Download or read book Aestheticism Nabokov and Lolita written by David Andrews and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a major revaluation of aestheticism as a literary and historical idea, reexamines Nabokov in the light of his aestheticism. Offers a revisionary reading of Lolita. In addition, it provides a groundbreaking essay that compares three adaptations of Lolita: Nabokov's screenplay, Stanley Kubrick's film, and Adrian Lyne's recent film.
Download or read book Strong Opinions written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-03-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strong Opinions offers Nabokov's trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita. • "First published in 1973, this collection of interviews and essays offers an intriguing insight into one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century." - The Guardian Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, among other subjects. Keen to dismiss those who fail to understand his work and happy to butcher those sacred cows of the literary canon he dislikes, Nabokov is much too entertaining to be infuriating, and these interviews, letters and articles are as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote.
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 Style is Matter written by Leland De la Durantaye and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and what sort of intelligence should we apply to a work of art that recounts so much love, so much loss, so much thoughtlessness--and across which flashes something we might be tempted to call evil? To begin with, we should read with the attention and intelligence we call empathy. A point on which all readers can agree is that great literature offers us a lesson in empathy: it encourages us to feel with the strange and the familiar, the strong and the weak, the vulgar and the cultivated, the young and the old, the lover and the beloved. It urges us to see our own fates as connected to those of others, to link the starry sky we see above us with whatever moral laws we might sense within."--from Style is Matter"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."--Vladimir Nabokov, Strong OpinionsWith this quote Leland de la Durantaye launches his elegant and incisive exploration of the ethics of art in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), the author asks whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed. Style is Matter places Nabokov's work once and for all into dialogue with some of the most basic issues concerning the ethics of writing and of reading itself.De la Durantaye argues that Humbert's narrative confession artfully seduces the reader into complicity with his dark fantasies and even darker acts until the very end, where he expresses his bitter regret for what he has done. In this sense, Lolita becomes a study in the danger of art, the artist's responsibility to the real world, and the perils and pitfalls of reading itself. In addition to Nabokov's fictions, de la Durantaye also draws on his nonfiction writings to explore Nabokov's belief that all genuine art is deceptive--as is nature itself. Through de la Durantaye's deft and compelling writing, we see that Nabokov learned valuable lessons in mimicry and camouflage from the intricate patterns of the butterflies he adored.
Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov s Lolita written by Ellen Pifer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight reprinted essays, mostly from the 1990s, examine various facets of the Russian exile's 1955 novel that has raised literary, legal, and religious hackles since it was first published. Also included is a 1967 interview with Nabokov by Herbert Gold. There is no index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Download or read book Art Emotion and Ethics written by Berys Gaut and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a good work of art be evil? 'Art, Ethics, and Emotion' explores this issue, arguing that artworks are always aesthetically flawed insofar as they have a moral defect that is aesthetically relevant. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the relation of art to morality.
Download or read book Escape Into Aesthetics written by Page Stegner and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lolita The Story of a Cover Girl written by John Bertram and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should Lolita look like? The question has dogged book-cover designers since 1955, when Lolita was first published in a plain green wrapper. The heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel has often been shown as a teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses--a deceptive image that misreads the book but has seeped deep into our cultural life, from fashion to film. Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov scholars survey more than half a century of Lolita covers. You'll also find thoughtful essays from such design luminaries as Mary Gaitskill, Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut, Peter Mendelsund, Jessica Helfand, Alice Twemlow, Johanna Drucker, Leland de la Durantaye, Ellen Pifer, and Stephen Blackwell. Through the lenses of design and literature, Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl tells the strange design history of one of the most important novels of the 20th century--and offers a new way for thinking visually about difficult books. You'll never look at Lolita the same way again.
Download or read book Lolita written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. "The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind." —The New Yorker Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Download or read book Teaching Nabokov s Lolita in the MeToo Era written by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era seeks to critique the novel from the standpoint of its teachability to undergraduate and graduate studentsin the twenty-first century. The time has come to ask: in the #MeToo era and beyond, how do we approach Nabokov’s inflammatory masterpiece, Lolita? How do we read a novel that describes an unpardonable crime? How do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content? This student-focused volume offers practical and specific answers to these questions and includes suggestions for teaching the novel in conventional and online modalities. Distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered nature of Lolita by sharing innovative assignments, creative-writing exercises, methodologies of teaching the novel through film and theatre, and new critical analyses and interpretations.
Download or read book Light the Dark written by Joe Fassler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning masterclass on the creative process, the craft of writing, and the art of finding inspiration from Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Roxane Gay, Neil Gaiman, and more of the most acclaimed writers at work today "For artists in need of a creative fix, Light the Dark is as good as a visit from the divine muse." -Bookpage What inspires you? That's the simple, but profound question posed to forty-six renowned authors in LIGHT THE DARK. Each writer begins with a favorite passage from a novel, a song, a poem—something that gets them started and keeps them going with the creative work they love. From there, incredible lessons and stories of life-changing encounters with art emerge, like how sneaking books into his job as a night security guard helped Khaled Hosseini learn that nothing he creates will ever be truly finished. Or how a college reading assignment taught Junot Díaz that great art can be a healing conversation, and an unexpected poet led Elizabeth Gilbert to embrace an unyielding optimism, even in the face of darkness. LIGHT THE DARK collects the best of The Atlantic's much-acclaimed "By Heart" series edited by Joe Fassler and adds brand new pieces, each one paired with a striking illustration. Here is a guide to creative living and writing in the vein of Daily Rituals, Bird by Bird, Draft No. 4, and Big Magic for anyone who wants to learn how great writers find inspiration—and to find some of your own. CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: Elizabeth Gilbert, Junot Díaz, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Roxane Gay, Angela Flournoy, Jonathan Franzen, Yiyun Li, Leslie Jamison, Claire Messud, Edwidge Danticat, David Mitchell, Khaled Hosseini, Ayana Mathis, Kathryn Harrison, Azar Nafisi, Hanya Yanagihara, Jane Smiley, Nell Zink, Emma Donoghue, Jeff Tweedy, Eileen Myles, Maggie Shipstead, Sherman Alexie, Andre Dubus III, Billy Collins, Lev Grossman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Charles Simic, Jim Shepard, T.C. Boyle, Tom Perrotta, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Gibson, Mark Haddon, Ethan Canin, Jesse Ball, Jim Crace, and Walter Mosley. "As [these authors] reveal what inspires them, they, in turn, inspire the reader, all while celebrating the beauty and purpose of art." -Booklist
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 Lolita in the Afterlife written by Jenny Minton Quigley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on Vladimir Nabokov’s perennially provocative book—with original contributions from a stellar cast of prominent twenty-first century writers. In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and bestsellerdom. More than sixty years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse—art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma—Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova. Lolita in the Afterlife is edited by the daughter of Lolita’s original publisher in America. WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY Robin Givhan • Aleksandar Hemon • Jim Shepard • Emily Mortimer • Laura Lippman • Erika L. Sánchez • Sarah Weinman • Andre Dubus III • Mary Gaitskill • Zainab Salbi • Christina Baker Kline • Ian Frazier • Cheryl Strayed • Sloane Crosley • Victor LaValle • Jill Kargman • Lila Azam Zanganeh • Roxane Gay • Claire Dederer • Jessica Shattuck • Stacy Schiff • Susan Choi • Kate Elizabeth Russell • Tom Bissell • Kira Von Eichel • Bindu Bansinath • Dani Shapiro • Alexander Chee • Lauren Groff • Morgan Jerkins
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 266 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 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 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 A Reader s Guide to Nabokov s Lolita written by Julian W. Connolly and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of the most fascinating and controversial novels of the twentieth century. This book seeks to guide readers through the intricacies of Nabokov's work and to help them achieve a better understanding of his rich artistic design. Chapters include an analysis of the novel, a discussion of its precursors in Nabokov's work and in world literature, an essay on the character of Dolly Haze (Humbert's "Lolita"). and a commentary on the critical and cultural afterlife of the novel. The volume concludes with an annotated bibliography of selected critical reading. The guide should prove illuminating both for first-time readers of Lolita and for experienced re-readers of Nabokov's text." --Book Jacket.
