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Theory of the Novel Instructors: Armstrong and Garréta Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a concept-driven argument in relation to other disciplinary discourses, especially critical theory. The ...

Vladimir Nabokov, the author of such masterpieces as 'Lolita' and 'Pale Fire,' was also an expert on butterflies who inadvertently helped give Luciano Pavarotti a career boost.

Lolita for the first time. I do. Freshman fall in college . It was 1989 and I had just turned 18. I curled up under my Laura Ashley knockoff floral comforter and cracked Lolita open for Professor Shepard’s English 101 class. The story moved swiftly. It was electrifying. I could not put it down. I did not question that it was Lolita who seduced Humbert first. I believed that Humbert loved her. I somehow did not catch most of her tears. Dare I admit “ Lo. Lee. Ta.” pinged me with romantic longing? Professor Shepard was young, mustached and uproariously funny. His recitation in class of H...

12 Rules for Life (2018), the narrative changes completely. Not since Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire has there been so much happening in that interesting borderland between the information the reader is given and the information the reader might apprehend; between order and chaos, as Peterson might put it. Pale Fire is presented as a long unfinished narrative poem by an American poet named John Shade, with a commentary by his colleague and neighbour, Charles Kinbote, an obscure, provincial academic from a strange northern land. But Kinbote appears to have wilfully misunderstood the poem and ...

The title of this post is my considered response to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It was my response when I first read it at twelve, and it’s still my response reading it today. Childhood’s End was published in 1953. It’s a truly classic science fiction novel, and a deeply influential one, and one of the books that makes Clarke’s reputation. It’s also a very very strange book. It does as much as any half dozen normal books, and all in 218 pages, and it does it by setting up expectations and completely overturning them, repeatedly.