Liberating Nabokov: From Critical Approaches to Textual Discoveries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the idea of liberation in Nabokov studies from a variety of interrelated perspectives, including the biographical, political, philosophical, textual, metatextual, critical, and archival. In line with the recent shift towards undermining the writer’s monumental presence in Nabokov scholarship, authors of the proposed papers deviate from the narrow paradigm of “good reading” Nabokov himself professed and prescribed. While focusing on the subject of liberation itself, they also perform a liberation from Nabokov’s authority, which Nabokov himself admitted to being that of a dictator in an interview from 1966. Nabokov’s claims about political and creative freedom are studied in light of the limits he saw as restricting those freedoms; his representation of death in Invitation to a Beheading is matched up against a parallel narrative of birth and re-birth in the same novel that proves to have possibly unintended biographical echoes; his most controversial novel, Lolita, is reexamined in light of the discarded drafts and encrypted notes that went into its making and have been preserved in Nabokov’s archives. Together, these papers address a series of enduring Nabokovian controversies both by subverting the authorial perspective and recognizing its lasting impact.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Matthew Philip Walker, Middlebury College

Papers

• Mapping the Impermissible in Vladimir Nabokov - Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton U (Canada)

• Nabokov's Invitation to a (Re)Birthing - Sara Pankenier Weld, UC Santa Barbara

• Lolita at Large: De-Scripting Nabokov’s Notes - Olga Yurievna Voronina, Bard College

Discussant

• Stephen Blackwell, U of Tennessee