Stalking Nabokov

Stalking Nabokov
Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2013-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231158572

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.

The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov

The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov
Author: Paul Benedict Grant
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1399519247

The first in-depth study of Vladimir Nabokov’s humour, investigating its physical aspects such as farce, slapstick, sexual and scatological humour Offers the first in-depth study of Nabokov’s humour Presents a revisionist reading of Nabokov Examines the metaphysical aspects of Nabokov’s humour Examines the sexual and scatological aspects of Nabokov’s humour Applies humour theory (e.g. those of Hobbes, Bergson, Freud) to Nabokov’s texts Compares Nabokov’s humour to that of his Russian predecessors (e.g. Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov) and to literary humourists such as Rabelais, Swift, Joyce Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov’s writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

Vladimir Nabokov in Context

Vladimir Nabokov in Context
Author: David M. Bethea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 660
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108608094

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.

The Rub of Time

The Rub of Time
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0735273790

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.

The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord

The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord
Author: Gavriel Shapiro
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2014-03-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0472119184

A careful and intimate study on the ways Nabokov’s world perception and fictional universe were influenced by his father

Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research

Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900441035X

Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.

Freudians and Schadenfreudians

Freudians and Schadenfreudians
Author: Jeffrey Berman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350471852

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.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts
Author: Dana Dragunoiu
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810144018

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.

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction
Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 2198
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 3110279819

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.