Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Nabokov's Evolving Body Paradigm

Abstract

This article explores ways in which Peter Brooks' notions of the semiotization of the body and of the somatization of story may furnish hermeneutic keys to Nabokov's works. It focuses on the latter's non-fictional writings from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as his novels ­— notably Lolita, Ada and especially The Original of Laura ­—, so as to examine how the paradigms of agon and eros operate in the writer's figuring of the reader and in his elaboration of embodied narratives.