Overview
Demonstrates the relationship between literature and cognitive science
Highlights aspects of Nabokov’s work related to his multilingualism, his personal history, and his experiences brought on by his émigré life
Considers the sensual aspects of Nabokov’s prose
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Table of contents (21 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Role of the Senses in Nabokov’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics
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Front Matter
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Crossing Sensations and Languages: Multilingualism, Memory and Intermediality
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Senses and the Body: From Pleasure to Displeasure
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Front Matter
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Synesthesia and Multisensoriality
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Keywords
About this book
This collection of essays focuses on a subject largely neglected in Nabokovian criticism—the importance and significance of the five senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, poetics, politics and aesthetics. This text analyzes the crucial role of the author’s synesthesia and multilingualism in relation to the five senses, as well as the sensual and erotic dimensions of sensoriality in his works. Each chapter provides a highly focused and sometimes provocative approach to the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and narrating of Nabokov’s memories and in his creative process.
Reviews
“Nabokov may not have believed in ‘reality,’ but he surely believed in the senses, which deliver us such reality as we have access to. The fine essays in this volume take us on a sometimes uncomfortably intimate journey through Nabokov's engagement with the body's physical senses, and how, for him, they produce the raw material for experience, imagination and art.” (Stephen Blackwell, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)
“Though to his many passionate readers, Nabokov is ‘the high priest of sensuality and desire’ (Edmund White), scholars have been surprisingly slow to write about those qualities in his work. This collection takes up that challenge, offering a range of essays from senior figures in the world of Nabokov studies while also introducing exciting work from younger Nabokov scholars. The best work in this volume is not only about sight but touch, sound, taste, and smell, and the troubling relations of all these to one another, to memory, verbal sense, desire, and disgust.” (Thomas Karshan, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of East Anglia, UK, President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society)Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Marie Bouchet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse, France, and the author of Lolita: A Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, A Film by Stanley Kubrick (2009). She has co-edited two collections of essays on Lolita, and is in charge of the annotations to the novel for The Nabokovian.
Julie Loison-Charles is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Lille University, France, and has published a book on Nabokov’s use of foreign words (Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: mots étrangers et jeux de mots, 2016). She has organized several conferences on Nabokov.
Isabelle Poulin is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, and author of several books on Nabokov. Her latest are Poétiques du récit d’enfance: Benjamin, Sarraute et Nabokov (2012) and Le Transport romanesque. Le Roman comme espace de la traduction, de Nabokov à Rabelais (2017).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works
Editors: Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, Isabelle Poulin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-45405-0Published: 20 June 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-45408-1Published: 21 June 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-45406-7Published: 19 June 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 367
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Postmodern Literature, Literary History