I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
The Nabokov Project
In his short essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, Vladimir Nabokov tells us not to read literature as anything so crude or polemical as the expression of a political view. Instead we should remember that ‘the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world’. Against tendencies of literary scholarship—the imperatives to contextualise, to thematise, to categorise—Nabokov encouraged his students at Wellesley College and Cornell University to treat the stories and novels of Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and others as intricate spaces constructed from language and obscured by translation, whose detailed exploration was the proper task of the reader.
The Nabokov Project takes up this meticulous approach to reading and returns to the only recordof the course on ‘Masters of European Fiction’ that he taught at Cornell University: the essay questions he set his students. Exam candidates were asked to respond to the cinematography of Bleak House, ‘Every character has his attribute, a kind of colored shadow that appears whenever the person appears. Integrate a list of these colored shadows into the list of characters in your copy of the book’; or to ‘Describe the opening and closing of doors’ in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’; or just to respond to the linguistic materialism of a text: ‘Ulysses is a fat book of more than two hundred and sixty thousand words. Discuss some of them.’
Participants in this project have chosen an essay question each as an invitation to reflect on the ways in which literary worlds can communicate with our own. Taking one question each as a generative constraint, each gives concrete form to an act of reading (or in one case not reading). Archie Wilson has created an audio collage of various readings of the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses which is accompanied by an audio/video output that uses a programme which translates the colours of the text’s pages into sound composition. Nabokov’s instruction to ‘Map the streets of Combray’ has provoked a piece of work from Sveta Antonova which defines the cartography of Proust’s work from the outside by insisting on using materials extraneous to the book such as tourist information. Isabella Eastwood has responded to the invitation to describe the ‘eyes, hands, hair and skin’ of Jane Austen’s Emma with a series of cut-ups taken from images of the many film productions of Emma and the text itself.
The Nabokov Project was inspired by the artist show of the same name that was initiated by Kate Briggs and Lucrezia Russo in 2013 (link). It took place at Falmouth University in Spring of 2015 and was co-curated by Gillian Wylde (Fine Art) and Ben Carver (English). The site will remain live until the end of May 2016.
In his short essay ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, Vladimir Nabokov tells us not to read literature as anything so crude or polemical as the expression of a political view. Instead we should remember that ‘the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world’. Against tendencies of literary scholarship—the imperatives to contextualise, to thematise, to categorise—Nabokov encouraged his students at Wellesley College and Cornell University to treat the stories and novels of Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and others as intricate spaces constructed from language and obscured by translation, whose detailed exploration was the proper task of the reader.
The Nabokov Project takes up this meticulous approach to reading and returns to the only recordof the course on ‘Masters of European Fiction’ that he taught at Cornell University: the essay questions he set his students. Exam candidates were asked to respond to the cinematography of Bleak House, ‘Every character has his attribute, a kind of colored shadow that appears whenever the person appears. Integrate a list of these colored shadows into the list of characters in your copy of the book’; or to ‘Describe the opening and closing of doors’ in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’; or just to respond to the linguistic materialism of a text: ‘Ulysses is a fat book of more than two hundred and sixty thousand words. Discuss some of them.’
Participants in this project have chosen an essay question each as an invitation to reflect on the ways in which literary worlds can communicate with our own. Taking one question each as a generative constraint, each gives concrete form to an act of reading (or in one case not reading). Archie Wilson has created an audio collage of various readings of the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses which is accompanied by an audio/video output that uses a programme which translates the colours of the text’s pages into sound composition. Nabokov’s instruction to ‘Map the streets of Combray’ has provoked a piece of work from Sveta Antonova which defines the cartography of Proust’s work from the outside by insisting on using materials extraneous to the book such as tourist information. Isabella Eastwood has responded to the invitation to describe the ‘eyes, hands, hair and skin’ of Jane Austen’s Emma with a series of cut-ups taken from images of the many film productions of Emma and the text itself.
The Nabokov Project was inspired by the artist show of the same name that was initiated by Kate Briggs and Lucrezia Russo in 2013 (link). It took place at Falmouth University in Spring of 2015 and was co-curated by Gillian Wylde (Fine Art) and Ben Carver (English). The site will remain live until the end of May 2016.
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