ABSTRACT
Nathalia Saliba Dias returns to an old dilemma—“How to handle bibliographical information in the analysis of literary works?”. Saliba argues that the dichotomy between biographical–political interpretation, on the one side, and the study of aesthetic elements (aka “art for art’s sake”) on the other, can no longer sustain cultural readings. Through her own research on Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, Saliba advocates a pluralistic approach to the biographical dilemma, claiming that biographical, intersubjective, political, and aesthetic interpretations are inseparable, and that a reparative attitude is essential when it comes to the study of “bad men”.
