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Palgrave Macmillan

Vladimir Nabokov

Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels

  • Book
  • © 2007

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Introduction

  2. The Problem of Seeing

  3. Deluded Minds, Deluded Worlds

Keywords

About this book

Glynn provides a new reading of Vladimir Nabokov s work by seeking to challenge the notion that he was a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality. Glynn argues that Nabokov s epistemology was in fact anti-Symbolist and that this aligned him with both Bergsonism and Russian Formalism, which intellectual systems were themselves hostile to a Symbolist epistemology. Symbolism may be seen to devalue material reality by presenting it as a mere adumbration of a higher realm. Nabokov, however, valued the immediate material world and was creatively engaged by the tendency of the deluded mind to efface that reality.

Reviews

"This is a striking and original book. Glynn attacks the trend in criticism of Nabokov that reads his work as a Symbolist and instead suggests that a large part of the novelist s work is founded on a dynamic interaction with the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Henri Bergson. This study explores how Nabokov s project has been transformed by the philosophy of Shklovsky and Bergson into a fictional universe which is at once playful and serious, experimental yet rooted in the everyday, both engaged and moral, a convincing answer to the demeaning arguments that the writer is nothing more than a pure stylist." - Robert Lawson-Peebles, University of Exeter

About the author

MICHAEL GLYNN is Head of the English Department at the City College Plymouth, UK

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