Lectures on Literature

Lectures on Literature PDF

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2017-12-05

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0547541325

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The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others—with an introduction by John Updike. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and other works. This volume also includes photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes, revealing his own edits, underlined passages, and more. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers Introduction by John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature PDF

Author: Ben Dhooge

Publisher: Brill

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789004352865

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These essays focus on Nabokov's lectures on European and Russian literature at American universities, and shed new light on the relationship of his views on aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre.

Nobel Lectures

Nobel Lectures PDF

Author:

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1595584099

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This is a collection in which meditations on imagination and the process of writing mingle with keen discussions of global affairs, geography and colonialism, cultural change, and the deeply lasting influences of the past.

Literature and the Taste of Knowledge

Literature and the Taste of Knowledge PDF

Author: Michael Wood

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-09-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781139446129

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What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This 2005 book seeks to answer and to prolong these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction, with examples ranging from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats. Literature is a form of pretence. But every pretence could tilt us into the real, and many of them do. There is no safe place for the reader: no literalist's haven where fact is always fact; and no paradise of metaphor, where our poems, plays and novels have no truck at all with the harsh and shifting world.

Bech at Bay

Bech at Bay PDF

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2008-12-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307482065

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In this, the final volume in John Updike’s mock-heroic trilogy about the Jewish American writer Henry Bech, our hero is older but scarcely wiser. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive, lecherous, and self-absorbed, lost in a brave new literary world where his books are hyped by Swiss-owned conglomerates, showcased in chain stores attached to espresso bars, and returned to warehouses just three weeks later. In five chapters more startling and surreal than any that have come before, Bech presides over the American literary scene, enacts bloody revenge on his critics, and wins the world’s most coveted writing prize. It’s not easy being Henry Bech in the post-Gutenbergian world, but somebody has to do it, and he brings to the task his signature mixture of grit, spit, and ennui.

Lecture

Lecture PDF

Author: Mary Cappello

Publisher: Undelivered Lectures

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 9781945492426

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An energetic and irreverent essay on the forgotten art of the lecture, part of Transit's new Undelivered Lectures series.

Lectures on Dostoevsky

Lectures on Dostoevsky PDF

Author: Joseph Frank

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0691178968

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Poor Folk -- The Double -- The House of the Dead -- Notes from Underground -- Crime and Punishment -- The Idiot -- The Brothers Karamazov -- Appendix I: Selected Film Adaptations of Dostoevsky's Novels -- Appendix II: "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace.

On Rereading

On Rereading PDF

Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-11-18

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0674267478

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After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.