Description
Book SynopsisThis book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Barbara Straumann''s close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt and explores the connections between language, imagination and exile. Invoking psychoanalysis as the principal discourse of dislocation, the book not only uses concepts such as ''screen memory'', ''family romance'', ''fantasy'' and ''the uncanny'' as hermeneutic foils, it also argues that, in their own ways, the arch-parodists Hitchcock and Nabokov are remarkably in tune with the images and tropes developed by Freud.
Trade ReviewWithin Nabokov criticism especially, effort has traditionally been concentrated on detective-style exegesis. This study offers a highly interesting alternative that provides a basis for a new area of debate in the future. -- Laurence Piercy, University of Sheffield European Journal of English Studies (EJES) Within Nabokov criticism especially, effort has traditionally been concentrated on detective-style exegesis. This study offers a highly interesting alternative that provides a basis for a new area of debate in the future.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Cross-mapping Hitchcock and Nabokov; Questions of Exile and Displacement; Home and Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov; Nabokov's Dislocations: Refiguring Loss and Exile in Speak, Memory; Chronophobia; Family Romance; Poetics of Memory; 'Aesthetic Bliss' and Its Allegorical Displacements in Lolita; Childhood Romance; Textual Relocations; Language to Infinity; Hitchcock's Wanderings: Inhabiting Feminine Suspicion; Traumatic Fantasy; Family Murder; Aesthetics of Overproximity; Wandering and Assimilation in North by Northwest; Mad Traveller; Oedipal Voyage; Language of Exile and Assimilation; Epilogue: Psychoanalytic Dislocation; Bibliography.
