Senior Seminar

This seminar will be devoted to a careful rereading of Nabokov’s most famous novel. We will consider the critical and ethical debates that have arisen around the book, and we will look at the novel’s transposition to the screen (Nabokov’s screenplay, Kubrick’s classic and Lyne’s recent treatment). We will examine the novel’s relationship to the genre of pornography and to notions of a discursive “body.” The novel will serve us as a focus for an investigation of critical methodologies and their usefulness when applied to a resolutely self-conscious text. We will read Lolita throughout the semester, and we will analyze portions of the novel in class and in written exercises throughout the fall.

Students will write two 5-10 page papers and five three-page analyses of individual chapters. They will also be responsible for leading short discussions on critical texts.

Readings by Vladimir Nabokov: The Annotated Lolita; Lolita: A Screenplay (note: out of print and will not be stocked in Student Store, please plan to purchase elsewhere); The Enchanter; Lectures on Literature; and Marcel Proust:  The Prisoner.  The Fugitive.