Tutorial: Ada and Time

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This independent study will focus on Nabokov's longest and most difficult text, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Begun under the working title The Texture of Time, Nabokov's late masterpiece contains his most sustained engagement with the philosophy of time, a recurrent theme throughout his work. For this reason, we will read philosophical works on time from writers such as Henri Bergson, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur, alongside Nabokov's novel and important secondary works.