Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century

In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together.

＂It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives... this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov’s literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity.＂--Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University

＂[A] valuable study for any reader, teacher, scholar, or student of Nabokov. Amongst specific and urgent insights on the potential for digital methods, the relevance of Nabokov for students today, and how to reconcile issues of identity with an author who disavowed history and politics, are much wider and timeless questions of authorial control and the ability to access reality.＂--Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Nabokov Online Journal
Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.--Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review

Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.

SARA KARPUKHIN teaches as a lecturer in Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and pedagogy interests include Nabokov, contemporary eastern European art, the uses of history and aesthetics, cultural trauma, clarifying boundaries of individual action and agency, and queering the canon. She also writes fiction and essays.

JOSÉ V ERGARA is assistant professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship at Bryn Mawr College. He specializes in prose of the long twentieth century with an emphasis on experimental works. His first book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (NIU Press), examines the reception of Joyce’s fiction among Russian writers, including Vladimir Nabokov.