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In their virtuoso displays of literary talent, Nabokov and Kundera showcase the strategies that allow their protagonists to succeed as emigres: a creative fusing of past and present through the prism of the imagination.".
Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2018 im Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaft - Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Note: 2,0, Universität Erfurt, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Die Hausarbeit setzt sich mit dem Vergessen in Milan Kunderas Roman "Das Buch vom Lachen und Vergessen" auseinander. Der Roman beginnt auf der ersten Seite damit, die Thematik des Vergessens anhand eines Ereignisses aus der Tschechischen Geschichte einzuleiten. Beschrieben wird ein Moment im Februar 1948. Der kommunistische Führer Klement Gottwald tritt auf den Balkon eines Prager Barockpalais, um zu den Bürgern zu sprechen. Umringt von seinen Genossen, will er eine neue Ära ankündigen. In Kunderas Roman ist ein kalter Tag mit Schnee beschrieben. Gottwald trägt keine Mütze, sodass Vladimir Clementis, der neben ihm steht, seine Pelzmütze ab- und sie auf Gottwalds Kopf setzt. Diese historische Rede, begleitet von einem Akt der Menschenliebe, wurde auf einem Foto verewigt, das anschließend von der Propagandaabteilung in Hunderttausenden Exemplaren veröffentlicht wurde. Mit diesem Foto beginnt Kunderas Reflexion über die Rolle der fotografischen Dokumentation im kulturellen Gedächtnis, die immer wieder im Roman auftaucht.
This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. The collection features essays on such major writers as Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, and many others.
This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Barbara Straumann's close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt and explores the connections between language, imagination and exile. Invoking psychoanalysis as the principal discourse of dislocation, the book not only uses concepts such as 'screen memory', 'family romance', 'fantasy' and 'the uncanny' as hermeneutic foils, it also argues that, in their own ways, the arch-parodists Hitchcock and Nabokov are remarkably in tune with the images and tropes developed by Freud.
Karen von Kunes traces Milan Kundera’s creative ideas to a 1950 police report filed in Stalinist era Czechoslovakia. Demonstrating how this incident influenced Kundera’s literary trajectory and ultimately contributed to his acclaim as a writer, von Kunes interprets his work in a new way.
The third volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature" includes contributions that focus on the interplay between concepts of nation, national languages, and individual as well as collective identities. Because all literary communication happens within different kinds of power structures - linguistic, economic, political -, it often results in fascinating forms of hybridity. In the first of four thematic chapters, the papers investigate some of the ways in which discourses can establish modes of thinking, or how discourses are in turn controlled by active linguistic interventions, whether in the context of the patriarchy, war, colonialism, or political factions. The second thematic block is predominantly concerned with hybridity as an aspect of modern cultural identity, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of domestic life and in society at large. Closely related, a third series of papers focuses on writers and texts analysed from the vantage points of exile and exophony, as well as theoretical contributions to issues of terminology and what it means to talk about transcultural phenomena. Finally, a group of papers sheds light on more overtly violent power structures, mechanisms of exclusion, Totalitarianism, torture, and censorship, but also resistance to these forms of oppression. In addition to these chapters, the volume also collects a number of thematically related group sections from the ICLA congress, preserving their original context.
Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change engages with current debates in world literature over the past twenty years, addressing the nature of literary influence in centers and peripheries, the formation of transnational literary and pedagogical canons, and the role of translation and regionalism in how we relate to texts from around the globe. The author, Daniel Just, argues for a supranational but sub-global perspective of regions that emphasizes practical reasons for reading and focuses on the potential of literary texts to stimulate personal transformation in readers. One of the recurring dilemmas in these debates is the issue of delimitation of world literature. The trouble with the world as a frame of reference is that no single researcher is bound to have the in-depth knowledge and linguistic skills to discuss works from all countries. In response, this book revives literary theory and recasts it for the purposes of world literature, by making a case for the continuing relevance of literature in the age of new media. With the examples of fictional and nonfictional writings by Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal, Just shows that regional literatures offer differing methods of activating readers and thereby prompting personal change. This book would be of general interest to anyone who wants to explore personal change through literature but is particularly indispensable for literary professionals, researchers, and postgraduate and graduate students.
Whereas literary criticism has mainly oscillated between “the death of the author” (Barthes) and “the return of the author” (Couturier), this work suggests another perspective on authorship through an analysis of Nabokov’s prefaces. It is here argued that the author, being neither dead nor tyrannical, alternates between authoritative apparitions and receding disappearances in the double gesture of mastery without mastery which Derrida calls ‘exappropriation’, that is, a simultaneous attempt to appropriate one’s work, control it, have it under one’s power and expropriate it, losing control by loosening one’s grip. The intention of this is to approach, through one’s experience of reading and interpreting, the experience of self-effacement and impersonality pertaining to writing (cf. Blanchot). Prefaces are considered to be suitable places for the deconstruction of the classical image of Nabokov’s arrogance through the unearthing of his reserve and vulnerability. This work provides an account of the mere intuition (which, therefore, does not pretend to be a conclusive and definitive interpretation) of another image of Nabokov whose undeniable talent for deception seems in accordance with a need for discretion and secrecy.
