Irena Księżopolska of Vistula University (Warsaw, Poland), will present a seminar on “Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory.” While the Russian-born American writer Nabokov is best known as the author of Lolita, perhaps there is no other writer as obsessed with memory. From his very early poems to the unfinished manuscript of his last novel, his writings abound in characters haunted by their pasts. This preoccupation is not simply a feature of loss and nostalgia, but an attempt to examine the mechanisms which control the functions of human consciousness. These are the fictions of memory: writings fueled by the energy of reminiscence, and which are themselves an exploration of the furtive processes of remembering. And by looking at them closesly, we may also observe the fictions that memory writes. Irena Księżopolska is Assistant Professor and Vice Dean of the English Department at Vistula University. She published a monograph, “The Web of Sense: Patterns of Involution in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov” in 2013, and a volume co-edited with Mikołaj Wiśniewski entitled Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory, containing papers by various scholars, which is forthcoming. The seminar is here.
