Figurations of Exile in Hitchcock and Nabokov

This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Barbara Straumann’s close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt and explores the connections between language, imagination and exile. Invoking psychoanalysis as the principal discourse of dislocation, the book not only uses concepts such as ‘screen memory’, ‘family romance’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘the uncanny’ as hermeneutic foils, it also argues that, in their own ways, the arch-parodists Hitchcock and Nabokov are remarkably in tune with the images and tropes developed by Freud.

Key Features

• Brings an entirely new perspective to the work of Hitchcock and Nabokov
• Discusses psychoanalysis both as a critical approach and as a crucial reference point for the cinematic and literary texts themselves
• Analyses figurations of exile in different aesthetic media
• Challenges received notions of postmodern texts as purely playful