/pdf/a-voice-of-disturbance-robert-coover-und-mythos-r1wfownfoe.pdf

A Voice of Disturbance - Robert Coover und Mythos

Juxtaposing the opening of The Gift 's second chapter with Speak, Memory 's account of Nabokov's first poem and Lolita 's couch scene reveals a surprising set of similarities. A preliminary study of these common points leads to some intriguing linkages and contradictions among Nabokov's roles as writer of fiction, autobiography, self-parody, and criticism. It also provides a new data set to be examined in light of the currently dominant critical paradigm, revises Nabokov's relations to other artists, and may even lead to consequences for his aesthetic theory.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nabokov_studies/v007/7.kuzmanovich.pdf

"Just as it was, or perhaps a little more perfect": Notes on Nabokov's Sources

Invitation to a decoding. Dostoevskij as subtext in Nabokov's Priglašenie na kazn‘

A Return to Nature - A Critique of the Pastoral in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native

I will read the novels politically, interpreting them as rhetorical narratives holding the power to challenge commonplace assumptions. I will apply the ideas put forward by James Phelan concerning the inherent rhetorical nature of narrative in fiction. I will also present Ann Rigney’s concept of cultural memory as an analytical tool for analysing the way in which memory and history have been politicised and how the material analysed offers a critique of that politicisation. I will contextualise the novels in the political, cultural and historiographic debates and political transformations in Northern Ireland.

A tipper full of skinned limbs : fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles

Priglashenie na Kazn' was written in 1934 and translated into English as Invitation to a Beheading by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov in 1959. In 1966 the book was reissued in Russian by Victor Press (Paris) with the expectation that Soviet tourists in Western Europe would be interested in a novel by Russia's most distinguished emigre author. Nabokov's writings are already well known and widely disseminated in Russian literary circles that keep in touch with literature abroad; but the ordinary Soviet reader probably knows little more of Vladimir Nabokov than the name. This preface, which appears in the Paris edition in Russian translation by M. Arnold Blokh, attempts to keep both sorts of Russian reader in mind and also to say something valid about Nabokov's importance for a reader of any nationality (or party) whatsoever. J. M.

A Russian Preface for Nabokov's "Beheading"

In Fall 1977 Novel published two condensed panel discussions-"In Defense of Authors" and "In Defense of Readers"-from its tenth anniversary conference on current trends in novel theory. Held at Brown on April 14-16, 1977, widely attended by students, academics, and townspeople, the conference was designed to bring together a distinguished group of critics and writers who might profitably consider the present state of fiction studies. To this group the editors of the journal addressed a working hypothesis: that fiction studies in England and America might be characterized, on the one hand, by the defense along many fronts of the human dimensions of the genre, and on the other, by more abstruse or more technical concerns, largely European in origin. Renewed interest in the author's presence or in reader reactions would be illustrative of the first tendency; hermeneutics, structuralism, and formalism of the second. Obviously the categories were too neat to account for the overlappings and convolutions of the tendencies themselves, or of anyone's critical thinking about them; and yet the tendencies were and are observable and worth discussion. The panel called "Character as a Lost Cause" was so entitled because, among recent defenses of the human dimensions of fiction-intrusive authors, unruly or wrongheaded readers-fictional characterization had until very recently received comparatively little critical attention; and because many contemporary novelists had in some sense written it off. The panelists themselves-Martin Price of Yale University, Julian Moynahan of Rutgers, Arnold Weinstein of Brown-and their moderator (and now editor) had all been engaged at one time or another in writing it back in again and were willing now to speak in its defense-even to deny its lostness. What follows is an edited version of their initial remarks and a condensed version of the discussion which they generated.

Character as a Lost Cause

In the spring of 1977 NOVEL sponsored a three-day conference whose comprehensive and exploratory nature is implicit in the title "Towards a Poetics of Fiction." The occasion, wide-ranging and lively, was attended by more than two-hundred auditors who joined with teachers, critical theorists, and practitioners of fiction. The mix, though internationally diverse, was unified by a common curiosity about-indeed by a fascination with-the storyteller's art that provided the ingredients for a savory and heady collation.1 Among the numerous panels on the stuff of fiction was one dealing with hermeneutics. John Erwin, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, presided. Sharing the speakers' table with him were three distinguished figures of the critical and creative establishment: Professor Emeritus Austin Warren of the University of Michigan, Yale Professor Geoffrey Hartman, and Rutgers Professor Julian Moynahan. Professor Warren is of course the much admired and respected coauthor (with Rene Wellek) of Theory of Literature. His writings include also: Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist, The Elder Henry James, Richard Crashaw, Rage for Order, New England Saints, The New England Conscience, Connections. Professor Hartman, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has written: The Unmediated Vision, Andre Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, The Fate of Reading. Professor Moynahan's critical books are: The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. His novels are Sisters and Brothers and Pairing Off. Following Professor Erwin's introductory remarks, Professor Warren recalled with urbanity and wisdom many of the trends in literary criticism that he himself had helped to formulate from the Thirties onward. As equally at ease with Metaphysical and Neo-Augustan theory as with the speculations of the contemporary Formalists, Hermeneuticians, and their kin, Professor Warren once again demonstrated why he has been so influential in the history of the international critical scene. Like the omniscient narrator of Tom Jones, and always the reliable one, Professor Warren tastefully set forth a "bill of fare to the feast" whose main courses he then left to be served up by Professors Hartman and Moynahan.

Hermeneutic Hesitation: A Dialogue between Geoffrey Hartman & Julian Moynahan

The British, who by and large invented the Industrial Revolution and urbanization as far back as the later eighteenth century and who are a large population inhabiting a relatively small, sea-locked land area, have not been a pastoral society strictly speaking for a very long time. But they have clung throughout their modern history to what Empson calls "the permanent tradition of the country," to an idea of themselves as indeed a people with immemorial rural roots and of a spiritual disposition that is at home among tall trees, clear streams, hunting fields and sheepfolds, ricks, roses and hedgerows. There is a pleasant, superficial side to this continuing illusion of the pastoral in Britain: seen in the persistent English cult of the domestic and the homely; in East End cockney families picnicking in Kew Gardens on a Sunday; in the tradition among the more prosperous classes of long weekends spent at country retreats; in the habit, among the less prosperous, of visiting great ducal estates made over by their enterprising owners into private zoos, fun fairs and tea houses; in the habit of vigorous love-making in broad daylight on the greensward of the London parks; in country sports, including the rather ferocious sports of fox hunting and greyhound coursing; in weekend gardening, which, according to a recent survey, is the only hobby of some 22,000,000 Britons. There is also a less pleasant, though still superficial side to the illusion. The reactionary and xenophobic politics of the Little Englanders, most recently under the leadership of Enoch Powell, are often fueled by sentimental ideas about preservation of the English rural establishment and English nature. It is the same impulse that makes small suburban property owners mortar sharp pieces of broken glass into the top of a garden wall and write letters to the newspapers demanding that Britain stay out of the Common Market in order to protect the British farmer, who is at present down to 3% of the general population and produces at a level of daunting technical efficiency that needs little protection from competition by the peasant agriculturalists of the continent.

Julian Moynahan

Papers

A Russian Preface for Nabokov's "Beheading"

Character as a Lost Cause

Hermeneutic Hesitation: A Dialogue between Geoffrey Hartman & Julian Moynahan

Pastoralism as Culture and Counter-Culture in English Fiction, 1800-1928: From a View to a Death