Notes on VN - Andrew Field - chapters 18 & 19

pp. 242-

• the art and/or artifice of the biographer
• 1940s wartime and after / modernism primarily between the wars / moral uncertainty in the British and American wartime novel
• other postwar satirists: Orwell, Lowry, Burgess, Spark, Waugh - in Britain
• Burroughs, Bellow, and Salinger in the US
• literary seriousness of modernism and postwar bourgeois-consumerist culture come together in the literary "performer" - e.g. Book of the Month Club, lost elitism
• tradition of the visiting European writer giving tours - e.g. Dickens

pp. 250-

• VN's literary influences / allies: Sterne, Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka
• VN is the "stranger" living a second life like the characters of his novels
• 252: when "gamesmanship" goes wrong
• persistent theme of totalitarianism and control
• 256-257: style of Speak, Memory and the elusiveness of Nabokov

pp. 258-

• importance of periodicals
• critics/writers mentioned: John Crowe Ransom; Mary McCarthy; Ramon Jakobson, Edmund Wilson, Diana Trilling
• New Critics and formalism
• New York Intellectuals - Trotskyists: art vs. politics
• New York Intellectuals (Trilling, McCarthy etc.) vs. popular front (liberalism vs. revolutionary left)
• McCarthyism + '60s student rebellion
• Edmund Wilson - frienship and relationship with critics, political differences p. 263
• 260: movement away from New Directions toward New Yorker (264-265) literary establishment

pp. 267-

• Nabokov and translation, philosophy, Pushkin
• 269: driving Mr. Nabokov
• the performative - theatrical professor
• 274: "affable severity" - suspected students of cheating
• VN in class (275)
• Kafka's "Metamorphosis"; butterflies 282-283
• 278: mysterious dislike of Dostoevsky (but like Rabelais)
• tennis
• trips to Colorado and Utah
• 286-287 - two linguistic dreams

some questions for first post due before 8/28

excerpt from biography VN.
excerpt from Strong Opinions
short article about "Good Readers..." from Literary Essays
these are all in the packet

Record your impressions, which may be quite indirect, of Nabokov the personality - his values about literature, his way of presenting himself as a public figure, and also his public persona: how he was received in the 1940s and '50s; the state of literary culture at that time; his status as a Russian, European (or Soviet) writer as it may have affected his reception.

From the interview: does his personality as a writer seem distinct from his character as a person? (We should remember that Nabokov customarily demanded questions in advance and wrote out his answers - so, he was probably not a spontaneous person.) Take note of his philosophy towards literature as represented in the interview.

Regarding the two chapters from the biography: I am always suspicious of biographers, who make it their business to construct the events of a life into a narrative - in this case, with commentary. Following the Nabokovian theme of the uncertainty of reality, how much can we trust the biographer? What are his probably sources? How does the narrative change the probable reality of VN's life as a literary lecturer, a writer of novels in English, a teacher, etc.?

It's August 14th

This is the first post as I look forward to fall's class on the great Lolita. All you (that means you, the class-members) will form blogs (use your first name + lolitaworld for the address in blogspot), and I will link them all here. I'll also post quotes from your posts + my summaries and additions to whatever went on in class, and my own thoughts about the texts. But, like I say, it's August 14th, and my vacation tan is fading. By the time "you" read this... well "Monday week," or, a week from this coming Monday.