Download or read book Nabokov s Permanent Mystery written by David S. Rutledge and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This critical text examines the ways in which Vladimir Nabokov, one of the twentieth century's great novelists, structured his novels to encapsulate his metaphysical beliefs. At the heart of his work is a profound respect for what's missing, for unsolvable riddles, for questions even at the expense of answers. Nabokov's techniques reveal an enduring reverence for permanent mystery"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Nabokov s Permanent Mystery written by David S. Rutledge and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical text examines the ways in which Vladimir Nabokov, one of the twentieth century's great writers, structured his works to encapsulate his metaphysical beliefs. It draws examples from Nabokov's novels, stories and nonfiction, revealing a startling consistency in his beliefs over the course of his career, even as the structure of his novels increased in complexity. At the heart of his work is a profound respect for what's missing, for unsolvable riddles, for questions even at the expense of answers. Nabokov's techniques--from wordplay to plotlines--reveal an enduring reverence for permanent mystery.
Download or read book Nabokov written by Leona Toker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures." Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction. According to Toker, most previous critics stressed either Nabokov’s concern with form or the humanistic side of his works, but rarely if ever the two together. In sensitive and revealing readings of ten novels, Toker demonstrates that the need to reconcile the human element with aesthetic or metaphysical pursuits is a constant theme of Nabokov’s and that the tension between technique and content is itself a key to his fiction. Written with verve and precision, Toker’s book begins with Pnin and follows the circular pattern that is one of her subject’s own favored devices.
Download or read book Insomniac Dreams written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.
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 241 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 Nabokov s Women written by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov written by D. Rampton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nabokov and Nietzsche written by Michael Rodgers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Bend Sinister written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.
Download or read book Nabokov and Indeterminacy written by Priscilla Meyer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work. Meyer first focuses on Sebastian Knight, exploring how Nabokov associates his characters with systems of subtextual references to Russian, British, and American literary and philosophical works. She then turns to Lolita and Pale Fire, applying these insights to show that these later novels clearly differentiate the characters through subtextual references, and that Sebastian Knight’s construction models that of Pale Fire. Meyer argues that the dialogue Nabokov constructs among subtexts explores his central concern: the continued existence of the spirit beyond bodily death. She suggests that because Nabokov’s art was a quest for an unattainable knowledge of the otherworldly, knowledge which can never be conclusive, Nabokov’s novels are never closed in plot, theme, or resolution—they take as their hidden theme the unfinalizability that Bakhtin says characterizes all novels. The conclusions of Nabokov's novels demand a rereading, and each rereading yields a different novel. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable.
Download or read book Silent Love written by Gerard Vries and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of Vladimir Nabokov’s most autobiographical novels and it has often been observed that Sebastian’s passionate affair with the femme fatale Nina Rechnoy is a dramatized extension of Nabokov’s infatuation with Irina Guadanini. In this book it is shown that the novel also conceals another, secluded, love affair Sebastian had with a man, which reflects the main episode in the life of Nabokov’s brother Sergey. By pursuing many biographical and literary references and allusions, and by disregarding the deceptive guiding by the narrator (Sebastian’s half-brother), this moving story about Sebastian’s silent love becomes brightly visible.
Download or read book Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture written by Jeffrey Clapp and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from an international array of scholars, this volume opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. The chapters in the volume span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and the phenomena of tourism, interpersonal exchanges and cross-cultural interventions. The volume explores the multifarious ways in which subjects, citizens, communities, and states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and offer hospitality to others. From the individual’s telephone and data, to the threshold of the family home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality’s injunction to openness, gifting, and refuge. In demonstrating an interrelation between ongoing discussions of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security, the book engages with a range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, drawing on work from other disciplines, including philosophy, political science, and sociology. Further, it defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with current academic interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.
Download or read book Between Rhyme and Reason written by Stanislav Shvabrin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of such global bestsellers as Lolita and Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is also one of the most controversial literary translators and translation theorists of modern time. In Between Rhyme and Reason, Stanislav Shvabrin discloses the complexity, nuance, and contradictions behind Nabokov's theory and practice of literalism to reveal how and why translation came to matter to Nabokov so much. Drawing on familiar as well as unknown materials, Shvabrin traces the surprising and largely unknown trajectory of Nabokov's lifelong fascination with translation to demonstrate that, for Nabokov, translation was a form of intellectual communion with his peers across no fewer than six languages. Empowered by Mikhail Bakhtin's insights into the interactive roots of literary creativity, Shvabrin's interpretative chronicle of Nabokov's involvement with translation shows how his dialogic encounters with others in the medium of translation left verbal vestiges on his own creations. Refusing to regard translation as a form of individual expression, Nabokov translated to communicate with his interlocutors, whose words and images continue to reverberate throughout his allusion-rich texts.
Download or read book After Postmodernism written by Christopher K. Coffman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Several of American literature’s most prominent authors, and many of their most perceptive critics and reviewers, argue that fiction of the last quarter century has turned away from the tendencies of postmodernist writing. Yet, the nature of that turn, and the defining qualities of American fiction after postmodernism, remain less than clear. This volume identifies four prominent trends of the contemporary scene: the recovery of the real, a rethinking of historical engagement, a preoccupation with materiality, and a turn to the planetary. Readings of works by various leading figures, including Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, A.M. Homes, Lance Olsen, Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace, support a variety of arguments about this recent revitalization of American literature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.
Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.
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 The Enchanter written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1991-07-20 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The precursor to Nabokov's classic novel, Lolita. • A middle-aged man weds an unattractive widow in order to indulge his obsession with her daughter. • "A gem to be appreciated by any admirer of the most graceful and provocative literary craftsman." —Chicago Tribune The unnamed protagonist of the story is, outwardly, a respectable and comfortable man; inside, he churns at the pubescent femininity of certain girls. Rare girls – one in a thousand – whose coltish grace and subconscious flirtatiousness betray, to his obsessed mind, a very special bud on the moist verge of its bloom. Sitting on a park bench one day, he is tantalized by the fleeting form of just such a girl roller-skating on a gravel path. His desire to be near this beauty burns in him and drives him to begin a courtship of the child’s pitiful mother – a course that can end only in the disintegration of his life. Over the years, the idea of The Enchanter grew; it changed; it developed “claws and wings.” By 1953 it was ready to furnish the basic theme of Lolita. "The Enchanter is entertaining independent of its Lolita connection. It is arch, delicious and beautifully written." —Publishers Weekly
