Course Description
Summary
(Important Notice: This course focuses on the novel Lolita, which can be disturbing to some readers. Our class discussions will not be able to circumvent the narrative of an older man exploiting a child. Please be aware of this difficult material before registering for the course.)
In Vladimir Nabokov鈥檚 Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert writes, 鈥淚 am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world鈥攏ymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix.鈥 It is precisely this borderline between 鈥渕onster鈥 and 鈥渇ancy prose" stylist that we will examine in this course, which will also consider Nabokov鈥檚 Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951), his research on butterflies, as well as The Enchanter, a precursor to Lolita. When Lolita was first published, it was deemed "filthy" yet enjoyed the status as a best-seller, and it continues in the contemporary era to both attract and repel. In addition to reading academic scholarship on Lolita, we will also consider the recently published Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century (2021) as well as cultural and cinematic representations or reckonings of the novel.
