Download or read book Stalking Nabokov written by Brian Boyd and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stalking Nabokov written by Brian Boyd and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote an essay on Vladimir Nabokov that the author called 'brilliant.' After gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd after completing Nabokov's biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Rub of Time written by Martin Amis and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive collection of essays and reportage written during the past thirty years from one of most provocative and widely read writers--with new commentary by the author. For more than thirty years, Martin Amis has turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics--politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. Now, at last, these incomparable essays have been gathered together. Here is Amis at the 2011 GOP Iowa Caucus, where, squeezed between "windbreakers and woolly hats," he pores over The Ron Paul Family Cookbook and laments the absence of "our Banquo," Herman Cain. He writes about finally confronting the effects of aging on his athletic prowess. He revisits, time and time again, the worlds of Bellow and Nabokov, his "twin peaks," masters who have obsessed and inspired him. Brilliant, incisive, and savagely funny, The Rub of Time is a vital addition to any Amis fan's bookshelf, and the perfect primer for readers discovering his fierce and tremendous talents for the first time.
Download or read book The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord written by Gavriel Shapiro and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A careful and intimate study on the ways Nabokov’s world perception and fictional universe were influenced by his father
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov in Context written by David Bethea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Taking Stock Twenty Five Years of Comparative Literary Research written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This commemorative volume offers a retrospective of the discipline as mirrored in the series Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft since its founding in 1993. Leading scholars examine issues of world literature, the history of ideas, gender studies, aesthetics and literary translation.
Download or read book Freudians and Schadenfreudians written by Jeffrey Berman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sigmund Freud can be a polarizing figure, beloved by many and despised by some. Focusing on eight key writers and scholars who either passionately loved or gleefully loathed Freud, this book represents Freud's wide legacy, the reach of his ideas, their controversies, and their ability still to provoke, inspire, confound, outrage, and compel. The book begins by focusing on four highly prolific authors whose admiration for Freud is boundless: Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Kurt R. Eissler, and Peter Gay. Berman then explores four more writers whose aim was not simply to debunk Freud and destroy his monstrous creation but to cast both into hell: D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Szasz, and Frederick Crews. Each chapter discusses the author's involvement with Freud, exploring the continuities and discontinuities of his or her writings, as well as offering snapshots of the writers, suggesting how their personal and professional lives were inextricably related. Berman draws out some surprising commonalities between the Freudolaters and Schadenfreudians, going on to discuss the current state of psychoanalysis and the “psychoanalytic credos” by which contemporary analysts live.
Download or read book Handbook of Autobiography Autofiction written by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 2220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
Download or read book Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora 1920 2020 written by Maria Rubins and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the century that has passed since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe. What happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries and begin to negotiate new experience gained in the process of migration? Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, countering its conventional reception as a subsidiary branch of national literature and reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland and origins to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, World Literature and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland. These diverse discussions are framed by a focused examination of diaspora as a methodological perspective and its relevance for the modern human condition.
Download or read book A Plurilingual Analysis of Four Russian American Autobiographies written by Michele Russo and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the many examples of Russian-American émigré literature, a number of less known authors moved to the USA, following their predecessors' transnational and plurilingual experiences. The bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) expressions in their works written in English invite a contrastive analysis of their transition from their source language, Russian, to their target language, English. This book explores the linguistic structure of the autobiographies of four Russian-American writers (Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova and Shteyngart) bringing into focus the linguistic "geology" of their texts, as they record their passage from a Russian world to an English one. These linguistic passages are examined from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, by dwelling on the geographies of the émigrés' itineraries as well as on the process of linguistic transformation that such itineraries generated. By analyzing these writers' geographic and linguistic routes, this volume engages the reader in a metalinguistic discourse and highlights the influence of these first plurilingual experiments on modern theories concerning linguistic globalization.
Download or read book Photographic Literacy written by Katherine M. H. Reischl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photography, introduced to Russia in 1839, was nothing short of a sensation. Its rapid proliferation challenged the other arts, including painting and literature, as well as the very integrity of the self. If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky greeted the camera with skepticism in the nineteenth century, numerous twentieth-century authors welcomed it with a warm embrace. As Katherine M. H. Reischl shows in Photographic Literacy, authors as varied as Leonid Andreev, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn picked up the camera and reshaped not only their writing practices but also the sphere of literacy itself. For these authors, a single photograph or a photograph as illustration is never an endpoint; their authorial practices continually transform and animate the frozen moment. But just as authors used images to shape the reception of their work and selves, Russian photographers—including Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky and Alexander Rodchenko—used text to shape the reception of their visual work. From the diary to print, the literary word imbues that photographic moment with a personal life story, and frames and reframes it in the writing of history. In this primer on photographic literacy, Reischl argues for the central place that photography has played in the formation of the Russian literary imagination over the course of roughly seventy years. From image to text and back again, she traces the visual consciousness of modern Russian literature as captured through the lens of the Russian author-photographer.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts written by Dana Dragunoiu and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty. Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.
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 Shades of Laura written by Yuri Leving and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly before Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions that the draft for his last novel, The Original of Laura, be destroyed. But in 2008 Dmitri Nabokov, the writer's only child and sole surviving heir, contravened his father's wishes. Formed from novelistic fragments that had been hidden from the public eye for three decades, The Original of Laura is a construction based on the conjecture of the Nabokov estate, publishers, and scholars. Shades of Laura returns to the "scene of the crime," elucidating the process of publishing Nabokov's unfinished novel from its conception - the reproduction of 138 handwritten index cards - to the simultaneous publication of translations of the final text in several languages. The essays in this collection investigate the event of publication and reconstitute the book's critical reception, reproducing a selection of some of the most salient reviews. Critics condemned Dmitri's choice, but as contributors to this volume attest, there are many more "shades" and "nuances" to his decision. The book also endeavours to allow readers to understand and evaluate an incomplete novel; contributors analyze its plot, structure, imagery, and motifs. Published after prolonged public debate, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura was dubbed "the most eagerly awaited literary novel of this fledgling century." Covering the publication from a broad spectrum of perspectives, this collection reassesses the Nabokov canon and the roots of his literary prestige. Contributors include Paul Ardoin (Florida State University), Gennady Barabtarlo (University of Missouri), Brian Boyd (University of Auckland), Marijeta Bozovic (Colgate University), Maurice Couturier (University of Nice), Lara Delage-Toriel (Strasbourg University), Galya Diment (University of Washington), Leland de la Durantaye (Claremont McKenna College), Michael Juliar (Private collector), Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley), Ellen Pifer (University of Delaware), Anna Raffetto (Adelphi Publishing House, Milan), Michael Rodgers (University of Strathclyde), Rien Verhoef (Leiden University), Olga Voronina (Bard College), Tadashi Wakashima (Kyoto University), Michael Wood (Princeton University), and Barbara Wyllie (Slavonic and East European Review).
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 Fine Lines written by Stephen Hardwick Blackwell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reproduces 154 of Russian-American novelist and entomologist Vladimir Nabokov's drawings, few of which have ever been seen in public, and presents essays by ten leading scientists and Nabokov scholars. The contributors underscore the significance of Nabokov's drawings as scientific documents, evaluate his visionary contributions to evolutionary biology and systematics, and offer insights into his unique artistic perception and creativity. Showcasing color drawings of butterflies' distinctive markings and anatomy as well, all as part of his work at the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Download or read book Troubling Late Modernism written by Doug Battersby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
