Download or read book Crystal Land written by Julia Bader and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
Download or read book Pale Fire written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1992-03-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure. An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty.
Download or read book The Prestige of Violence written by Sally Bachner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence. Examining such works as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner's readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.
Download or read book Crystal Land Artifice in Nabokov s English Novels written by Julia Bader and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Magician s Doubts written by Michael Wood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a child in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed conjuring. In this engrossing book, Princeton's Michael Wood explores the blend of arrogance and mischief that makes Nabokov such a fascinating and elusive master of fiction. "Wood's book is . . . so acute in its insights, so replete with clear thoughts . . . . (It) offers us an entirely new set of insights into the work of a modern master".--THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS.
Download or read book Reflecting Narcissus written by Steven Bruhm and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Character and Person written by John Frow and published by . This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Character and Person explores the category of fictional character, one of the most widely used and least adequately theorized concepts in literary studies, cultural studies, and everyday usage. It sets fictional character in relation to the concept of person and tries to examine how each of these terms is constructed across different cultures.
Download or read book The Secret Life of Stories written by Michael Bérubé and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform one's understanding of narrative. The author explains how ideas about intellectual disability inform a wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading..
Download or read book The Wreath of Wild Olive written by Mihai Spariosu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the concept of play in Western thought, with special emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and envisions literary discourse as contributing to an alternative mentality based on peace rather than power.
Download or read book Nabokov s Pale Fire written by Brian Boyd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever. In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery. This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Download or read book In roads of Language written by Ignasi Navarro Ferrando and published by Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I. This book was released on 2006 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In-roads of Language caps an ensemble of many-varied, interesting and spirited articles of appealing claim --specially garnered for students looking for new insights and usefully dedicated to advanced scholars that may battle in recent trends in English studies
Download or read book The Remnants written by John Hughes and published by UWA Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in pre-war Russia, contemporary Australia and Renaissance Italy, this novel's central story explores exile, memory and loss. At its centre is an ageing Russian emigre, a woman who claims to have nursed the poet Osip Mandelstam in his final days.
Download or read book Nabokov and the Question of Morality written by Michael Rodgers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book That Other World written by Azar Nafisi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The foundational text for the acclaimed New York Times and international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells the poet's death and announces the critic's secret identity as the king of a lost country. The greatest of Vladimir Nabokov's enchanters--Humbert--is lost within the antithesis of a fairy story, in which Lolita does not hold the key to his past but rather imprisons him within the knowledge of his distance from that past. In this precursor to her international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi deftly explores the worlds apparently lost to Nabokov's characters, their portals of access to those worlds, and how other worlds hold a mirror to Nabokov's experiences of physical, linguistic, and recollective exile. Written before Nafisi left the Islamic Republic of Iran, and now published in English for the first time and with a new introduction by the author, this book evokes the reader's quintessential journey of discovery and reveals what caused Nabokov to distinctively shape and reshape that journey for the author.
Download or read book Literary Essays on Explicable Splendours written by Ethan Lewis and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary critic aspires to eloquence, though makes no pretense to mirror the sublimity of the monuments inspiring his endeavors. Poets express their wonder through works of art. Critics articulate their homage via analysis of art’s workings. Hence, these essays and lectures, addressed to the quizzical, though not of necessity scholarly, reader, explore Shakespeare and noted re-envisioners of the Bard; four modern novels that interrogate identity; and underappreciated works and writers. They conclude with a series of pensees (thinkings) that, in the course of glossing nuances, reflect upon the interpretative craft itself.
Download or read book A History of European Literature written by Walter Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literature's ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe-during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of today's global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.
Download or read book Playtexts written by Warren Motte, Jr. and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not hubris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. NietzscheParents and politicians have always taken play seriously. Its formative powers, its focus, its energy, and its ability to signify other things have drawn the attention of writers from Plato and Schiller to Wittgenstein, Nabokov, and Eco. The ease with which an election becomes perceived as a race, a political crisis as a football game, or an argument as a tennis match readily proves how much play means to contemporary life. Just how play confers meaning, however, is best revealed in literature, where meaning is perpetually at stake. At stake itself, the risk of a gamble, is only one intersection between play and life. "Playtexts" reveals numerous junctures where literary playfulness seemingly so diverting and irrelevant instead opens the most profound questions about creativity, community, value, and belief. How do authors play with their words and readers? Can literature proceed at all unless a reader is willing and able to play?No moralizing monologue, "Playtexts" is all for exuberance and creative surge: Breton s construction of an antinovel, Gombrowicz s struggle with adult formalities, Nabokov s swats at the humorless, Sarrazin s seductive notes, Eco s recasting of spy and detective fiction, Reyes s carnal metaphorics."
