Disenfranchised from America: Reinventing Language and Love in Nabokov and Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

Disenfranchised from America: Reinventing Language and Love in Nabokov
and Pynchon

By Melissa Lam 	
University Press of America 	
List Price: $19.95
Paper 0-7618-4619-0 / 978-0-7618-4619-2
Jul 2009 110pp
	

Disenfranchised from America explores the ways in which Vladimir
Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon manipulate the fictional strategies of a
novel in order to de-familiarize our perceptions of everyday objects
and people. Estranging our regular everyday perceptions allows us to
more pertinently and intensely examine the critical issues of morality
and identity that have become exhausted and clichéd with
over-examination. Nabokov's Lolita preoccupies us with issues of
morality, but the text also brings into question the nature of love
and whether it is possible in our modern era, replete with
self-conscious irony, to reinvent love and make it new again. In the
same vein, The Crying Lot 49 by Pynchon compels us to re-register
reality through a series of eye-opening guises and events that are
potent with meaning but leave us estranged, full of unanswered
questions and doubts. By reexamining America through an unfamiliar
perspective, these novels allow us as readers to view the world anew.
Through artful use of literary technique, these novels serve to
interrogate our own relationships towards such clichéd concepts as
love, belonging, national identity, and finding a deeper sense of
place or meaning.

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