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“Seeing without understanding”
Author(s) -
Bruhn Jørgen
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/oli.12074
Subject(s) - schism , theme (computing) , representation (politics) , recall , point (geometry) , literature , linguistics , philosophy , art , computer science , politics , mathematics , geometry , political science , law , operating system
Taking as my starting point the intermedial idea that all literary texts exhibit some kind of medial mixture, the article argues that Vladimir Nabokov's formally exquisite and existentially moving short story “Spring in Fialta” (which I analyze in Nabokov's own English translation from Russian) is best understood when it is considered a mixed mediality text. I hope to demonstrate the general idea that when a conventionally literary text is being read as a medially mixed text the role of media turns out to be crucial for the understanding of the entire text. More specifically, I shall argue that the schism between artistic representation and life in itself, condensed into the problem of how to represent and recall memory traces, is a major theme in “Spring in Fialta.”[Note 1. My work on this article was initially made possible ...]