SOURCE: “The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty,” in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, April, 1999, pp. 65-77.

In the following criticism of philosopher Richard Rorty's reading of Nabokov, Stow argues Rorty is, himself, a Nabokovian type.

In 1996, Vladimir Nabokov, an author who continually claimed that a “work of art has no value whatsoever to society,”¹ paradoxically found himself at the center of a debate between Alexander Nehamas and Richard Rorty over the proper “political” interpretation of Pale Fire.² The background to this dispute—which also involved such luminaries as Martha Nussbaum and Richard Posner³—concerned the extent to which it might plausibly be claimed that immersing oneself in the works of “Great Authors” might serve to make one a better citizen of a democratic polity. Rorty, for the record, argued that it would; Nehamas that it would not. Setting the broader debate aside, this article will focus...