This collection of essays focuses on a subject largely neglected in Nabokovian criticism—the importance and significance of the five senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, poetics, politics and aesthetics. This text analyzes the crucial role of the author’s synesthesia and multilingualism in relation to the five senses, as well as the sensual and erotic dimensions of sensoriality in his works. Each chapter provides a highly focused and sometimes provocative approach to the unique role that sensory perceptions play in the shaping and narrating of Nabokov’s memories and in his creative process.

Table of Contents
 

Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles and Isabelle Poulin: ‘Do the Senses Make Sense?’: An Introduction

PART I - The Role of the Senses in Nabokov’s Aesthetics and Metaphysics

Brian Boyd: Senses, Minds, Meanings and Value in Nabokov: Do the Senses Make Sense?

Lilla Farmasi: ‘To breathe the dust of this painted life’: Modes of Engaging the Senses in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading

Michael Rodgers: Nabokov’s Visceral, Cerebral and Aesthetic Senses

Lyudmila Razumova: Developing Transnational Style: Particularities of Nabokov’s Lexicon and Cognitive Frames in The Gift in Relation to the Five Senses

PART II - Crossing Sensations and Languages: Multilingualism, Memory and Intermediality

Damien Mollaret: An Eden of Sensations: The Five Senses in Speak, Memory

Yannicke Chupin: A Look at the Spectropoetics of Photography in Nabokov’s fiction

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney: Visual Agnosia in Nabokov: When One of the Senses Can’t Make Sense

Julie Loison-Charles: Translating Taste and Switching Tongues

Isabelle Poulin: Translation as Craft and Heroic Deed: On the Political Stakes of a Multilingual Sensoriality

PART III - Senses and the Body: from Pleasure to Displeasure

Maurice Couturier: Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov

Julian W. Connolly: The ‘Eyes’ Have It: The Pleasures and Problems of Scopophilia in Nabokov’s Work

Suzanne Fraysse: The carmen in Nabokov’s Lolita

Anastasia Tolstoy: ‘I’d Like to Taste the Inside of Your Mouth’: The Mouth as Locus of Disgust in Nabokov’s Fiction
 

PART IV  - Synesthesia and Multisensoriality

Jean-Michel Hupé: An Introduction to Synesthesia Via Vladimir Nabokov

Marie Bouchet: Neurological Synaesthesia vs Literary Synaesthesia: Can Nabokov Help Bridge the Gap?

Sabine Metzger: Undulations and Vibrations, Tonalities and Harmonies: Nabokov, Acoustics and the Otherworld

Kiyoko Magome: Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: “Music” and Nabokov’s Quartet

Léopold Reigner: 'Tactio has come of age’: the Tactile Sense in Nabokov’s Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada

Nathalia Saliba Dias: Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory

Lara Delage-Toriel:  ‘A Tactile Sensation is a Blind Spot’: Nabokov’s Aesthetics of Touch