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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mirrors In Russian Women’S Autobiographical Writing: The Self Reflected In Works By Alla Demidova And Vera Luknitskaia, Karin Sarsenov
Mirrors In Russian Women’S Autobiographical Writing: The Self Reflected In Works By Alla Demidova And Vera Luknitskaia, Karin Sarsenov
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In autobiographical writing, the mirror is not only a privileged metaphor for the genre as a whole; it also functions as a primary administrator of boundaries, demarcating the space of the self from the foreign, the chaotic, and the unknown. The mirror metaphor is not gender neutral: in Western elite culture the mirror has served to reinforce the patriarchal dichotomy between man/mind and woman/body, prompting Luce Irigaray’s view of the mirror as “a male-directed instrument of literal objectification.” This article examines two women-authored texts in which the mirror motif is fundamental to the construction of the autobiographical self: the actress …
Inverted Reality In Nabokov's Look At The Harlequins!, D. Barton Johnson
Inverted Reality In Nabokov's Look At The Harlequins!, D. Barton Johnson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Look at the Harlequins! presents itself as the autobiography of a famed Anglo-Russian writer who suffers from bouts of insanity that are connected with his feeling that he is the inferior copy of another, much better writer. The autobiography is devoted mainly to his four great loves and to his books. Close analysis suggests that the narrator's account is false and is essentially a record of his delusive life during periods of insanity. LATH is seen as an example of those of Nabokov's novels that have schizoid narrators, such as The Eye, Despair, and Pale Fire, and …