Books by Will Norman
This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals his ... more This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals his deep engagement with social and political temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in his attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time.
This volume of original essays brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the... more This volume of original essays brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov’s work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline
Journal Articles by Will Norman
European Journal of American Culture, 2020
This interdisciplinary issue on ‘The cartographic imagination: Art, literature and mapping in pos... more This interdisciplinary issue on ‘The cartographic imagination: Art, literature and mapping in post-war America’ in the European Journal of American Culture starts from two intellectual premises: the first one consists in acknowledging the relevance of cartography and mapping as modes of aesthetic representation and critical thinking in the United States after 1945, and the second consists in asserting the fruitful insights that can be gained by discussing post-war American literature and art together from the point of view of their common interest in cartography. This issue thus presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between American art and literature thanks to the choice of a third
term, ‘mapping’, which provides a clear thematic orientation and also a theoretical and critical framework to the various contributions.
Modernism/modernity, 2013
Journal of Modern Literature, 2011
Journal of American Studies, 2009
This article proposes the idea of a "hardboiled literary history" through readings three novels o... more This article proposes the idea of a "hardboiled literary history" through readings three novels of the culture industry published in the 1940s: Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949), Fredrick Wakeman's The Hucksters (1946), an Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run (1941). These novels made visible the intellectual labor of producing the cultural commodities upon which the industry subsisted, while at the same time struggling to identify and preserve regions of culture as yet unsullied by the market. They achieved this double effect by materializing in their fictions the abstract components of creative intellectual labor, rendering them intelligible as part of a larger economy at midcentury. I argue that, by tracing historical shifts in the way cultural work and cultural commodities were conceived in the United States in this period, we might arrive at a new understanding of an old literary-historical term, hardboiled. Loosened from its constricting generic frame, with the associated conventions of mystery plot and economical vernacular language, hardboiled at midcentury can be understood more capaciously, and indeed productively, as naming a certain disposition towards the commodification of culture, and a particular style of undertaking cultural work.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
In this article, I explore how US writers and intellectuals in the years following World War II r... more In this article, I explore how US writers and intellectuals in the years following World War II responded aesthetically to the questions of complicity raised by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. I discuss two short stories in particular: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Double Talk” (1945) and Mary McCarthy’s “Artists in Uniform” (1953). These form part of a group of literary works that share a striking and singular theme: the nightmare of the liberal intellectual finding herself or himself complicit with anti-Semitism in the confined space of a social encounter, and unable to escape. In reading these stories for their points of contact and shared concerns, we can begin to build an account of how complicity was addressed by members of a particular cultural formation in the early cold war, that of an East Coast intelligentsia characterized by its rejection of Stalinism, adherence to classically liberal political values and commitment to the aesthetic values of European modernism. More specifically, we gain an insight into why the aesthetics of complicity should be understood as a necessary and constitutive element of this group’s intellectual ethos.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
In this introduction to “Complicity in Post-1945 Literature: Theory, Aesthetics, Politics,” a spe... more In this introduction to “Complicity in Post-1945 Literature: Theory, Aesthetics, Politics,” a special issue of _Comparative Literature Studies_, the editors address the intersections among literature, complicity, and capitalism. We begin by historicizing the concept of complicity and articulating its relationship to colonialism, slavery, and the spread of capitalist world markets. We then track the emergence and development of the field of complicity studies, and examine the role played by literature and aesthetics within that field. We explore the centrality of the Holocaust to the study of complicity, and—via a reading of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666—we ask whether new conceptions of complicity are required to address more recent historical developments. Placing complicity studies in dialogue with the proliferating scholarship on neoliberalism, we conclude by naming complicity as the structure of feeling that corresponds to postwar liberalism, and consider the fate of complicity in the neoliberal and post-neoliberal eras.
Reviews by Will Norman
The Review of English Studies, 2015
Book chapters by Will Norman
This is an author copy of a chapter to be published in the volume Navigating the Transnational in... more This is an author copy of a chapter to be published in the volume Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture: Axes of Influence, ed. Tara Stubbs and Doug Haynes, by Routledge in 2017.
The essay examines work by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs from their time in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Ginsberg's "At Apollinaire's Grave" and Burroughs' cut-ups. I focus on the way these authors conjure the ghosts of the European interwar avant-garde in their work, and crystallize a distinctive transatlantic space-time of the early Cold War.
Here is the table of contents and introduction to my new book Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Ex... more Here is the table of contents and introduction to my new book Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture, published by Johns Hopkins University Press on November 27, 2016.
The intellectual migration to the United States of European writers, intellectuals, and artists in the 1930s and 1940s has often been narrowly seen as a clash between a rarefied European modernist sensibility and a debased American mass culture. In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. The transatlantic exchanges of midcentury emerge in the book as a crisis point for modernism at which claims for the autonomy of high culture became increasingly untenable, the geographical center of cultural authority was displaced, and the governing principles of the American cultural field went through a phase of dramatic instability.
Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of Transatlantic Aliens is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape.
Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book's analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.
This is an author copy of chapter 5 of my book Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time, publish... more This is an author copy of chapter 5 of my book Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time, published by Routledge in 2012.
This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.
Uploads
Books by Will Norman
Journal Articles by Will Norman
term, ‘mapping’, which provides a clear thematic orientation and also a theoretical and critical framework to the various contributions.
Reviews by Will Norman
Book chapters by Will Norman
The essay examines work by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs from their time in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Ginsberg's "At Apollinaire's Grave" and Burroughs' cut-ups. I focus on the way these authors conjure the ghosts of the European interwar avant-garde in their work, and crystallize a distinctive transatlantic space-time of the early Cold War.
The intellectual migration to the United States of European writers, intellectuals, and artists in the 1930s and 1940s has often been narrowly seen as a clash between a rarefied European modernist sensibility and a debased American mass culture. In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. The transatlantic exchanges of midcentury emerge in the book as a crisis point for modernism at which claims for the autonomy of high culture became increasingly untenable, the geographical center of cultural authority was displaced, and the governing principles of the American cultural field went through a phase of dramatic instability.
Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of Transatlantic Aliens is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape.
Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book's analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.
This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.
term, ‘mapping’, which provides a clear thematic orientation and also a theoretical and critical framework to the various contributions.
The essay examines work by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs from their time in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Ginsberg's "At Apollinaire's Grave" and Burroughs' cut-ups. I focus on the way these authors conjure the ghosts of the European interwar avant-garde in their work, and crystallize a distinctive transatlantic space-time of the early Cold War.
The intellectual migration to the United States of European writers, intellectuals, and artists in the 1930s and 1940s has often been narrowly seen as a clash between a rarefied European modernist sensibility and a debased American mass culture. In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. The transatlantic exchanges of midcentury emerge in the book as a crisis point for modernism at which claims for the autonomy of high culture became increasingly untenable, the geographical center of cultural authority was displaced, and the governing principles of the American cultural field went through a phase of dramatic instability.
Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of Transatlantic Aliens is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape.
Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book's analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.
This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.