Disenfranchised from America : reinventing language and love in Nabokov and Pynchon / Melissa Lam.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lam, Melissa.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977. Lolita.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Pynchon, Thomas. Crying of lot 49.

Pynchon, Thomas.

Physical Description:

xvii, 89 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham : University Press of America, [2009]

Summary:

Disenfranchised from America explores the ways in which Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon manipulate the fictional strategies of a novel in order to de-familiarize our perceptions of everyday objects and people. Estranging our regular everyday perceptions allows us to more pertinently and intensely examine the critical issues of morality and identity that have become exhausted and cliched with over-examination. Nabokov's Lolita preoccupies us with issues of morality, but the text also brings into question the nature of love and whether it is possible in our modern era, replete with self-conscious irony, to reinvent love and make it new again. In the same vein, The Crying Lot 49 by Pynchon compels us to re-register reality through a series of eye-opening guises and events that are potent with meaning but leave us estranged, full of unanswered questions and doubts. By reexamining America through an unfamiliar perspective, these novels allow us as readers to view the world anew. Through artful use of literary technique, these novels serve to interrogate our own relationships toward such cliched concepts as love, belonging, national identity, and finding a deeper sense of place or meaning.

Contents:

Section I Lolita

1 Trickery and Linguistic Device 3

2 Freud and American Suburbia 7

3 Defamiliarization and Landscape 15

4 The Underworld: America as Movie 19

5 The Resuscitation of the Romance Genre 23

6 Defamiliarization and Language 29

Section II The Crying of Lot 49

7 The Inside Outsider: Defamiliarization and the Narrator 41

8 Illegitimacy and Disruptive Imagination 47

9 W.A.S.T.E. Everywhere: Pynchon at the Movies 59

10 'The Direct Apocalyptic Word': Defamiliarization and Bakhtin 71.

ISBN:

9780761846192

0761846190

OCLC:

318877413