Five Senses in Nabokov's Works

Marie Bouchet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Toulouse, France, and the author of Lolita: A Novel by Vladimir Nabokov, A Film by Stanley Kubrick (2009). She has co-edited two collections of essays on Lolita, and is in charge of the annotations to the novel for The Nabokovian.Julie Loison-Charles is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Lille University, France, and has published a book on Nabokov’s use of foreign words (Vladimir Nabokov, ou l’écriture du multilinguisme: mots étrangers et jeux de mots, 2016). She has organized several conferences on Nabokov.Isabelle Poulin is Professor of Comparative Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, and author of several books on Nabokov. Her latest are Poétiques du récit d’enfance: Benjamin, Sarraute et Nabokov (2012) and Le Transport romanesque. Le Roman comme espace de la traduction, de Nabokov à Rabelais(2017).

“The wide range of sensory experience that this volume considers, alongside its extensive coverage of Nabokov’s work from the early stories to the last unfinished novel, makes it a valuable resource and provocative basis for further investigation.” (Barbara Wyllie, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 100 (3), July, 2022)

• Chapter 1: “‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction”, Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles, Isabelle Poulin.- Chapter 2: “Do the Senses Make Sense?”, Brian Boyd.- Chapter 3: “‘To breathe the dust of this painted life’. Modes of Engaging the Senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading”, Lilla Farmasi.- Chapter 4: “Nabokov’s Visceral, Cerebral and Aesthetic Senses”, Michael Rodgers.- Chapter 5: “Developing Transnational Style: Particularities of Nabokov’s Lexicon and Cognitive Frames in The Gift in Relation to the Five Senses”, Lyudmila Razumova.- Chapter 6: “An Eden of Sensations: The Five Senses in Speak, Memory”, Damien Mollaret.- Chapter 7: “A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s fiction”, Yannicke Chupin.- Chapter 8: “Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can’t Make Sense”, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney.- Chapter 9: “Translating Taste and Switching Tongues”, Julie Loison-Charles.- Chapter 10: “Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality”, Isabelle Poulin.- Chapter 11: “Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov”, Maurice Couturier.- Chapter 12: “The ‘Eyes’ Have It: The Pleasures and Problems of Scopophilia in Nabokov’s Work”, Julian Connolly.- Chapter 13: “The carmen in Nabokov’s Lolita”, Suzanne Fraysse.- Chapter 14:“‘I’d Like to Taste the Inside of Your Mouth’: The Mouth as Locus of Disgust in Nabokov’s Fiction”, Anastasia Tolstoy.- Chapter 15: “An Introduction to Synesthesia Via Vladimir Nabokov”, Jean-Michel Hupé.- Chapter 16: “Neurological Synaesthesia vs Literary Synaesthesia: Can Nabokov Help Bridge the Gap?”, Marie Bouchet.- Chapter 17: “Undulations and Vibrations, Tonalities and Harmonies: Nabokov, Acoustics and the Otherworld”, Sabine Metzger.- Chapter 18: “Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: “Music” and Nabokov’s Quartet”, Kiyoko Magome.- Chapter 19: “‘Tactio has come of age’: the Tactile Sense in Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada”, Léopold Reigner.- Chapter 20: “Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory”, Nathalia Saliba Dias.- Chapter 21: “‘A Tactile Sensation is a Blind Spot’: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch”, Lara Delage-Toriel.