“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as a Case Study for Critical Approaches to Literature

Abstract

In this paper, I describe teaching Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as the only novel in a one-semester upper-division English literature course called Research Methods, a course that combines instruction about both theory and practice. I am not arguing that Lolita is unique for this purpose, but I am arguing that it is a special case of the kind of text that instructors can use. Few novels could endure the focus of an entire semester's attention, and perhaps even fewer could generate such intense discussion session after session. Nabokov's Lolita answers these demands. With its depth, its wealth of secondary material, and its steadfast position in scholarly discourse, Lolita serves as an excellent case study for students studying current critical approaches. First published in 1955, the story of Humbert Humbert's obsession with 12-year-old Dolores Haze was deemed brilliant by some and obscene by others. Even its problematic initial publication suggests its usefulness to studying literary scholarship: rejected by four publishers in the United States, Nabokov's agent was pleased to place the novel with Olympia Press in France. Nabokov did not know that this publisher was known for publishing volumes such as The Sexual Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and France eventually banned the novel; subsequently, it was years before the novel appeared in the United States. Regardless, the novel emerged as an immense success. And then there is the story itself. Not only does Lolita generate power- ful responses from students, both positive and negative, it has the stylistic complexity and the breadth to maintain student interest over the course of a semester. To have students approach the novel from first one angle and then another has clear pedagogical benefits because students face the dif- ficulty of developing a reading of the novel based on one series of critical methods and then having to question that reading when given the new data produced by a different critical method, all the time working with a text with which they are able to develop considerable familiarity. Additionally, that there is a mass of scholarly apparatus related to the novel allows the course instructor to create assignments that introduce students to the vari- ous methods that researchers use in creating publishable material.