32212 Hauptseminar

Heinz Ickstadt

Versions of Literary Modernism:
Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov

Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, although different in their narrative styles and projects, are nevertheless similar in their dedication to an idea of Art conceived of as an aesthetically ordered counter-world, formed and set against (yet also related to) the chaos, "the howling desert", of experience and history.

Both were regarded by their contemporaries as ’masters’ of the novel and at the same time as figures ’in-between’: James as between English and American culture, between the conventions of Victorianism and a modernism that he anticipated in his experiments with narrative perspective; Nabokov as a literary figure between several cultures, languages, and literary traditions, but also as a modernist writer who anticipated postmodernism in his playful blurring of the borderline between reality and fiction and in the intertextual weaving of his texts.

The seminar will discuss and compare narratives James wrote in the 1890s and some of Nabokov’s ’American’ fictions. A similar course will be taught at the American Institute of the University of Warsaw (by Dr. Agnieszka Graff). Toward the end of the semester there will be a symposium in Berlin where students from both seminars present papers.

Texts:

• Henry James: "The Figure in the Carpet", What Maisy Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898).



• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962).

Requirements: Regular participation, willingness to accept an oral assignment, written paper.