Irony and textuality in Vladimir Nabokov's short stories (Spanish text)

The objective of this doctoral thesis is to analyse how Nabokov uses irony in the linguistic, narrative and textual structure of his short stories. We have used some contributions from the field of pragmatics, as it helps us understand how irony receivers (Nabokov's readers) discover the intentional ironic meaning of the literary text. Other critical theories of the study come from narratology, because the thesis examines the narrative structure of literary texts. Moreover, it helps us characterize the different voices in the text, which are contradictory in the ironic pieces.; This study reaches several conclusions. Nabokov uses different means to build his ironic texts as well as several types of irony. Besides, one understands how the loss of his native Russia together with his exile in Berlin and Paris lead to further detachment by means of using irony in his short stories. Consequently, Nabokov learns to use this rhetoric figure and ends up setting intellectual ironic games for the reader to discover in his stories. The roles of the enunciators, narrators and readers have been fully analysed. It is understood that enunciators and narrators show contradictory voices which build the irony of the stories. Furthermore, the reader must have a good literary competence, a wide cultural background and a great knowledge about languages in order to understand all the ironic implications of the text. In addition to this, one discovers Nabokov's own reflections spread in his short stories as he uses play on words with his name and surname or references to his past. The way in which Nabokov uses his past is important since it is associated to the involuntary memory and it shows how memory mixes with imagination in the process of recapturing one's past. However, during recollections, the author makes the reader conscience of the process of narration and the role of the narrator as such, both of which are postmodernist literary characteristics. The role of the reader is important as he or she has to reread his short stories, retain information, understand implications, puns, etc. Nabokov demands an active effort from the reader in order to understand his short stories. As Berberova (1969) said, “with Nabokov we learn another way of reading.”...