On The Metafictionality Of Vladimir Nabokov's American Novels

From the perspective of postmodern narrative theories, this dissertation examines textually the metafictionality of Nabokov's American novels and states that the essentiality of the awakening of the self-consciousness of American novels constitutes the formation of the metafictionality, which is further embodied with multiplicity in either the text's critical function or playfulness.The metafictionality of Nabokov's American novels can be recapitulated into three aspects: The self-consciousness of his American novels, the critical function, and the ludic impulse. The self-consciousness refers to the reflexivity produced in the process of the experimentation on form. The styles of different writers are recuperated and his own works are parodied in his novels. It is the knowledge of western literature that instigates the formation of his reflexivity. The critical function refers to the demonstration of other writers' style as criticism in which the text is transfigured into critical discourse entailing the literary criticism that magnifies the self-consciousness of the text. The novel's concern for literature becomes its theme. The ludic impulse refers to the narrative strewn with literary games or playful rhetoric devices. The style of the text is playful owing to numerous literary games. It is a medium of representing the self-consciousness of the novel. To be concise, the complexity of the text complicates metafictionality with self-consciousness as its essential. The critical function and the ludic impulse are the aspects that demonstrate the self-consciousness of his American novels from different angles. This dissertation further explores the thesis on the basis of the prerequisite studies.Chapter One explores the reasons of the formation of the self-consciousness of novel in relation to the influence of the cultural context. The self-consciousness of the novel is governed by that of the writer's whereas the self-consciousness of Nabokov is the reflection of his special cultural context. The writer's self-consciousness is influenced by the historical and cultural background in which his poetics and his aesthetic proclivity are cast. The experience of Russian Diaspora and his own literary...