ilchinealach reviewed Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Review of 'Lectures on Literature' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
was surprised by how useless this was. all lectures open with complaints about what an historian or Marxist might be attentive to in the novels of Joyce, Flaubert or Austen. everyday life in late-colonial Ireland, the bourgeois mentalités of post-restoration France, the spectre the Napoleonic wars cast over the British middle class, all very basic and important themes in Ulysses, Madame Bovary and Mansfield Park, which is no way close us off from weighing up their aesthetic effects. Nabokov will have none of it. like all aesthetes he's working very very hard to shove everything that he regards as inappropriate for the reader or critic off the stage, while preaching a hollow doctrine of open-mindedness. Once he's buried socio-historical criticism, what does he have to offer us? Plot summary, and long, long quotations.