Subject
VN and Critical Enquiry (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
I think for Nabokov there was the "right" way to do it and the "wrong" way
to do it (as with everything else). He did not reject literary criticism
as a whole and there were several critics in emigration, for example (like
Yuly Aikhenvald and Khodasevich, whom he also loved as a poet), whom he
admired and respected. There were at times tensions between him and other
Cornell lit. professors some of whom believed, especially at first, that
he was not really a "serious" scholar of literature since he had no
advanced degrees in the subject. That probably occasioned a couple of
snide remarks here and there on his part. We all know that he objected to
certain schools of criticism (Freudian, Marxist, etc) and probably to the
whole notion that lit. crit. should be more like a science (which
may take "the spine" out of our appreciation -- except that Nabokov did
find science as creative and exciting as poetry) -- but that is not the
same as the wholesale rejection of "professionalism" in literary studies.
Galya Diment
I think for Nabokov there was the "right" way to do it and the "wrong" way
to do it (as with everything else). He did not reject literary criticism
as a whole and there were several critics in emigration, for example (like
Yuly Aikhenvald and Khodasevich, whom he also loved as a poet), whom he
admired and respected. There were at times tensions between him and other
Cornell lit. professors some of whom believed, especially at first, that
he was not really a "serious" scholar of literature since he had no
advanced degrees in the subject. That probably occasioned a couple of
snide remarks here and there on his part. We all know that he objected to
certain schools of criticism (Freudian, Marxist, etc) and probably to the
whole notion that lit. crit. should be more like a science (which
may take "the spine" out of our appreciation -- except that Nabokov did
find science as creative and exciting as poetry) -- but that is not the
same as the wholesale rejection of "professionalism" in literary studies.
Galya Diment