Abstract
Focusing on visual arts in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, this chapter seeks to examine the intricate relationship of photography and death in Nabokov’s novels. Borrowing from Derrida’s “spectropoetics” in Specters of Marx and relying on Barthes’s reflections on photography in Camera Lucida it aims first to show how photographic references disseminate their lethal function in the text that surrounds them. This preliminary analysis is then used to discuss the stake of the “photogenic” presence of Humbert’s mother in Lolita.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Appel Jr., Alfred. 1974. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1980. Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography. Translated R. Howard. London: Vintage Books, 2000.
Bazin, André. 1960. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly 13 (4): 4–9.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. Photography, a Middle-Brow Art. Translated Shaun Whiteside. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Cash, Connall. 2010. Picturing Memory, Puncturing Vision: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. In The Goalkeeper: Nabokov Almanac, ed. Y. Leving, 124–152. Boston: Academic Studies Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée.
Dyer, Geoff. 2010. Foreword. In Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, ed. Roland Barthes, ix–xix. New York: Hill & Wang.
Morlan, Anna. 2010. A ‘Safely Solipsized’ Life: Lolita as Autobiography Revisited. Miranda 3. http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1673. Accessed 21 December 2018.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947. Bend Sinister. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. 1955. Lolita. In The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. Revised and Updated, New York: Vintage, 1991.
———. 1957. Pnin. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. 1962. Pale Fire. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. 1966. Speak Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. 1970. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw Hill.
———. 1972. Transparent Things. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989.
———. 1995. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
———. 2008. The Original of Laura. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
Petit, Laurence. 2009. Speak, Photographs? Visual Transparency and Verbal Opacity in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Nabokov Online Journal III. http://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/368. Accessed 1 March 2019.
Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. Reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Wood, Michael. 1998. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chupin, Y. (2020). A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s Fiction. In: Bouchet, M., Loison-Charles, J., Poulin, I. (eds) The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45405-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45406-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)