The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works

by Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, Isabelle Poulin

Overview

This collection of essays focuses on a subject largely neglected in Nabokovian criticism—the importance and significance of the five senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, poetics, politics and aesthetics. This text analyzes the crucial role of the author’s synesthesia and multilingualism in relation to the five senses, as well as the sensual and erotic dimensions of sensoriality in his works. Each chapter provides a highly focused and sometimes provocative approach to the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and narrating of Nabokov’s memories and in his creative process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030454050
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	06/20/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	367
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marie Bouchet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse, France, and the author of Lolita: A Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, A Film by Stanley Kubrick (2009). She has co-edited two collections of essays on Lolita, and is in charge of the annotations to the novel for The Nabokovian.

Julie Loison-Charles is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Lille University, France, and has published a book on Nabokov’s use of foreign words (Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: mots étrangers et jeux de mots, 2016). She has organized several conferences on Nabokov.

Isabelle Poulin is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, and author of several books on Nabokov. Her latest are Poétiques du récit d’enfance: Benjamin, Sarraute et Nabokov (2012) and Le Transport romanesque. Le Roman comme espace de la traduction, de Nabokov à Rabelais (2017).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 “‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction”, Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, Isabelle Poulin

PART I The Role of the Senses in Nabokov’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics

Chapter 2 “Do the Senses Make Sense?”, Brian Boyd, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Chapter 3 “‘To breathe the dust of this painted life’. Modes of Engaging the Senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading”, Lilla Farmasi, University of Szeged, Hungary

Chapter 4 “Nabokov’s Visceral, Cerebral and Aesthetic Senses”, Michael Rodgers, West College, Scotland

Chapter 5 “Developing Transnational Style: Particularities of Nabokov’s Lexicon and Cognitive Frames in The Gift in Relation to the Five Senses”, Lyudmila Razumova, King’s College, London, UK

PART II Crossing Sensations and Languages: Multilingualism, Memory and Intermediality

Chapter 6 “An Eden of Sensations: The Five Senses in Speak, Memory”, Damien Mollaret, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France

Chapter 7 “A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s fiction”, Yannicke Chupin, University of Cergy Pontoise, France

Chapter 8 “Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can’t Make Sense”, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross, USA

Chapter 9 “Translating Taste and Switching Tongues”, Julie Loison-Charles, University of Lille, France

Chapter 10 “Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality”, Isabelle Poulin, University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, France

PART III Senses and the Body: from Pleasure to Displeasure

Chapter 11 “Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov”, Maurice Couturier, University of Nice, France

Chapter 12 “The ‘Eyes’ Have It: The Pleasures and Problems of Scopophilia in Nabokov’s Work”, Julian Connolly, University of Virginia, USA

Chapter 13 “The carmen in Nabokov’s Lolita”, Suzanne Fraysse, University of Aix-Marseille, France

Chapter 14 “‘I’d Like to Taste the Inside of Your Mouth’: The Mouth as Locus of Disgust in Nabokov’s Fiction”, Anastasia Tolstoy, University of Oxford, UK

 

 

PART IV Synesthesia and Multisensoriality

Chapter 15 “An Introduction to Synesthesia Via Vladimir Nabokov” Jean-Michel Hupé, Neuroscience Researcher, University of Toulouse, France

Chapter 16 “Neurological Synaesthesia vs Literary Synaesthesia: Can Nabokov Help Bridge the Gap?”, Marie Bouchet, University of Toulouse, France

Chapter 17 “Undulations and Vibrations, Tonalities and Harmonies: Nabokov, Acoustics and the Otherworld”, Sabine Metzger, Stuttgart University, Germany

Chapter 18 “Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: “Music” and Nabokov’s Quartet”, Kiyoko Magome, University of Tsukuba, Japan

Chapter 19 “‘Tactio has come of age’: the Tactile Sense in Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada”, Léopold Reigner, University of Rouen, France

Chapter 20 “Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory”, Nathalia Saliba Dias, Humboldt University, Germany

Chapter 21 “‘A Tactile Sensation is a Blind Spot’: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch”, Lara Delage-Toriel, University of Strasbourg, France

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Nabokov may not have believed in ‘reality,’ but he surely believed in the senses, which deliver us such reality as we have access to. The fine essays in this volume take us on a sometimes uncomfortably intimate journey through Nabokov's engagement with the body's physical senses, and how, for him, they produce the raw material for experience, imagination and art.” (Stephen Blackwell, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA)

“Though to his many passionate readers, Nabokov is ‘the high priest of sensuality and desire’ (Edmund White), scholars have been surprisingly slow to write about those qualities in his work. This collection takes up that challenge, offering a range of essays from senior figures in the world of Nabokov studies while also introducing exciting work from younger Nabokov scholars. The best work in this volume is not only about sight but touch, sound, taste, and smell, and the troubling relations of all these to one another, to memory, verbal sense, desire, and disgust.” (Thomas Karshan, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of East Anglia, UK, President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society)

Editorial Reviews

The wide range of sensory experience that this volume considers, alongside its extensive coverage of Nabokov’s work from the early stories to the last unfinished novel, makes it a valuable resource and provocative basis for further investigation.” (Barbara Wyllie, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 100 (3), July, 2022)

From the Publisher