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- Title
A Search for the Viscous and Sawdust: (Mis)pronunciation in Nabokov's American Novels.
- Authors
Kager, Maria
- Abstract
Raised in an Anglophile family, Nabokov read English before he read Russian and called himself a "bilingual baby." Yet he has described his "Conradical" switch, from writing in Russian to writing in English, as a loss that was "exceedingly painful—like learning a new to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion." Nabokov centers the pain of his American exile on his linguistic experience, giving it a violent physical image. However, not only was this loss self-imposed, it also made his fiction richer and gave him a new literary topic, in as much as multilingualism and the exile's struggle with a new tongue become central themes in his American works. In "Pnin" and "Ada" especially, one can see the manner in which Nabokov develops characters in a way that mines linguistic complexities, and that would have been unthinkable had Nabokov not experienced a language switch himself.
- Subjects
MULTILINGUALISM; NABOKOV, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977; PRONUNCIATION; STORY plots; LINGUISTICS; MULTIDIALECTALISM
- Publication
Journal of Modern Literature, 2013, Vol 37, Issue 1, p77
- ISSN
0022-281X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/jmodelite.37.1.77