Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures

("In each chapter Toker carefully reconstructs a novel for...)

"In each chapter Toker carefully reconstructs a novel for us—those are not mere plot summaries, but mature products of several re-readings—and proceeds to make her way through the novel's numerous patterns, images, themes and motifs in an attempt to show that most of them relate not only to Nabokov's art but also to his heart. Her readings of the novels are invariably sensitive and refreshingly sophisticated, they provide new angles and do not overstate the obvious."—SEEJ

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Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors by Toker, Leona (2000) Hardcover

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Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors

( "This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital...)

"This is a ground-breaking book on a subject of capital importance, and I think it should start a debate about modern literature with a rich potential for further development." ―Michael Scammell Return from the Archipelago is the first comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors’ memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives-arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation.Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into the prisoners’ experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written. A pioneering book on an important subject, Return from the Archipelago is an authoritative resource for scholars in Russian history and literature.

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Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative

(The importance of the ethics of form in literature has on...)

The importance of the ethics of form in literature has only recently gained broad recognition and has thus far been explored mainly from the position of moral philosophy and critical theory. Leona Toker develops a narratological approach to the subject, based on studying "reticence" in works of fiction. Reticence consists in narrative techniques through which writers create information gaps that build interest, enhance tension, and control the reader's comprehension of theme, character, and event. Using novels by Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Forster, and Faulkner, Toker demonstrates how the withholding of information affects readers' attitudes, stimulates their reassessment, and leads to a self-critical reorientation―and how such manipulation of attention has specific ethical and aesthetic significance. Drawing on descriptive poetics, reader-response criticism, and information theory, Toker marks the parallel situations of the characters in the fiction she analyzes and of the readers who encounter it, and presents a novel approach to the issue of first and repeated readings. The inquiry into the twofold role of the reader opens the discussion of narrative techniques to ethical issues. Through her analysis of silences in representative works Toker makes a meaningful contribution to modern narrative study and offers new insights into a number of familiar novels. This well informed, sensitive, and judicious study will appeal to scholars interested in narrative theory and ethical criticism and to students of Faulkner and of the classical English novel.

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(Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors) Author: Leona Toker published on (December, 2000)

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