Questions, Resources, and General Banter - Lectures on Literature

[Jim]

This collection of Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature is taken from his years teaching at Wellesley and Cornell. The book was first published in 1980, a few years after his death.

Although we don’t have time to read the seven novels covered in these lectures, please join in the discussion for books you’re familiar with.


Feel free to use this thread to ask questions and post links to resources for Vladimir Nabokov and Lectures on Literature.

Also, if you’ve written a review of the book, please post a link to share with the group.

[Jim]

There is a short essay at the beginning of the book called "Good Readers and Good Writers" that's worth reading.

[Mala]

An interesting article on Nabokov as a professor!

Vladimir Nabokov:
An A from Nabokov by Edward Jay Epstein | The New York Review of Books
"He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines."

Here's the link:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

[Jim]

Mala wrote: "An interesting article on Nabokov as a professor!

Vladimir Nabokov:
An A from Nabokov by Edward Jay Epstein | The New York Review of Books
"He then described his requisites for reading the assigne..."

Fun story. Now I want to know the relation between Pushkin and Gogol...

I read somewhere that Thomas Pynchon attended Nabokov's lectures at Cornell (but I don't remember where I read that).