undergraduate courses on the Russian language, the history of Russian culture, and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship in Bryn Mawr College’s Department of Russian. He is the author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their edited volume, Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century appears in Roman Utkin’s chapter “Reading Disability in ‘A Guide to Berlin.’” Here, Roman is summarizing previous scholarship on Nabokov’s short story, “A Guide to Berlin,” and the changes the author made when translating it into English, namely his decision to make the narrator have a disability. Roman focuses on previous scholarship and in particular engages with the work of Eric Naiman, who has proposed reading Nabokov “preposterously” to good effect — an approach most relevant to what Reimagining Nabokov aims to do as a whole. Our volume’s focus is on new optics for pedagogy and by necessary extension on hermeneutics or interpretation. This page focuses on the scholarly/interpretive background for Utkin’s approach to discussing representations of disability in his Nabokov course.Visit Sara Karpukhin's website; visit José Vergara's website.
While this page doesn’t feature the specifics of how Roman teaches this story (read on to find those in our open-access volume!), it does hold and point to all of the volume’s critical gestures. In putting together this book, our goal was to consider the “problem spots” of teaching and reading Nabokov in this new century. It would be fair to say that Nabokov presents numerous challenges to today’s classroom: linguistic, cultural, social, ethical. Some of the challenges are historical and originate with Nabokov himself but others belong in the critical tradition of Nabokov studies as it exists today. We wanted to notice and talk about both, to engage in dialogue with the author and his subsequent readers and critics, from the standpoint of today’s generation. So, as page 99 shows, we aimed to consider which new questions we can ask of Nabokov’s texts and how to address these questions with our students in this particular historical moment.
Page 99 of our volume also gives a sense of the entire book in that it reflects our guiding principles of both relying on and productively questioning received wisdom about Nabokov’s writing. Roman asks whether Naiman’s self-defined “preposterous” reading of the “Guide” in fact distorts the author’s morality. The essay is part of the section on “Disability Studies and Queerings,” which challenges readings of key texts including “A Guide” and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
--Marshal Zeringue
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