet to be plumbed. Indeed, in recent years, new aspects of Nabokov’s formidable intellectual legacy, such as his research as a lepi...
Nabokov Online Journal, 2021
Notes. Bibliography. Index. 232pp. ot everyone likes Dickens. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed, even by those who may have a difficult time with Dickens' style, that there is little sense in arguing that the Englishman should not be read or that his peculiar style as well as his commitment to that style constitute a refusal of the inevitability of art to affect real human lives. Now, not everyone likes Nabokov, yet, unlike Dickens, this dislike is commonly accompanied by and, indeed, is grounded in the belief that Nabokov really cares nothing of the seriousness of the human predicament. Against this most common misreading of Nabokov, Robert Alter, in his new book, Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense, shows that Nabokov's literariness, his obsession with style, encodement, and gamesmanship, does not signify on Nabokov's part a lack of concern with the world outside of literature. Drawing upon decades of reading, writing, and teaching great works of literature, Alter shows that this critique of Nabokov is both unfair and incorrect, for not only are such devices as encodement common to all great works of literature, but such self-conscious literariness, when met in the works of other great authors (Joyce, Fielding, Faulkner, etc.), is rarely met with the charge that they care nothing of the real world with its problems and plagues. As the title of his new book suggests, Alter turns the hermeneutic of suspicion upon itself to ask if the literary academy has been too suspicious of Nabokov, and, instead, invites N
In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita for the first time in Paris, with an infamous press; in 1958 he published it once more in New York. His life-and arguably the English-language and transnational novel-was never the same. By 1962, Nabokov had collaborated on the film with Stanley Kubrick; the term "lolita" had entered popular language; and by the middle of the decade, he was the most famous living writer in the world. This lecture course will begin with the novels (and films) that made Nabokov famous, then move back in time to trace the origins of the international literary legend in the young Russian émigré fleeing the Revolution. We end with a number of works of world literature inspired and haunted by Nabokov, from Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, to W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. We will speak of exile, memory and nostalgia; hybrid cultural identities and cosmopolitan elites; language, translation and multilingualism. All readings will be in English.
Nabokov and the Russian Tradition: Americanizing the Pravednitsa in Laugther in the Dark and Lolita
This essay focuses on probing the complexities of Dostoevsky’s influence on Nabokov through the consideration of female characters in Laughter in the Dark and Lolita. The discussion centers on the development of characters and on the issue of the apotheosis of the Russian woman, which Nabokov inherits from Dostoevsky, as both are members of the ‘lesser tradition’ in Russian literature. Through the discussion of key concepts such as poshlost and the figure of pravednisa, the essay articulates the main intertextual similarities and differences between the writers, positing that Nabokov developed the stock female characters through adding dimensionality through them and giving them status as people in their own right, something that Dostoevsky did not aspire to in his Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment, despite his focus on morality. The discussion is focused mainly on mothers and children by way of exploring the central issue of cancelled children and mothers in both Laughter in the Dark and Lolita. I argue that despite Nabokov’s protestations against his precursor, Dostoevsky had a tangible impact on his works that informed the former’s portrayal of his heroines. Nabokov took the tradition further, however, by transporting and transplanting these figures into an American milieu, which imbues the notion of poshlost and the pravednitsa figure with new meanings, as the women have the possibility to encounter American consumerism of the mid-20th century.
Brushing through « veiled values and translucent undertones ». Nabokov’s pictorial approach to women
2006
Writers, artists and critics have long been aware of the intimate link between literature and the visual arts; the set phrase ‘sister arts’ is witness to this widely recognized kinship. As such, the title of this study may provoke a slight raising of the eyebrow—thanks to the elaborate quotation—, doomed to swiftly dwindle into a resigned sigh as soon as the eye meets the fatal ‘pictorial.’ Before you judge whether it is worth reading on, I wish to defend my case by elucidating my recourse to...