Lectures on Literature

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547541325
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others—with an introduction by John Updike. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and other works. This volume also includes photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes, revealing his own edits, underlined passages, and more. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers Introduction by John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

Author: Ben Dhooge
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9789004352865
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
These essays focus on Nabokov's lectures on European and Russian literature at American universities, and shed new light on the relationship of his views on aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre.

Lectures on Literature

Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780156027762
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description

Nobel Lectures

Author:
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595584099
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
This is a collection in which meditations on imagination and the process of writing mingle with keen discussions of global affairs, geography and colonialism, cultural change, and the deeply lasting influences of the past.

Literature and the Taste of Knowledge

Author: Michael Wood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139446129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This 2005 book seeks to answer and to prolong these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction, with examples ranging from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats. Literature is a form of pretence. But every pretence could tilt us into the real, and many of them do. There is no safe place for the reader: no literalist's haven where fact is always fact; and no paradise of metaphor, where our poems, plays and novels have no truck at all with the harsh and shifting world.

On Rereading

Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674267478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

Literature Class, Berkeley 1980

Author: Julio Cortázar
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
A master class from the exhilarating writer Julio Cortázar “I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist, which means that in my work I look for solutions as problems arise.” So begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC Berkeley in 1980. These “classes” are as much reflections on Cortázar’s own writing career as they are about literature and the historical moment in which he lived. Covering such topics as “the writer’s path” (“while my aesthetic world view made me admire writers like Borges, I was able to open my eyes to the language of street slang, lunfardo…”) and “the fantastic” (“unbeknownst to me, the fantastic had become as acceptable, as possible and real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening”), Literature Class provides the warm and personal experience of sitting in a room with the great author. As Joaquin Marco stated in El Cultural, “exploring this course is to dive into Cortázar designing his own creations.… Essential for anyone reading or studying Cortázar, cronopio or not!”

Lectures on Russian Literature

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 1328508021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki’s “On the Rafts”; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. This volume also includes Nabokov’s lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes. “This volume . . . never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians.” —Anthony Burgess Introduction by Fredson Bowers

Literary Lectures

Author: BI Feiyu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000554082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
This book is a collection of lectures on literature given in top universities in China by Bi Feiyu, one of the country's best known writers. From the perspective of a novelist, the author revisits and interprets classic works by renowned writers, aiming to illuminate what constitutes a classic. The lectures explore works of classical and modern Chinese literature such as A Dream of Red Mansions, Water Margin and works by Lu Xun and Wang Zengqi, as well as world-famous writers such as Guy de Maupassant, V.S. Naipaul, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Hardy. The interpretation and criticism of the works goes beyond academic textual analysis, highlighting the instincts, writing experience and insights of a creative writer. Comparison is made between the literary elements of modernism and classical Chinese works, techniques of character shaping and plot development, thematic dimensions, narrative style, literary topos, literary aesthetics and the language of literature. These essays will appeal to readers interested in literature, literary criticism, Chinese literature and world classics.

Electronic Literature

Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, the author argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority.