Strangers in stranger tongues: Vladimir Nabokov and the writing of exile, with reference to Joseph Conrad, Hakob Asadourian, and Roman Jakobson

My dissertation examines Nabokov's representation of his linguistic displacement and literary bilingualism on the textual level of his English-language works. I argue that Nabokov's transition to writing in English reshaped his theoretical and practical conception of text, leading him to represent both Russian and English in his works. Four registers of Nabokov's writing---lexical choices, invented languages, self-translation, and subversion of genres---capture Nabokov's position between two languages and two literary traditions. They mirror on the level of language Nabokov's thematic representation of exile.; Chapter one explores Nabokov's representation of literary bilingualism through code-switching, recherche vocabulary, and the use of visual metaphors to describe language in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire. These devices mark a foreignness of Nabokov's prose as they call attention to language itself. Here, I contrast Nabokov's textual multilingualism to Joseph Conrad's representation of foreign speech in "Amy Foster."; Chapter two discusses Nabokov's use of invented languages in "Solus Rex," Bend Sinister, and Pale Fire, as creative alternatives to literary bilingualism. These fictional languages, composed of competing etymological roots, also encode Nabokov's metalinguistic commentary on the simultaneously individual and derivative nature of language.; Chapter three examines Nabokov's Russian translation and subsequent re-"Englishing" of Speak Memory! I demonstrate that Nabokov's choice of language determines his construction of his autobiographic self and interaction with the external world. Nabokov uses self-translation to capture different modes of remembering in English and Russian and deconstructs the binary notion of foreign and native language. I discuss self-translation as a mode of rewriting memory in the Armenian and English versions of Hakob Asadourian's Grandchildren of Hovakim.; Chapter four analyzes the narrative uncertainty of Nabokov's English-language works and establishes a link with the subversion of genres in the biography Nikolai Gogol and his novels. The suspension of interpretive meaning on the limits of genre reflects Nabokov's exilic position and deflects the referentiality of his texts. I draw parallels to Roman Jakobson's definition of poetic language and his argue that in both his and Nabokov's writing, linguistic displacement leads to a prioritization of language over meaning.