Gretchen Minton's Presentation

I thoroughly enjoyed Gretchen's presentation today. I will be the first to admit that I not very familiar at all with the majority of Shakespeare's works, so pretty much everything that she said revealed something new to me and helped me to further understand what is going on in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. It never ceases to amaze me how many literary allusions Nabokov sneaks into his works. For example, the names of the street signs in Zembla being taken from Shakespeare works. That is something that I never would have noticed on my own, and is so random that is difficult to believe that he would put something like that in. I cannot even imagine how much time he must have spent just doing research in order to write his novels. In a time where the Internet was not accessible, it is insane that he could even find as much information as he did. Minton too has retained an incredible amount of knowledge it seems. I was blown away by how familiar she was with both "Timon of Athens" and "Hamlet." Something that I would never have noticed had she no pointed out is the switch of gender in the passage about the moon stealing light from the sun. It is likely that Nabokov did this in order to make Kinbote give himself the greater power, since that is what he does throughout the novel. I thought that the interpretation of the colors green and red as indication of heterosexuality and homosexuality was interesting as well. Overall, it was a great presentation and led to an interesting discussion. I'm sure that everyone on class was thankful that she came in.