Nabokov's art of memory and European modernism / John Burt Foster, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Foster, John Burt, 1945-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977--Criticism and interpretation.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Modernism (Literature)--Europe.

Modernism (Literature).

European literature--History and criticism.

European literature.

Autobiographical memory in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (279 pages)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1993.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history. In a fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context, John Foster shows how this writer's art of memory intersects with early twentieth-century modernism. Tracing his interests in temporal perspective and the mnemonic image, in intertextual "reminiscences," and in individuality amid cultural multiplicity, the book begins with such early Russian novels as Mary, then treats his emerging art of memory from Laughter in the Dark to The Gift. After discussing the author's cultural repositioning in his first English novels, Foster turns to Nabokov's masterpiece as an artist of memory, the autobiography Speak, Memory, and ends with an epilogue on Pale Fire. As a cross-cultural overview of modernism, this book examines how Nabokov navigated among Proust and Bergson, Freud and Mann, and Joyce and Eliot. It also explores his response to Baudelaire and Nietzsche as theorists of modernity, and his sense of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin as modernist precursors. As an approach to Nabokov, the book reflects the heightened importance of autobiography in current literary study. Other critical issues addressed include Bakhtin's theory of intertextuality, deconstructive views of memory, Benjamin's modernism of memory, and Nabokov's assumptions about modernism as a concept.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON CITATIONS

Part One: Points of Departure

CHAPTER 1. The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography

CHAPTER 2. The Self-Defined Origins of an Artist of Memory

CHAPTER 3. The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory

Part Two: Toward France

CHAPTER 4. Encountering French Modernism

CHAPTER 5. From the Personal to the Intertextual

CHAPTER 6. Narrative between Art and Memory

CHAPTER 7. Memory, Modernism, and the Fictive Autobiographies

Part Three: In English

CHAPTER 8. Cultural Mobility and British Modernism

CHAPTER 9. Autobiographical Images

CHAPTER 10. The Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

EPILOGUE: Proust over T. S. Eliot in Pale Fire (1962)

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-253) and index.

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9786612751684

9781400802418

1400802415

9781282751682

1282751689

9781400820894

1400820898

9781400811632

1400811635

OCLC:

707068792