Daniel Arrieta    Department   Kyoto University of Foreign Studies  Department of Hispanic Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies    Position   Associate Professor
Date	2014/11/13
Presentation Theme	Intermediality as an inferring tool for the reader in Nabokov's The Original of Laura
Conference	38th Conference AEDEAN (Spanish Association of Anglo-North American Studies)
Promoters	Alcalá University
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Venue	Alcalá, Madrid, Spain
Details	In Vladimir Nabokov’s The original of Laura, a posthumous book that his son Dmitri published in 2009 in the form of a cut-out volume, the reader encounters a physical reproduction of the original 138 hand-written index cards with the author’s smudges and corrections. The reader is also invited to rearrange them, changing and setting an ambiguous embedded narrative structure. Checking the presence or absence in Nabokov’s book of the multimodal novel’s features, as they are stated by Gibbons (2010), we study the two levels at which intermediality is contained in The Original of Laura: the handwriting and the structure. Furthermore, we analyze in the content examples of intermedial references that lead to the concept of ‘embodiment of the text’, which, combined with the autofictional hints, support the thesis that author, narrator and character vanish with the text as if the three of them were only one.