Adopting the modernist master Vladimir Nabokov as its guide, Nabokov in Motion: Modernity and Movement is an exploration of the radically changing social, historical, technological, and literary culture of the early 20th century, a time when modes of communication and transportation, especially, were changing society in drastic and profound ways.
Across seventy microchapters that are by turn serious, ironic, informative, and playful, and which take on topics such as automobiles, trains, airplanes, electricity, elevators, advertisements, telegraphs, and telephones, Yuri Leving offers new ways to understand Nabokov, Russian literature, and technology, modernism, and world material culture. Nabokov's writings are analyzed against a broad context of prose and poetry and from the point of view of what Leving calls the poetics of urbanism in literature.
Nabokov in Motion is a ground-breaking exploration of urban and material themes in literature and creates a complex and vibrant cultural fabric of which Nabokov is the master weaver.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/nabokov-in-motion-9781501386534/
Table of Contents
1. Chaos and Order
On the Poetics of Urbanism
Bodies and Texts
From Chaos to Order
The Urban Infrastructure, or “What Lies Beneath the Asphalt of the Text?”
The Resurrection of Electricity
Buildings, Stairs, Elevators
The Life of Things
The Telephone: A Conduit to the Other World
The Street Advertisement
The Shop Window of Metatexts
2. The Train as a New Locus of Myth Creation in Literature
The Topos of the Beginning
The Railroad as a Metaliterary Device
The Railroad Metaphor
Childhood and the Locomotive: A Model of the World
Toys and Reasons
The Station/Depot
The Hierarchy of Classes
The Existential Nature of the Journey by Rail
The Killing Power of the Train and Engine
The Train Wreck
Conductor to Immortality
The Mythology of the Train
The Esoteric Language of Trains
Train. Love. Fate
The Boredom of the Road
An Erotic Encounter
Violence and the Railroad
The Poetics of Description
Personification and Animation
Cliches: Russians and the Railroad
On the Road and Longing for Russia
Nabokov and Tsvetaeva: Synoptic Chart of a Dialog
The Beckoning Distance
Telegraph Poles
The View from the Train Window
The Underground
3. The Automobile in the Works of Nabokov: The Semantics of Driving and the Metaliterary Process
Auto vs. Train
The Ride to School
The Nabokovs' American Cars
Driving Experience
The Model
Car controls (a Novel on Wheels)
“Crossroads of Life”: The Symbolism of Driving
Worlds Unknown to Each Other
Metaphysics of the Garage
The Route Through the Text
The Automobile in the Landscape
Vehicular Mimicry
Sex in a Car
An Incident on the Street
Forewarnings
The Car Accident
Death of the HeroThe Furniture Truck
4. Symbolism of the Airplane: Breakthrough to Another Dimension
The Airplane Schematic
Flight in the Russian Periodical Press in the 1910s
“And the Steel Bird Will Fly”: The Airplane in Russian Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century
The Magic of Names
Insects, Birds, and Fish
On the Genesis and Context of Nabokov's Poem, “The Airplane”
The Music of Flight
Flight and Performance
The Aesthetics of Public Death
Death of the Pilot
War in the Air
The Futurist Thesaurus
Overcoming Gravity: Hymn to the Airplane
Flights, Dreaming, and Waking
The Last Station
Bibliography
Index
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