Apophenia: the Postmodern Trap in Auster's Fictions
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Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's Work | Books | the Guardian
Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's work | Books | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-naboko... The problem with Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novella, The Original of Laura, is being published despite the author's instructions that it be destroyed after his death. Martin Amis confronts the tortuous questions posed by a genius in decline Martin Amis The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009 larger | smaller Vladimir Nabokov in Switzerland, in about 1975. Photograph: Horst Tappe/Getty Images Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974: The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) a Novel in Fragments (Penguin Modern Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov 304pp, Penguin Classics, £25 1 of 11 11/15/09 12:59 AM Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's work | Books | The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-naboko... Buy The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) a Novel in Fragments (Penguin Modern Classics) at the Guardian bookshop ". I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home." Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn't faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov's fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is sadistically fickle). -
Iconographic Architecture As Signs and Symbols in Dubai
ICONOGRAPHIC ARCHITECTURE AS SIGNS AND SYMBOLS IN DUBAI HARPREET SETH Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON 2013 i ICONOGRAPHIC ARCHITECTURE AS SIGNS AND SYMBOLS IN DUBAI By Harpreet Seth B.Arch., M.Arch. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhmapton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Technology (STECH) Department of Architecture and Design University of Wolverhampton February 2013 This work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body whether for the purpose of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless otherwise indicated). Save for any express acknowledgements, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and no other person. The right of Harpreet Seth to be identified as the author of this work is asserted in accordance with ss.77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. At this date copyright is owned by the author. Signature (Harpreet Seth) Date 16 / 03/ 2013 Mrs. Harpreet Seth (M.Arch.) Iconic Architecture in Dubai as Signs and Symbols February 2013 ii Abstract This study seeks to investigate the impact of architectural icons on the cities that they are built in, especially those in Dubai to understand the perceptions and associations of ordinary people with these icons, thus analysing their impact on the quality of life in the city. This is an important study with the advent of ‘iconism’ in architecture that has a growing acceptance and demand, wherein the status of a piece of architecture is predetermined as an icon by the media and not necessarily by the people. -
Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darne
Networks of Displacement: Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darnell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Michael Darnell All rights reserved ABSTRACT Networks of Displacement: Genealogy, Nationality, and Ambivalence in Works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart Michael Darnell In this dissertation I examine Vladimir Nabokov’s and Gary Shteyngart’s use of family metaphors to manage intersecting Russian and American literary and cultural continuities. Both authors fashion their relationships to literary predecessors and common cultural narratives in terms of disrupted filial relationships, describing both an attachment to the conservative narratives of the nation and a desire to move beyond their rigid structure. I articulate this ambivalence as a productive state of transnational subjecthood that allows these authors to navigate apparently oppositional national identities. Central to this reorientation is a critique of the hierarchical schema of the national canon, which frames literary culture as a determinative series of authoritative relationships. By reimagining these relations as part of a branching network of co-constituting associations, we open the space for transnational subjects to move within and overlap these networks. Table of Contents Introduction……………..................………………………………..…......................…....1 Chapter 1. Emigration -
A Jeweler's Eye
A Jeweler's Eye Date: October 29, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By John Updike; Lead: THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV Edited by Dmitri Nabokov. 659 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Text: RETURN trips to Paradise are risky. The prose of Vladimir Nabokov did loom as a paradise for me when I began to read, in The New Yorker more than 40 years ago, the reminiscences that became chapters of "Speak, Memory" (1951) and the short stories about the touching Russian emigre professor Timofey Pnin, eventually collected in the quasi novel "Pnin" (1957). What startling beauty of phrase, twists of thought, depths of sorrow and bursts of wit! -- this was a rainbow prose that made most others look flat and gray. "Lolita" sensationally followed in 1958, and I settled into an enraptured readership as, capitalizing upon this breakthrough into best- sellerdom, the exquisite but industrious author mingled new productions in his adopted English with lovingly supervised translations from his large oeuvre in his native Russian. The publication now, 18 years after Nabokov's death, of his collected stories, under the editorship of his son and favorite translator, Dmitri Nabokov, offered a threat as well as a treat: a threat, that is, to dull and dampen a faithful reader's old ardor with a ponderous assembly of short fiction originally consumed in the four handy collections, of 13 items each, which the senior Nabokov had issued while alive. And, in truth, "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" is not an easy read -- hard to hold, and rather dense and rich for systematic, consecutive perusal. -
Nabokov: the Artist Against Caprice
INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photo graph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the original text directly from the copy submitted. Thus, some dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from a computer printer. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyrighted material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are re produced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each oversize page is available as one exposure on a standard 35 mm slide or as a 17" x 23" black and white photographic print for an additional charge. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. 35 mm slides or 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. illAccessing the UMIWorld's Information since 1938 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA Order Number 88X6357 Nabokov: The artist against caprice Parker, Mary Elizabeth, Ph.D. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1987 Copyright ©1987 by Parker, Mary Elizabeth. All rights reserved. U MI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 NABOKOV: THE ARTIST AGAINST CAPRICE by Mary Elizabeth Parker A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 1987 Approved by Dissertation Advisor APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. -
Signs and Symbols, Or the Nabokovian Unconscious
Signs and Symbols, or the Nabokovian Unconscious Sigi Jottkandt, in RABATE, J.M. (Ed.). (2019). Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002727 “In the beginning was the telephone. We can hear the telephone constantly ringing, this coup de telephone which plays on figures that are apparently random but about which there is so much to say.” - Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone Since its first publication in The New Yorker in 1948, Nabokov's short story “Signs and Symbols” has become one of his most critically celebrated, if famously cryptic, tales. This is largely due to a suggestion Nabokov made to his editor, Katherine A. White, that the story contains an encoded meaning. As Nabokov famously explained, “Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters” are texts in which “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (Nabokov, Selected Letters 117). But while Nabokov, also famously, divulged the secret of “The Vane Sisters” as an acrostic message encrypted in the first letters of each sentence in the final paragraph, – “Icicles by Cynthia, Meter from me. Sybil” – the “second (main) story” of “Signs and Symbols” remains as yet undeciphered despite the best efforts of the critical tradition.1 The critical detective work focuses on the identity behind the third telephone call. As is well known, “Signs and Symbols” ends with three phone calls – two wrong numbers and a third unanswered one that rings off the tale. In the first two, a girl's -
The Quill and the Scalpel
The Quill and the Scalpel The Quill and the Scalpel N AB O K O V’ S A R T A N D T H E W O RLD S O F S C IEN C E Stephen H. Blackwell T H E O H I O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E ss | C O L U MB us Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blackwell, Stephen H. (Stephen Hardwick), 1965– The quill and the scalpel : Nabokov’s art and the worlds of science / Stephen H. Blackwell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1099-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9197-9 (cd-rom) 1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art and science. 3. Sci- ence—Philosophy. 4. Science and the humanities. I. Title. PS3527.A15Z63 2009 813.'54—dc22 2009012103 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1099-4) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9197-9) Cover design by Mia Risberg Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Aleka, Timothy, and Gabriel I’ve drawn my scalpel through spacetime, space being the tumor, which I assign to the slops. -
Articolo Commentato / Discussion Article
01Meschiari.qxp:Layout 1 9-11-2009 8:39 Pagina 181 Articolo commentato / Discussion article Roots of the Savage Mind. Apophenia and Imagination as Cognitive Process di MATTEO MESCHIARI commenti di FRANCESCO BENOZZO , P ETER BRUGGER , NICLAS BURENHULT , A LESSANDRO MANCUSO con una replica dell’autore 01Meschiari.qxp:Layout 1 9-11-2009 8:39 Pagina 182 01Meschiari.qxp:Layout 1 9-11-2009 8:39 Pagina 183 Roots of the Savage Mind. Apophenia and Imagination as Cognitive Process by MATTEO MESCHIARI The dynamic of pursuit and escape is the great sculptor of brains Paul Shepard [1998b: 6] Abstract Questo articolo discute e sviluppa la Landscape Mind Theory (LMT) che l’autore ha pre - cedentemente formulato. Utilizzando un’ampia scelta di esempi etnografici e le recenti acquisizioni delle neuroscienze, viene esplorato il ruolo del paesaggio e dell’ecosistema nel modellare le strutture cognitive di Homo sapiens sapiens . L’analisi si concentra in par - ticolare sulle culture di caccia e raccolta, e mostra come la fenomenologia venatoria da un lato e le attività intellettuali e simboliche rivolte all’ambiente dall’altro siano legate tra loro da fattori evoluzionistici e culturali. Un rilievo particolare viene dato alle pro - duzioni immaginative e linguistiche dei cacciatori-raccoglitori. [Parole chiave : cacciatori-raccoglitori - processi cognitivi - apofenia - caccia - Landsca - pe Mind Theory (LMT)] This article discusses and develops the Landscape Mind Theory (LMT) that the author previously formulated. Using numerous ethnographic examples and recent research in neuroscience, he explores the role of landscape and the ecosystem in the shaping of cog - nitive processes in Homo sapiens sapiens . -
Unreliable Narration in Vladimir Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters
Ministry of Higher Education And Scientific Research University of Al-Qadissiya College of Education Department of English Unreliable Narration in Vladimir Nabokov’s "The Vane Sisters” Submitted By Fatima Haider Nour Riad Supervised By Prof. Basim Al - Ghizawi To our dear parents for their love, patience, encouragement, and help. ii Acknowledgements This paper would not have been achieved without, guidance, advice, help and encouragement from oue supervisor Prof. Basim Al - Ghizawi who supports me to finish this paper. Also we would like to express our deepest gratitude to our friends for their support. To each and every one of above , we extend our deepest appreciation . iii Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Contents iv Abstract v Chapter One Unreliable Narration History 1 Chapter Two Unreliable Narration in "The Vane Sisters” 6 Conclusion 12 References 14 iv Abstract The focus of this paper is on a further investigation into the growing area of research in the idea of unreliability in literary studies. The paper seeks to examine the issue of unreliability with reference to "The Vane Sisters" The first part of the paper provides an overview of the contrasted key theoretical investigations into the concept of unreliability, and in the second part, we have made an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s "The Vane Sisters" by applying the ideas of unreliability. There is a conclusion which sums up the findings of the study. v Chapter One Unreliable Narration History Unreliable narration is a storytelling technique which requires some work on the part of the reader, trying to work out how much of the story is true and how much is subjective, or an outright lie. -
Kafka's Reality and Nabokov's Fantasy. on Dwarves, Saints, Beetles, Symbolism, and Genius
LELAND DE LADURANTAYE Kafka's Reality and Nabokov's Fantasy. On Dwarves, Saints, Beetles, Symbolism, and Genius 1. The Metamorphosis It is not difficult to hear echoes of Kafkan steps in the early works of Vladimir Nabokov. Critics have detected faint echoes in his early Russian novels The Eye (1930) and Despair (1933) (see Hyde 104, 109; and Foster) and more definite sounds in Invitation to a Beheading (1938). In the latter novel, a harmless hero in an abstracted world is interred in a castle, brought before an incomprehensible tribunal, and charged with the vaguest of crimes ("Gnostic turpitude"). This the- matic similarity was strong enough for Nabokov to protest in a 1959 foreword to the English translation of the novel that he had not read Kafka until after he wrote it (Invitation 6). When asked about the matter in an interview ten years later, he replied: "I do not know German and so could not read Kafka before the nineteen thirties when his La metamorphose appeared in La nouvelle revue fran- faise, and by that time many of my so-called 'kafkaesque' stories had already been published" {Strong Opinions 151-52). In Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel Nabokov wrote in America, a beede- shaped bootjack is referred to as Gregoire (the name Kafka's protagonist bears in La metamorphose), and, more to the Kafkan point, the novel not only includes a miraculous transformation in its closing lines, but also depicts a nightmarish world of absurd bureaucracy that at certain shadowy moments recalls Kafka (Bend Sinister 33-34; cf. -
•CM-3 Master of Arts
DEATH AND POSTERITY AS A MATTER OF STYLE A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University A5 In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree •CM-3 Master of Arts In English: Literature by Edward Joseph Charlberg San Francisco, California May 2016 Copyright by Edward Joseph Charlberg 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Death and Posterity as a Matter of Style by Edward Joseph Charlberg, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. Professor Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D. Associate Professor DEATH AND POSTERITY AS A MATTER OF STYLE Edward Joseph Charlberg San Francisco, California 2016 Vladimir Vladimirovish Nabokov sought to distance himself from his works by first utilizing the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin and ultimately through a hall of mirrors created by three personae: (1) a Historical Nabokov, (2) an Authorial Nabokov, and (3) Nabokov the Reader. Through close readings of Nabokov’s final three novels (Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!, and The Original o f Laura) we find the Authorial Nabokov’s pronouncements to be illusions designed to conceal the Authorial Nabokov’s creation of fantasies in order to explore the concerns of the Historical Nabokov, intended to be interpreted by Nabokov the Reader. This reveals that while the fictions may be intended for Nabokov the Reader, the human concerns that shine through allow us to see more of the Historical Nabokov in the fictions of the Authorial Nabokov than either would have ever liked to admit. -
The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov
The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov Leland de la Durantaye I. Cruelty FEW OF NABOKOV’S READERS have begrudged him their admiration, but many their affection. Asked in 1959 whether he felt that the novel was then traversing a ‘crisis’, Italo Calvino responded that it was not, and pointed to the recently published Lolita as proof.1 Many years later, Calvino was to restate his admiration, but this time accompanied by an aside. He remarked that Nabokov was ‘truly a genius, one of the greatest writers of the century and one of the people in whom I most recognise myself’, and that, ‘if I had to name the author who has most influenced me these last years and who I’ve preferred above all others, I would answer: Vladimir Nabokov’ Calvino goes so far as to credit Nabokov with having, ‘invented an English of extraordinary richness’. Despite this highest of praise, however, Calvino appends to his appreciation that, as a writer, Nabokov possessed ‘an extraordinary cynicism and a formidable cruelty’.2 1 ‘Ecco una nostra lettura recente: Lolita. La virtù di questo libro è che può esser letto contemporaneamente su molti piani: storia lirica, poema allegorico dell’America, divertimento linguistico, divagazione saggistica su un tema-pretesto, ecc . [Calvino’s ellipses] Per questo Lolita è un bel libro: per il suo esser tante cose insieme, il suo riuscir a muovere la nostra attenzione in infinite direzioni contempo- raneamente.’ Italo Calvino, Saggi 1945–1985, ed. Mario Barenghi, 2 vols (Milan 1995) i. 1524. 2 ‘veramente un grande genio, une dei più grandi scrittori del secolo e una delle persone in cui mi riconosco di più .