| Vladimir Nabokov is unique as one of the greatest novelists and stylists in the twentieth century. He establishes his immortal literary status with his superiorly distinct and profound art. Some critics rank him with Proust, Kafka and Joyce as four most greatest novelists in the twentieth century. Throughout his life Nabokov accomplished abundant works which include novels, short novels, poems, translations, dramas, commentary and script of movie. Themes like artists’originality and creativity, the relationship between artists and their works and the eternal ity of art are commonly explored in his works. Among his works, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor:A Family Chronicle, published respectively in1955,1962, and1969, are renowned as his three greatest novels.Counterpoint is one of the primary artistic techniques in Pale Fire and Ada. What’s more, it represents the author’s view towards art, and it is the key to comprehend Nabokov’s theme of memory and his philosophy of time. Therefore, counterpoint is of great importance to understand Nabokov’s art comprehensively. As a great master of counterpoint art, Nabokov designs multi-layer contrapuntal structures in Pale Fire and Ada:from character counterpoint, plot counterpoint to world counterpoint. In both novels, the contrapuntal characters and worlds are unified by the protagonists’art. Meantime, in creation Nabokov unifies "the average realities" and his artistic realities, namely, this world and the other world. So counterpoint writing embodies Nabokov’s artistic view:the world is contrapuntal and the nature of the other world is aesthetic. Nabokov’s counterpoint penetrates into language level. By juxtaposing his texts with other texts, he develops intertextuality counterpoint. In its essence, intertextuality counterpoint is a form of literary memory. Through it, Nabokov expresses his individualistic time philosophy:time is motionless and time is but memory in its making and artists could obtain eternity by recreating his memory. Moreover, through intertextuality writing, Nabokov establishes his distinctiveness in literary history. This thesis is of three parts, mainly the introduction, the main body, and the conclusion. In introduction it offers a brief summary of Nabokov’s life and presents a literary review about Nabokov’s study. In the first chapter it defines counterpoint in this thesis. The second and the third chapters are the body part. The second chapter approaches Pale Fire and Ada in detail from three aspects:character counterpoint, plot counterpoint and world counterpoint. Its conclusion is that Nabokov perceives the world contrapuntally, and he regards the other world aesthetically. The third chapter accesses the two texts from the microcosmic language level:intertextuality counterpoint. The first section defines intertextuality; the second section analyzes the counterpoint of literary genres in two texts; the third section analyzes the counterpoint of the text and other texts, which is further divided into three kinds. They are the counterpoint of original texts and its translation texts, the counterpoint of the two texts and Nabokov’s other texts, and the counterpoint of the two texts and other writers’ texts, among which the third type is the predominant one. The conclusion of the third chapter is that:through intertextuality counterpoint writing, Nabokov expresses his philosophy of time:time is motionless and artists could get eternity by creating his memory. The conclusion part traces the significance of counterpoint art for Nabokov. By counterpoint writing Nabokov recalls his lost memory and returns his lost homeland, and he also demonstrates his great uniqueness in literary history. |
