Let's Recap the class Lit 431, quickly now

I liked Adam's quick recap of the class by ranking the Nabokov books that we've read. I think it is a good way to reflect. Of course there is no way to truly rank these against each other or anything else for that matter. (I will be posting my final term paper tomorrow after I've proofread it a couple more times. Then I present on Tuesday.)

4 - Lolita, this was my second encounter with the novel. I had read it only once before so that I could write a paper for my Literary Criticism class. Sutter suggested the novel for the paper, so I read it quickly so I could use it. I felt like I knew so much about this book having already written a paper on it, but little did I know how little I knew. Lolita is when I truly realized you never just read a Nabokov book, but rather you must be a re-reader. I learned that through my overconfidence approaching the novel. Vivian Darkbloom is Vladimis Nabokov....or is it the other way around? What do we do with the child molestation part of the novel? Is it an allegory of the artistic process? Do you think Humbert asked for this role? Maybe he never wanted to like little girls, he dreamed of being an astronaut. (picnic, lightening). Waterproof.

3 - Speak Memory, good read with clever writing. The most interested I've ever been in an autobiography. I love the insight into the mysterious Nabokov, although presented of himself by himself. I realize he has a certain slant on things. We learned not to look lazily at things and look at a photograph the way Nabokov might, seeing the divine detail in everything. We thought about our earliest childhood memory, hopefully at a pure image, an experience before it had labels. Christina's blog has a good example of this.

2 - Pale Fire, I had no idea what to expect with this novel. I was under the impression it might be a bit boring because it was just about a guy commenting on another guy's poem. This is called a novel, but really it just looked like a poem being explicated. I was so pleasantly suprised at how much I enjoyed this. I read this side by side with Sutter. And we fell in love with the pedantic Kinbote and I genuinely felt for Shade and the loss of Hazel. This is when I started to notice a deeper experience to Nabokov's novels. Everyone is a thief, and like the moon can't help but take the silvery light from the sun, we all can't help but take our material from everything that surrounds us. Nothing is original....perhaps. I also had never seen a waxwing bird before, and really very beautiful with their black mask. Lemniscate (Bloom and Stephen). Timon of Athens, I had never heard of that Shakespeare play before. I watched the Prisoner of Zenda. This novel seemed to have so much more going on than I could have EVER imagined.

1- Transparent Things, I can't wait to sit down and read this again. and then again. Just because it is short does not mean it's a fast read. It was by far the most interesting to me. The way the past, present and future were wound together, narrators who were characters who died in the novel narrating Hugh Persons's life.....you person. The multiple narrators and the levels of narration were at first very confusing, but as we talked in class things clicked! Armande was my favorite character, perhaps I just like her name. somnambulism. And the most interesting of all: mysterious mental manuever.


Thank you Dr. Sexson, our professor and psychopompos for the class. We quite literally would never have made it this far without you....ever.