Nabokov Perversely

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.

Product Details :

Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Eric Naiman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Release : 2011-01-15
File : 316 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780801460234


Approaches To Teaching Nabokov S Lolita

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Widely considered one of the twentieth century's great novels, Lolita maintains an established place on the syllabus. Yet its mix of narrative strategies, ornate allusive prose, and troublesome subject matter complicates its presentation to students. This volume helps instructors make Lolita accessible to students. Part 1 opens with an extensive chronology of the author's life, outlines the novel's convoluted publication history, and identifies useful textual and audiovisual. Part 2 concentrates on the novel's ethical quandries and introduces its textual intricacies.

Product Details :

Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Author : Zoran Kuzmanovich
Publisher :
Release : 2008
File : 220 Pages
ISBN-13 : STANFORD:36105131789393


Poetry World

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre : English poetry
Author :
Publisher :
Release : 1986
File : 168 Pages
ISBN-13 : UCAL:B3578304


The Films Of The Sixties

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre : Performing Arts
Author : Douglas Brode
Publisher : Citadel Press
Release : 1990
File : 292 Pages
ISBN-13 : 0806507985


Cosmic Synchronization And Other Worlds In The Work Of Vladimir Nabokov

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre :
Author : Jonathan Borden Sisson
Publisher :
Release : 1979
File : 720 Pages
ISBN-13 : MINN:31951001036249J


Nabokov S Garden

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Bobbie Ann Mason
Publisher : Ann Arbor : Ardis
Release : 1974
File : 208 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015011591180


The Nabokov Wilson Letters

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

A quarter century of intimate and intellectual correspondence between Nabokov and critic Edmund Wilson, prior to their notorious feud.

Product Details :

Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Author : Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Publisher : New York : Harper & Row
Release : 1979
File : 380 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015008498969


Nabokov The Critical Heritage

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre : Fiction
Author : Norman Page
Publisher : London ; Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul
Release : 1982
File : 272 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015005510295


Canto

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre : Literature
Author :
Publisher :
Release : 1977
File : 834 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015067400757


The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter

eBook Download

BOOK EXCERPT:

Product Details :

Genre :
Author :
Publisher :
Release : 1978
File : 426 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015052938977