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SUMMARY:'A Little Ghost in Natural Colors': Nabokov and the Reproduction o
 f Colour - Dr Beci Dobbin (English)
DTSTART:20120606T110000Z
DTEND:20120606T130000Z
UID:TALK38136@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ruth Rushworth
DESCRIPTION:In writing in 1971 that ‘a bad memoirist re-touches his past
 \, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph’\, Nabokov 
 locates himself on the snobbish side of a contemporary debate about the me
 rits of colour photography. The problem with photographic colour has alway
 s been that the effect can seem artificial. But it was in the 1950s and 19
 60s\, when coloured images in magazines and films\, and later in polaroid 
 snapshots and on television screens\, were gradually becoming normal that 
 their ‘bepop and electric blues\, furious reds\, and poison greens’ 
 – to borrow the photographer Walker Evans’s sneering phrases – came 
 to suggest a lack of cultural sophistication. As Evans writes: ‘There ar
 e four words which must be whispered: colour photography is vulgar.’ In 
 reading the self-consciously artificial colours of Lolita (1955) and Pale 
 Fire (1962) as an aspect of the larger interest in misrepresentation which
  characterises Nabokov’s post-war work\, this paper will consider his se
 nse of the ‘vulgarity’ of garishness as a mode of inspiration. In both
  these novels\, I will argue\, unnatural or ‘natural’ colour is crucia
 l to the conception of fictional worlds.        
LOCATION:CRASSH\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 
 9DT
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