THE CEA FORUM - Winter/Spring 2011 - Playing for Keeps - Using Nabokov to Teach Composition

Oct 15, 2026

Playing for Keeps explores how Vladimir Nabokov’s distinctive approach to realism and representation can be used in freshman composition teaching. The discussion frames Nabokov as both a metafictional practitioner and a writer who preserves an interest in the novel’s representational mission. Distancing devices—mirrors, webs, spirals, prisms, and related stylistic techniques—are presented as tools for moving students from familiar representations of experience toward less familiar, imaginative realities. The article also connects these methods to earlier composition pedagogy inspired by Proust.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages33

Reading Time51 min

AccessFree to download

Why Nabokov?

Nabokov’s distancing devices and “given world”

Reversing the direction of representation in composition

Using Nabokov alongside Proust

THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2011 Playing for Keeps: Using Nabokov to Teach Composition JANET MOSER Brooklyn College, City University of New York Why Nabokov? The celebrated novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, a poster-boy for theoretical meditations on antirealism in postmodern fiction, 1 was known also to the professional world as V. Nabokov, a writer of scientific papers, entomological studies that could straightforwardly address difficult problems of taxonomy while transmitting detailed and unambiguous descriptions and analyses of data. The paradox of the novelist who said he did not believe in an “everyday reality”(SO 100-101) sharing mental office space with the naturalist who could fashion propositions like “The simple reality of course is that…are separate species’’ captures neatly the character of Nabokov’s idiosyncratic challenge to the conventions ofthe realist novel (“On Some Asiatic Species” 221) . Nabokov may question the adequacy of realist epistemology and techniques, but he has little interest in the usual postmodern formalist approaches to dealing with these problems. Ordinary, prosaic reality never gets entirely lost in the funhouse of Nabokov’s fiction; rather, the iteratively mirrored images of the “given world” remain with the reader,“intertwinkling facets” of agrounding presence, threads ofthe passive warp upon which the author weaves the fabric of amore encompassing reality, the world of the imagination (SO 32, SM 126). Borrowing a phrase from one of V. Nabokov’s comparative studies of butterfly species, one might observe that THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2011 “there seems to exist a curious mimetic affinity”between the two species of fictional reality, the Nabokovian and the conventional (“Lysandra” 266) . Though certainly a practitioner of selfconscious metafiction2 who “manipulates genres to attack realism”(Stark 87), Nabokov nevertheless stops short of a complete break with the representational mission of the novel, advocating instead “not text but texture…Not flimsy nonsense but a web of sense”—an expansion both of the means of portrayal and of the nature of what can be portrayed (Pale Fire 62-63) . The playful stylistic techniques that Nabokov brings to the task of separating the multiplicities3 of the world of the imagination from the univocal realm of pedestrian realty—the distortions, exaggerations, parodies, ironies, antitheses, phrasal tmesis4 often associated with images of mirrors, webs, spirals, prisms, refractions of color—act in his fictions as finely-tuned distancing devices, allowing Nabokov to construct the extraordinary out of the raw material of the ordinary, to erect a layered hierarchy of realities founded on mimetic affinities, to create “in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones”(SM 166- 67). It strikes me that it is precisely here, at this point of stylistic contact between the world of imagination and the “given world,” that the teacher of composition can find a way to exploit the symmetries underlying the defamiliarized5 world of Nabokovian reality and the world that is represented in academic writing. If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2011 ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it the other way around. I ought to be able to reverse-engineer what I do in my literature classes and come up with a way to use Nabokov’s distancing techniques in my composition classes as a means of probing the limitations of familiar models of representation, of helping students come to an understanding of the ways in which too great an adherence to con

FAQs

Why does the author focus on Nabokov for teaching composition?

Nabokov is presented as challenging realist epistemology while still offering a constructive way to portray reality through imaginative texture and distancing techniques.

What stylistic techniques are highlighted as useful for writing instruction?

Techniques associated with mirrors, webs, spirals, prisms, refractions of color, and related distortions are described as distancing devices that help organize layered realities.

How does the pedagogy change students’ understanding of representation?

The author argues composition can move students from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, and then reverse that direction to probe limits of conventional models.

Oct 15, 2026

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