lo li ta
Spring 2005 Russian G6290
THE LOLITA PHENOMENON
Prof. Valentina Izmirlieva
Tuesday, 4:10pm-6:00pm at 401 Hamilton Hall
An advanced graduate seminar on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and its multiple reincarnations, transformations, and distortions. The course offers a comprehensive panorama of Nabokov's literary practices through the lens of a single novel by bringing together varied aspects of his cultural legacy under the unified theoretical concern with reproduction and inauthenticity.
Against the backdrop of Nabokov's own theory/practice of re-reading and repeated self-translation, the course explores, in seven weeks of close reading, the novel's own peculiar strategies for serial repetition. The same problematic is probed in a number of Nabokov's alternative fictional universes: the novels Mary, Invitation to a Beheading, Pnin, Pale Fire; the play The Waltz Invention, the novella The Enchanter, the autobiography Speak, Memory, selected poems, and excerpts from Nabokov's annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
The second part of the course is organized around students' presentations on research topics of their own choice. It targets the cultural multiplication of the novel itself through translation, screen and stage adaptations, parodies, spin-offs, and through the elephantine academic enterprise of annotating and re-interpreting Lolita. The recommended works for analysis include: Nabokov's own screenplay of Lolita, the two cinematic versions of the novel by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, parodies of the novel (Umberto Eco's "Granita"; Viktor Pelevin's "Nika"), Pia Pera's scandalous spin-off Lo's Diary, some possible literary precursors of the novel (Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita"; Casanova's autobiographical narrative about his affair with Zaire), as well as selected (mis)readings, from Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome" to the recent memoir by Azar Nafazi Reading Lolita in Teheran.
THE LOLITA PHENOMENON
Prof. Valentina Izmirlieva
Tuesday, 4:10pm-6:00pm at 401 Hamilton Hall
An advanced graduate seminar on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and its multiple reincarnations, transformations, and distortions. The course offers a comprehensive panorama of Nabokov's literary practices through the lens of a single novel by bringing together varied aspects of his cultural legacy under the unified theoretical concern with reproduction and inauthenticity.
Against the backdrop of Nabokov's own theory/practice of re-reading and repeated self-translation, the course explores, in seven weeks of close reading, the novel's own peculiar strategies for serial repetition. The same problematic is probed in a number of Nabokov's alternative fictional universes: the novels Mary, Invitation to a Beheading, Pnin, Pale Fire; the play The Waltz Invention, the novella The Enchanter, the autobiography Speak, Memory, selected poems, and excerpts from Nabokov's annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
The second part of the course is organized around students' presentations on research topics of their own choice. It targets the cultural multiplication of the novel itself through translation, screen and stage adaptations, parodies, spin-offs, and through the elephantine academic enterprise of annotating and re-interpreting Lolita. The recommended works for analysis include: Nabokov's own screenplay of Lolita, the two cinematic versions of the novel by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, parodies of the novel (Umberto Eco's "Granita"; Viktor Pelevin's "Nika"), Pia Pera's scandalous spin-off Lo's Diary, some possible literary precursors of the novel (Heinz von Lichberg's "Lolita"; Casanova's autobiographical narrative about his affair with Zaire), as well as selected (mis)readings, from Simone de Beauvoir's essay "Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome" to the recent memoir by Azar Nafazi Reading Lolita in Teheran.