Subject
Re: Italics in PF index
From
Date
Body
Matthew Roth wrote: "...thanks and admiration to Jerry for his thoughts on teaching PF. I'm guessing he could stand in for me in my lit courses a lot more capably than I could stand in for him in physics."
Although I also have a long experience as a teacher, I must acknowledge my total incapacity to teach either English Lit. or Physics, even in Kindergarten. And yet, I have one suggestion to offer to Matthew Roth.
I'll use an example: Yesterday I wrote about VN's poem ( the one about "ex Ponto") that I considered a fragment from a long song of exile. Independently, Giulia playfully brought up a line from Goethe connected to another nostalgic song ( "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt")*.
This small "coincidence" illustrates a backbone of nostalgia and loss, in Nabokov, that may at times be felt whatever American novel of his we pick up to read.
Nabokov complained about Joyce's excess of "verbal thought" and indicated a dimension of "thinking with images, not words"... Nabokov students, imho, should learn the Keatsian advice of " heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter" to practice, with Nabokov, at hearing both...
There are several hidden themes which shine through in irregular places and that depend on the reader's momentary mood ( these effects create a "poltergeist" effect).
I think this is one of the multiple experiences with feelings Nabokov students must learn to let rise in them: the various and sonorous "Leitmotif" ( Leitmotiven?) that weave through his novels.
Someone in the know might express something like: One must read Nabokov both sincronically and diacronically, like a person listening to myths recited by Homeric followers. And more...read him as poet and scientist, geographer and historian, like someone ennamoured with Vermeer and Picasso. Like a teacher in Physics....
Jansy
*It is soooo amazing, there is no precise word in English for "Sehnsucht" or "Saudades" . Later I'll find a comment on the latter by Nabokov, while lecturing on Cervantes.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm