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Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival material, this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Vladimir Nabokov's thinking and writing. Siggy Frank provides fresh insights into Nabokov's wider aesthetics and arrives at new readings of his narrative fiction. As well as emphasising the importance of theatrical performance to our understanding of Nabokov's texts, she demonstrates that the theme of theatricality runs through the central concerns of Nabokov's art and life: the nature of fiction, the relationship between the author and his fictional world, textual origin and derivation, authorial control and textual property, literary appropriations and adaptations, and finally the transformation of the writer himself from the Russian émigré writer Sirin to the American novelist Nabokov.
Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career—from the 1920s to the 1940s—in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.
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.
Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads is the first book-length study to focus on Nabokov’s relationship with his heroines. Essays by distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered and nomadic nature of Nabokov’s women: their voice and voicelessness, their absentness, the paradigm of power and sacrifice within which they are situated, the paradox of their unattainability, their complex relationship with textual borders, the travel narrative, with the author himself. By design, Nabokov’s woman is often assigned a short-term tourist visa with a firm expiration date. Her departure is facilitated by death or involuntary absence, which watermarks her into the male protagonist’s narrative, granting him an artistic release or a gift of self-understanding. When she leaves the stage, her portrait remains ambiguous. She can be powerfully enigmatic, but not self-actualized enough to be dynamic or, for even where the terms of her existence are deeply considered or her image beheld reverently, her recognition seems to be limited to the “Works Cited” register of the male narrator’s personal life. As a result, Nabokov’s texts often feature a nomadic woman who seems to live without a narratorial homeland, papers of her own, or storytelling privileges. This volume explores the “residency status” of Nabokov’s silent nomads—his fleeting lovers, witches, muses, mermaids, and nymphets. As Nabokov scholars analyze the power dynamic of the writer’s narrative of male desire, they ponder—are these female characters directionless wanderers or covert operatives in the terrain of Nabokov’s text? Whereas each essay addresses a different aspect of Nabokov’s artistic relationship with the feminine, together they explore the politics of representation, authorization, and voicelessness. This collection offers new ways of reading and teaching Nabokov and is poised to appeal to a wide range of student and scholarly audiences. 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.
This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.
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.
In Nabokov’s Mimicry of Freud: Art as Science, Teckyoung Kwon examines the manner in which Nabokov invited his readers to engage in his ongoing battle against psychoanalysis. Kwon looks at Nabokov’s use of literary devices that draw upon psychology and biology, characters that either imitate Freud or Nabokov in behavior or thought, and Jamesian concepts of time, memory, and consciousness in The Defense, Despair, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. As Kwon notes, the transfiguration of biological mimicry and memory into an artistic form involves numerous components, including resemblance with a difference, contingency, the double, riddles, games, play, theatricality, transgression, metamorphosis, and combinational concoction. Nabokov, as a mimic, functions as a poet who is also a scientist, while his model, Freud, operates as a scientist who is also a poet. Both writers were gifted humorists, regarding art as a formidable vehicle for the repudiation of all forms of totality. This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, literary studies, film studies, and philosophy.
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.
Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.
Exploring the deeply translational and transnational nature of the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, this book argues that all his work is unified by the permanent presence of three cultures and languages: Russian, English and French. In particular, Julie Loison-Charles focusses on Nabokov's dual nature as both an author and a translator, and the ways in which translation permeates his fictional writing from his very first Russian works to his last novels in English. Although self-translation has received a lot of attention in Nabokov criticism, this book considers his work as an author-translator, drawing particular attention to his often underappreciated and underestimated, but no less crucial, third language; French. Looking at Nabokov's encounters with pseudotranslation, Julie Loison-Charles demonstrates the influence this had on his practice as both a translator and a writer, arguing that this experience was crucial to his ability to create bridges between the literary traditions of Europe, Russia and America. The book also triangulates his practice and theory of translation for Onegin with those of Chateaubriand and Venuti to illuminate Nabokov's transnational vision of literature and his ethics of translation before presenting a robust case for reconsidering his collaborative translations in French as mediated self-translations.