Nabokov and play

In December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov said that "everything in the world plays" and that "everything good in life - love, nature, the arts and domestic puns - is play." This thesis argues that, after December 1925, play was Nabokov's leading idea. Previous critics have spoken of Nabokov as a playful writer but have not drawn on the untranslated early Russian texts; have rarely discussed the actual games depicted in his novels; and have been vague on what it means to call Nabokov a playful writer. This thesis argues that Nabokov's novels after 1925 are all playful or game-like in different ways related to the games they depict, and become ever more radically so. It provides a chronological narrative of play as the evolving subject and style of Nabokov's writing. The first chapter discusses the sources of Nabokov's idea of aesthetic play in Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche. The second chapter traces the emergence of play in Nabokov's earliest writings, from 1918 to 1925, isolating the themes of play of self, play as make-believe, and play as violence. The third chapter looks at how in King, Queen, Knave (1927) and The Luzhin Defense (1930), Nabokov adopted the scheme of Lewis CarrolPs two Alice books, first using cards as an image of play and freedom, then chess as an image of rule and game. The fourth chapter shows that in the 1930s Nabokov wrote about play in contrast to work, and deals with Glory (1931), Despair (1934), Invitation to a Beheading (1935-6), and The Gift (1937-8; 1952). The fifth chapter is about free play in Nabokov's American writing, and emphasises the influence of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It covers Bend Sinister (1947), Speak, Memory (1951; 1967), Lolita (1955) and Ada (1969). The sixth chapter argues that Pale Fire (1962) belongs to the genre of the literary game, and is in complex intertextual relation to a previous literary game, Pope's Dunciad

Nabokov and play

In December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov said that "everything in the world plays" and that "everything good in life - love, nature, the arts and domestic puns - is play." This thesis argues that, after December 1925, play was Nabokov's leading idea. Previous critics have spoken of Nabokov as a playful writer but have not drawn on the untranslated early Russian texts; have rarely discussed the actual games depicted in his novels; and have been vague on what it means to call Nabokov a playful writer. This thesis argues that Nabokov's novels after 1925 are all playful or game-like in different ways related to the games they depict, and become ever more radically so. It provides a chronological narrative of play as the evolving subject and style of Nabokov's writing. The first chapter discusses the sources of Nabokov's idea of aesthetic play in Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche. The second chapter traces the emergence of play in Nabokov's earliest writings, from 1918 to 1925, isolating the themes of play of self, play as make-believe, and play as violence. The third chapter looks at how in King, Queen, Knave (1927) and The Luzhin Defense (1930), Nabokov adopted the scheme of Lewis CarrolPs two Alice books, first using cards as an image of play and freedom, then chess as an image of rule and game. The fourth chapter shows that in the 1930s Nabokov wrote about play in contrast to work, and deals with Glory (1931), Despair (1934), Invitation to a Beheading (1935-6), and The Gift (1937-8; 1952). The fifth chapter is about free play in Nabokov's American writing, and emphasises the influence of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It covers Bend Sinister (1947), Speak, Memory (1951; 1967), Lolita (1955) and Ada (1969). The sixth chapter argues that Pale Fire (1962) belongs to the genre of the literary game, and is in complex intertextual relation to a previous literary game, Pope's Dunciad.</p

What is an Essay?:Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf

In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing

Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau: John Updike, New Yorker Humorist

This chapter argues that New Yorker humorist John Updike was able to develop a fifth column position by drawing upon discontents already implicit in New Yorker humour. In its cartoons and light verse, Updike found a humorous cloud of secular anxiety which he could distil, with deceptive courtesy, into an internal critique of The New Yorker's culture. Cartoons showing savages acting like Manhattanites, or vice versa, betrayed a sense of the hidden affinity between civilisation and the discontented primitive instincts; cartoons about cannibals, the fearful possibility that life was a violent matter of survival; cartoons about urban anxiety, the false support of work, and works; while light verse playing on speed and slowness hinted at an underlying desire to see in a human life an unmodern norm of shape and pace.</p