Guest Lecture Yuri Leving (Dalhousie University)

A Book? What's That?

Professor Yuri Leving will address issues of creating an interactive learning environment for the study of literary works both for specialists and a wider audience in a world that is rapidly moving towards an all-encompassing digital culture where touch-screen mobile devices will soon become as accepted as paper books. The subtitle of the talk (“A Book? What’s that?”) is a direct quote from a poem “A Cloud in Trousers” (1914), by Nabokov’s famous namesake, also Vladimir Vladimirovich, the Soviet rival poet Mayakovsky. In Yuri Leving’s lecture the notion of a “cloud,” however, will be taken as something more than a vague intertextual entity – closer to an iCloud concept, a service that keeps all our devices in sync. Leving will be discussing e-books, interactive apps, websites and video production in the modern digital scholarship on Nabokov and will share his experience of teaching Nabokov’s writings on North American campuses, especially The Gift and Lolita.

YURI LEVING is University Research Professor in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at Heidelberg University and an affiliated research fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Leving is the author of four monographs and editor of six volumes of articles, most recently Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies (2013), Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), and Anatomy of a Short Story (2012). Leving has published over a hundred scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature. He served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes, and was the curator for the exhibition “Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955-2005” in Washington, D.C., which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lolita. Leving is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal.

This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies in cooperation with the Office of International Relations and the Research Focus „The Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe“.

Katharina Fackler

Postdoctoral University Assistant
Department of American Studies
University of Graz
Attemsgasse 25/II
8010 Graz, Austria

Fon: +43 (0)316 380 - 8146
Fax: +43 (0)316 380 - 9768

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