Search

How might a novel play tennis? In a New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace reflects on how the climactic topspin lob that won Wimbledon for Federer in 2006 was a product of narrative, reliant on a sequence of bluffs, building up to a final unreturnable shot whose genius lay in its 'unimaginable angle.' Tennis becomes fiction here, both in the sense that the final shot is unreal and that it is Rafael Nadal's imagination that is ultimately overwhelmed by Federer's spin. In this essay I consider how Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov's most tennis-obsessed novels, Infinite Jest and Lolita, achieve the equivalent of tennis's 'unimaginable angles' in their language and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov on 14th January 1946: 'I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial – in other words, Americanized'. The rumour was true: Nabokov's relocation to America in the 1940s seemed to act in conspiracy with the swelling of his gut, such that by the time he achieved international fame as an anglophone American writer, his body had transformed. I will propose in this article that Nabokov's discomfort at his expansion is linked to his ambivalence about becoming American. When Wilson accused him of becoming Americanly stout in 1946, he squirmed: 'Thanks for your remarks (though I did not understand the one about my "americanization")'. It is my argument here that, in the middle years of the twentieth century, Nabokov underwent what Lauren Berlant has described in an essay on American obesity as a 'crisis of choosing and antiwill', and that this crisis reverberates through his accounts of food and fatness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shakespeare, ‘The Cause of the People’, and The Chartist Circular 1839–1842 Left political critics such as Cultural Materialists are now often rather hostile towards Shakespeare, apparently agreeing with William Hazlitt that great poetry such as Shakespeare's tends to be inimical to ‘the cause of the people’, i.e., democracy. This is a changed situation from that when the Communist Arnold Kettle, writing in the 1960s, could take it for granted that Shakespeare was an indispensable author for a radical working-class culture in Britain. This article explores the politics of Shakespeare through an analysis of how he and a selection of his plays are represented in a Chartist newspaper of the early 1840s. It argues that the Chartists saw Shakespeare as, in broad terms, an ally – they are closer to Kettle's position than Hazlitt's, let alone that of contemporary radical Bard-bashers. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not prevent the Chartists dissenting from what they took to be conservative implications in texts such as Coriolanus and Othello – and in ways that seem to anticipate recent ideological critiques of these plays. ( Hamlet the Chartists find a vastly more sympathetic text.) Overall, the explicit political bias of the Chartists' reading of Shakespeare was valuable, alerting them to political implications of the plays, including democratic or progressive ones, that less or differently biased approaches are likely to miss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]