Guest Lecture Péter Tamás (Eötvös-Loránd-Universität)

Péter Tamás is a PhD student in the Modern English and American Literature programme at Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Supported by Fulbright, he did some of his research at Fordham University (New York, NY) and consulted the Nabokov collection at the New York Public Library. In 2016, he published an essay in the Nabokov Online Journal. The topic of his doctoral research is Ethical Criticism, with a chapter devoted to Nabokov’s Lolita.

In this talk he will discuss how the ironic tone of these novels derives in large part from their narratorsʼ treatment of everyday routines (such as moviegoing). The narrators identify and mock a feature that makes certain banal phenomena particularly vulgar: their commonplace, fake nature. Both Salinger and Nabokov introduce a technical term for this feature (“phony” and “poshlust,” respectively). By scorning the vulgarity of everyday life, the narrators try to achieve more than provoke laughter: they also attempt to justify their status as outsiders, since they oppose their base surroundings to their own extraordinary perceptiveness. But do the implied authors share the narratorsʼ sense of the vulgarity of everyday life?

The event is free and open to public.

Information:

Department of American Studies Graz

Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465

amerikanistik@uni-graz.at
http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at