New Approaches to Nabokov’s Transparent Things

Session Submission Type: Lightning Round

Brief Description

This lightning round offers seven quick new takes on Nabokov’s Transparent Things, his 1972 novella that perplexed its first readers and continues to befuddle critics today (as Nabokov himself noted in his diary, “reviews oscillating between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred”). Riffing on the novella’s own multi-voiced structure, we will use the lightning round format to encounter this enigmatic text from a range of angles, revealing Nabokov’s preoccupations with time, materiality, memory, intertextuality, language, and the act of reading. In exploring these topics, we offer new close readings of several scenes, original connections between Transparent Things and other texts and disciplines, and unexpected approaches to this ironically transparent novella. We hope to draw fresh attention to Nabokov’s late work at a moment when his games of style have never seemed more superfluous—and thus, perhaps, never more essential.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Eric Naiman, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Translucent Things: Exploring a Butterfly with a Layered Literary Subtext - Stephen Blackwell, U of Tennessee

• The Biography of a Pencil: Nabokov's Things - Robyn Jensen, UC Berkeley

• End-of-Life Art: Nabokov and Old Age as a Creative Challenge - Sara Karpukhin, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Transparent Things, Re-reading, and the Good - Pavel Khazanov, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• Material Signifiers, Transparent Things: Nabokov and Large Language Models - Chloe Kitzinger, Columbia U

• Death Rehearsal: Revolting Objects in Nabokov’s 'Transparent Things' - Yuri Leving, Princeton U

• Journey to Hades or 'That Which is Unseen': Homer and Joyce in Transparent Things - Meghan Vicks, Independent Scholar