Marie Bouchet

Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès | UTM · EA Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS)

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 eroti...

The introduction to the collection of essays situates the volume within nabokovian scholarship, and highlights its originality, as the five senses’ importance in Nabokov’s poetics, aesthetics, ethics and politics has not been studied on such a scale. It notably recalls the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and telling of Nabo...

It is crucial to distinguish between neurological synesthesia (the brain condition that Nabokov had) and “literary” synesthesia, or metaphorical synesthesia—a quite preeminent term in literary studies. Nabokov’s “case” is a very interesting one, as he is a writer whose neural synesthesia is established, and whose texts teem with examples of literar...

Annotations du Roman Ada ou l'Ardeur

Nabokov avait initialement nommé sa célèbre héroïne « Juanita Dark », et pourtant la présence de Jeanne d’Arc dans Lolita semble s’être effacée au fil de l’écriture du roman. Cet article défend toutefois l’importance du motif de Jeanne d’Arc, car il s’inscrit dans un motif multiculturel central de l’œuvre de Nabokov, celui de la jeune martyre, qui...

https://ojs.parisnanterre.fr/index.php/latelier/article/view/541/778

This paper focuses upon intertextuality in Nabokov’s Lolita, but not through literary allusion. Instead, this study analyzes the way the author integrates non-literary material taken from post-World War 2 American mass culture into the textual fabric. Thanks to the preparatory notes to the novel kept at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Con...

This article sheds light on how Nabokov subverts the Ut Pictura Poesis tradition through his intermedial use of non-canonical pictorial references. These pictorial references are taken from popular culture and include commercial ads, amateur snapshots, or magazine pictures. The focus is on Lolita, for it is a highly intermedial work--a novel in whi...

In this essay, I examine the underside of the Haute Couture weave of words Nabokov tailored for his young heroines, by focusing upon the omnipresence of clothes and accessories in the portraits that recur throughout his works. Before embarking on this subject, I would like to delineate some important aspects of maiden characterization in Nabokov’s...

http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document3898.php

Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film (2010) appears like a documentary on the history of street art. It was made by the world-famous, though mysterious, street artist Banksy and, as its title indicates, it is characterized by a reflection on the transformation of street art, an illegal, nocturnal art form that made its way into museums and the...

Robert Wilson’s Video Portraits series (2004-2013, ongoing) displays a type of intericonic work which interweaves several layers of iconicity. Even if his first Video Portraits pictured famous and ordinary people and animals, it is when he lays his eyes upon celebrities that he almost systematically resorts to intericonic doubles. Robert Downey Jr....

Vladimir Nabokov was not only one of the major writers of the 20th century, but also a recognized entomologist, specializing in Lepidoptera, notably a family of butterflies called the Blues, which he completely reorganized. His findings and his research, despite a few corrections added in the 1990s, still hold true today, and while he named many bu...

L'activité intense de traduction et auto-traduction menée tout le long de la vie de Nabokov lui a donné une conscience aiguë de la manière dont les différentes langues qu’il maîtrisait partagent le monde dans leur lexique, leur syntaxe, leurs phonèmes, et explique également en partie l’épaisseur intertextuelle de son œuvre littéraire, tant dans les...

This article analyzes the uses and function of ekphrasis in Nabokov's short story "La Veneziana" by showing how Nabokov uses the ekphrastic topos to confront, on the surface, art and "reality" (a word Nabokov only used with quote marks), and more deeply, to foreground the concept of representation and celebrate the sublime lies of art.

Vladimir Nabokov était un homme «qui marchait dans l’image», bien qu’il n’ait jamais tenu une caméra ou un appareil photographique. En effet, à un journaliste qui lui demandait dans quelle langue l’écrivain trilingue pensait, il répondit qu’il ne pensait pas en langage, mais en images. Depuis les images projetées par la lanterne magique de son enfa...

Cette étude propose d’illustrer comment Nabokov, coupé de sa terre natale et métamorphosé en écrivain américain, utilisa l’hybridité comme principe créateur pour mettre au point ce qu’il appelait son anglais « privé », qui est si particulier. L’analyse se concentrera sur l’un des aspects frappants de l’hybridité langagière nabokovienne, l’insertion...

This paper contends that Nabokov, once severed from his native land and metamorphosed into an American writer, used hybridity as his creative principle in order to craft what he called his "private" English, which indeed made him a unique writer in American literature. This paper focuses on one particular aspect of Nabokov's linguistic hybridity, n...

A secret could be defined as “something kept hidden or unexplained”, or “something kept from the knowledge of others or shared only confidentially with a few”, as the Merriam-Webster puts it. From the point of view of the plot of Lolita, secret is thus a key-word: throughout his confessions, Humbert Humbert reveals how, throughout his life, he ende...

This paper explores some of the various mises en abyme and metatextual devices in Nabokov’s and Kubrick’s Lolita, so as to explore how such devices create a poetics of reflections, and themselves reflect the manner in which the relationship to the reader/spectator is engaged by the literary and filmic narratives. As underscored by Lucien Dallenbach...

The aim of this paper is to stress the importance of music and song in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and also in Kubrick’s interpretation of it in his film (1962). Indeed Kubrick’s adaptation does bring about, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, a “transcoding process” from the code of writing into the code of film (Hutcheon 7), which is itself multisemiotic, as...

Nabokov revised his works as he translated them and, on another plane, canon revisionism has been having its backlash and provoked other refracting waves. The purpose of the conference was to advance Nabokov studies through the discussion of how our view of Nabokov’s standing and his works today should be revised, especially after the publication o...

Briar Rose is a 1996 short novel, which unsurprisingly tells the story of a sleeping beauty, named Briar Rose, just like in the Brothers Grimm’s tale. Coover largely plays with the reader’s expectations and knowledge of the popular tale to compose his narrative. As many metafictional and postmodernist works, Briar Rose is an intertextual novel offe...

The terms “strange” and “stranger” derive from extraneus, a Latin word literally meaning “outside of”. This article proposes to examine the notions of distance and limit which shape the consciousness of a foreigner / outsider—Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov lost his native land when he was 18, and was condemned to remain a stranger in a foreign land. In...

America structures Nabokov’s most famous novel, Lolita. The novel provides a double mapping process: that of the desired body of the nymphet, and that of the vast country where one finds towns called Dolores and Lolita. In Lolita, the landscape is a projection of the heroine on a huge scale. The country and its metonymic nymphet share characterizat...

Le blanc relève d’une ambiguïté essentielle que reflètent les deux possibilités de sa traduction en anglais, « white » ou « blank ». En effet, l’anglais se distingue une fois de plus par la double ascendance qui caractérise son lexique. Le mot « white » vient du vieil anglais « hwit » et désigne le blanc en tant que nuance colorée (« the color of f...

Lolita is an ambiguous object of desire, whose "twofold nature," halfway between woman and child, constantly escapes Humbert's attempts to "fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets." Trying to fix the unfixable in words, Humbert develops different strategies to articulate his desire. Unable to provide a complete and stable picture of his bel...