This NOSe will feature two more scholars, Julie Lesnoff and Anoushka Alexander-Rose, who have recently completed dissertations on Nabokov. Please see below for their bios, abstracts, and a Zoom link to the session.
Julie Lesnoff is a Research Associate at the CRAL (EHESS/CNRS) and PRISM (AMU/CNRS) laboratories. She holds a PhD in aesthetics from EHESS, Paris. She defended her doctoral dissertation on May 27,2025, under the supervision of Marie Bouchet and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. Her work focuses on the cinematic adaptation of metaphor, and more specifically on the case of metaphors in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita and their film adaptations by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne. Her current research extends to the cinema of David Lynch, which she studies through the prism of Vladimir Nabokov's work.
Abstract: This thesis looks at metaphor as a rhetorical tool in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita
(1955), and at the processes of cinematographic adaptation that enable these metaphors
to be recreated on screen in Stanley Kubrick’s film (MGM 1962) and Adrian Lyne’s film
(Patheì 1997). The main aim of this research is therefore to understand the extent to which
metaphors can be adapted to film. It is not a question of demonstrating how a metaphor
can exist in cinema, but how it can endure despite the various prisms through which it is
transformed. The choice of Nabokov’s Lolita is explained by the transmediality that runs through the
texts (particularly this novel and the screenplay he wrote for its adaptation) of an author
who claimed to ‘think in images’, not in language. The lines of research in this thesis
examine the novel and its two film adaptations in terms of perception, reception and
creation. The various transfers from the text medium to the film medium enable us to
understand how metaphors are (re)fabricated and then transmitted to an audience. This
transdisciplinary work is based on theoretical tools borrowed from aesthetics, literature,
film studies and the information and communication sciences.
Anoushka Alexander-Rose is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Heidelberg and research associate at the Winchester School of Art. Her current project explores the Wandering Jew and other migratory myths in the visual and literary arts and will culminate in an exhibition at the Winchester Gallery in 2027. She completed her PhD, ‘Vladimir Nabokov’s Jewish Muse’, in English at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton in July 2025, supervised by Devorah Baum and Claire Le Foll and examined by Leonid Livak and James Jordan. Additionally, she is involved in several research projects related to cultural heritage, minority representation, and diasporic arts. She has published on Vladimir Nabokov’s father and philosemitism, multiple book reviews in comparative literature and history, and a forthcoming article on the Wandering Jew.
Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov’s Jewish Muse
This thesis characterises Vladimir Nabokov’s engagement with Jewishness, offering a broad yet extensive perspective covering the author’s entire oeuvre, substantiated by granular close reading of individual characters and scenes. This reading is bolstered by archival findings and paratextual sources, as well as by paying keen attention to historical, literary, and political contexts that situate Nabokov amidst a wider and troubled tradition of representational challenges. I am guided by thinking which incorporates theories of the Jew through depictions of the body, gender, sex, and race, as well as reflecting on Jewish identity, defined as a cultural subject, victim of politics and history, and foil to other ethnic types. Thus, through the framework of the Jewish Muse, I demonstrate how Nabokov presents the Jew as the other (a term which I situate and problematise for my usage) in multiple ways, responding to and challenging binary thinking in both Jewish studies and existing Nabokov scholarship. Crucially, this approach revises various of the dominant assumptions about Nabokov as an author by elucidating a much neglected but essential leitmotif, thus contributing to wider studies concerned with the appropriation, pursuit, and representation of those deemed to be other. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of shibboleth I seek to characterise Nabokov’s literary pursuit of the Jew as one which reflects his own feelings of being an outsider, and his authorial desire to access and express the ungraspable. Via the types of ‘The Other’, ‘The Jewess’, ‘The Vulgarian’ and ‘The Helper’ I showcase the scope and diversity of Nabokov’s Jewish Muse in both his Russian and English texts.
Matt Roth is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://messiah.zoom.us/j/93305327130
Meeting ID: 933 0532 7130
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