Nabokov Essay- Question #3 Rhetorical Devices

Vladimir Nabokov employs several types of rhetorical devices in his lecture, "Good Readers and Good Writers".  For example, he uses a few metaphors throughout this piece.  In one he says, "Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, whom do you think he meets?  The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever."  This metaphor helps the reader to visualize the journey an author and a reader must make in order to form a connection through the novel.  In another Nabokov compares a painting with a literary work, explaining how a good reader should reread books to ensure that he or she catches all the details of the piece.

Nabokov also uses a rhetorical device called asyndeton, or a "lack of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words." (Arment)  This is found when Nabokov states, "A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader."  


Questions also commonly used throughout this lecture.  In one paragraph Nabokov uses almost nothing but questions:  "Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel?  Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels?  But what about the masterpieces?  Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor?  And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago?"


All the rhetorical devices Vladimir Nabokov uses in his informative lecture help to engage the reader while expressing what he believes is the best way to enjoy literature.


Arment, Ernest. Kentucky Classics. University of Kentucky - Welcome to the University of Kentucky. University of Kentucky, 22 Dec. 2004. Web. 02 Aug. 2011. <http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html>.


Nabokov, Vladimir. "Good Readers and Good Writers." Lecture. 1948. Lectures on Literature. Print.