Title: Figurations of exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov /
Authors: Straumann, Barbara
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press,
Year: 2008
Subjects: Hitchcock, Alfred, Criticism and interpretation.; Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Criticism and interpretation.; Exiles in literature.; Exiles in motion pictures.; Emigration and immigration in literature.; Emigration and immigration in motion pictures.
Abstract: "This comparative study of Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Questions about the contingencies of history and the rupture of the real are hardly ever brought to bear on their highly self-reflexive texts. Barbara Straumann counters this critical gap by reading real-life exile as the 'absent cause' of Alfred Hitchcock's and Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant virtuosity. Her 'cross-mapping' of the two seemingly disparate authors takes as its point of departure the conditions of exile in which they found themselves and goes on to show how the relentless playfulness of their language and irony points to the creation of a new home in the world of signs. This book is aimed at those with an interest in Nabokov, Hitchcock, Freud, Lacan, cultural theory, media and/or exile."--Jacket.
Contents: 1. Introduction -- Cross-mapping Hitchcock and Nabokov -- Questions of Exile and Dislocation -- Home and Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov -- Pt. I. Nabokov's Dislocations -- 2. Refiguring Loss and Exile in Speak, Memory -- Chronophobia -- Family Romance -- Poetics of Memory -- 3. 'Aesthetic Bliss' and Its Allegorical Displacements in Lolita -- Childhood Romance -- Textual Relocations -- Language to Infinity -- Pt. II. Hitchcock's Wanderings -- 4. Inhabiting Feminine Suspicion -- Traumatic Fantasy -- Family Murder -- Aesthetics of Overproximity -- 5. Wandering and Assimilation in North by Northwest -- Mad Traveller -- Oedipal Voyage -- Language of Exile and Assimilation -- 6. Epilogue: Psychoanalytic Dislocation.