Browsing by Subject "Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977 -- Criticism and interpretation"
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- ItemFixing Lolita: Reevaluating the Problem of Desire in Representation(2006) Ratcliffe, Laura; Stuber, DorianThis thesis examines desire in Nabokov's Lolita in order to explore the nature of representation and to suggest another way to read this controversial text.
- ItemFrom Disgust to Desire: Transcending Normative Ideals Through Oscillation in Lolita(2013) Born, Henrik; Bennett, AshlyThe narrative of Lolita is designed to incite an oscillation in the reader between feelings of desire and disgust. Humbert conveys his desire for Dolores, the 12‐year‐old girl‐child, and invites the reader to share in his utopian fantasy. At the same time, Humbert recounts his desire through motifs that strike both us – the readers – and him as disgusting: The invocation of the predator‐prey dynamic, and characterization of Dolores as a demoniac, bewitching creature prove disgusting. An analysis of Lolita’s narrative structure suggests that Nabokov narrates Humbert’s desire. His narration shrouds what transpires in radical ambiguity, arousing the reader’s desire for textual mastery. The narrative structure is designed to make us complicit in the disgusting, and thus demonstrates how entangled desire and disgust really are. Nabokov impresses on the reader how disgust intermingled with desire creates proximity to the object of disgust and can make ethical judgment of deviant desire problematic. Nabokov demonstrates how disgust reinforces the designation of certain desires as deviant, and sustains ideals of normality. Humbert’s and Nabokov’s views on the power of disgust diverge: Humbert strives to divest disgust of its power to reinforce taboos. He argues that beneath the veneer of socially sanctioned normalcy sexual desires, we are all sexually deviant. While Nabokov also acknowledges that the norms of sexuality to which we are held are narrow and idealistic, he does not suggest draining disgust of its power to uphold these norms. Instead, Nabokov urges the reader to cultivate a more critical understanding of disgust, how we are complicit in it and how it functions to reproduce social norms. The novel ends with a moment where even Humbert can achieve, through a more critical and nuanced view of disgust, a balance between his own personal, and idealized societal scripts for desire.
- ItemPhotographic Memory in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita(2017) Carter, Courtney; Zwarg, Christina, 1949-Humbert’s passing phrase—“photographic memory”—may appear to be a playful, yet eager attempt to credit his self-centered narrative focus and persuasive control of language with photography’s apparent believability. But for a notoriously unreliable narrator obsessed with visual recollection, and for an author notorious for his clever tricks, the reader cannot make the same assumptions of photography—whether too seriously intertwined with believability, or too jokingly undervalued—and must examine more carefully what “photographic memory” can really mean. By relying on photographic history and theory, primarily Kaja Silverman, I seek to illuminate photography’s evasion of controlled operation and its essential “analogy” (Silverman 11) with the world, both of which I argue engender optimistic possibilities for Lolita’s photographable subjects in the reproduction of their own remembered image. When characters in Lolita slip in and out of the narration of Humbert’s visual memory, they challenge his singular control of his memory’s recollection and the memoir’s authorship. By these same analogic relationships in the novel, Nabokov opens an opportunity for the reader to reinterpret their place in it, including even that place of unreliable authority Humbert occupies. These opportunities for reciprocity in the development of Humbert’s visual memory invite an alternate and reversed relationship of spectatorship in a book historically critiqued for its unapologetic presentation of the solipsistic and often voyeuristic perspective of a pedophilic murderer. Additionally, reciprocity in recollection challenges popular critical views that Nabokov exclusively treated memory subject to the author’s will power, offering an alternate view of a famed author who instead welcomes textual instability and democratized control of memory and language as equally positive developments. By seeing the world differently, through Silverman’s account of photography, the reader can see Nabokov differently—as an author who welcomes instability and lack of single-minded authorial control, without sacrificing care, cleverness, or optimism.
- ItemPicturing Memory, Puncturing Vision: Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire'(2008) Cash, Conall; Mohan, Rajeswari
- ItemStill Time: Textual Consciousness and Photography in Nabokov's Ada(2015) Odekirk, Connor; McGrane, LauraI have chosen to write my thesis on Vladimir Nabokov’s late novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In my thesis I invoke Henri Bergson’s treatise on duration, Time and Free Will as well as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, among other theorists and criticism to examine tropes of time and narrative forms of memory, such as memoir, photography, and voice recording, in the novel. Photography is a prominent image and theme in this text, which is itself fictionally structured in the form of memoir. Photographs appear both as images that both exist within and are also narrated by the text. They are also forms of memory that the memoir archives within its narrative. They are both subject of the text as well as a function of the narrative. In my thesis I examine the protagonist’s (Van Veen’s) philosophy on time – a theory that is both a reflection and recalibration of Bergson’s Duration. I then analyze the existence of Van’s memoir – including the photographs – within the text both to question his theory regarding time and also to show its fundamental flaws. Interestingly, some of the photographs that I examine in the novel appear earlier in Van’s memoir, as remembered, narrated events rather than posed or candid photographs. It is not until later in the text, and, by virtue of the memoir’s chronology, later in Van’s life, that photographs of specific, already-narrated events surface. The discrepancy between what Van remembers and the images that he sees for the first time in the photographs, in addition to seeing the physical photographs for the first time, complicate the temporal structure of the text as well as Van’s relation to Time and memory. It is through such complications that I explore the temporal complexities of Ada.
- ItemThe Beastly and the Beautiful: Grotesque Masking in Nabokov's Lolita(2011) O'Brien, Kyle; Benston, Kimberly W.
- ItemToward an Architectural Literature and a Literary Architecture: Reflections on Kahn, Nabokov and Borges(2002) Carr, Jamie; Garcia-Castro, Ramon; Roberts, Deborah H.