The MLA Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita edited by Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment (review)

It was a good idea to put together a book on Lolita specifically designed to help with its complexities and the pedagogical problems they create, since Nabokov’s methods can disorient, his prose and erudition can intimidate, and his novel’s content can upset the best-intentioned readers. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment have chosen their contributors well, organized the material intelligently, filled the interstices with their own astute commentary, and created a volume that is as comprehensive and provocative as it is practical and informative. Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s “Lolita” is an important addition to the MLA’s distinguished World Literature series, and deserves a wide readership.

The introductory material – “Chronology,” “Nabokov as Teacher,” “Publication History,” and so on – is a good example of Kuzmanovich at his best: witty, insightful, detailed, accurate. The section on “Further Reading” is particularly impressive: students could not ask for a more helpful, reliable, and disinterested guide. Because Kuzmanovich and Diment are so non-dogmatic in their own approaches to teaching the novel, they have been able to assemble an impressive range of critical expertise. The editors divide contributors’ articles into three sections: “Teaching Lolita in Specific Courses,” “Literary, Generic, and Cultural Contexts,” and ‘Philosophical, Ethical, and Ideological Approaches.” And the range of their own interests is neatly summarized in the Introduction: “We aim to provide students with the tools to help them understand their own reading habits and approaches. To prevent students from falling into platitudes, we ask that they define love, lust, incest, and child abuse; to widen their knowledge of the contexts and subtexts in which ‘hurricane Lolita’ landed, we insist that they figure out the relevance of nineteenth-century Romantic literature and of 1950s childlike sex symbols; we teach them to read closely and coherently and to appreciate Nabokov’s meticulousness with details.”

The section on how Lolita can be taught includes Eric Naiman’s account of how a senior seminar devoted to the novel might be organized. He argues that such a course “should produce frequent oscillation between receptivity and resistance,” says fascinating things about “the spirit of competition and one-upmanship that characterizes both Nabokov’s relationship with his readers and Nabokov studies as a whole,” notes “the penchant of Nabokov’s texts to pair hermeneutic and sexual proclivities and deviations,” and muses interestingly about the importance of the ubiquitous “bad reader” in Nabokov’s fiction and the work devoted to it. Jason Merrill also offers a week-by-week description of how he teaches a semester-long course on Lolita, striving “to strike a balance between treating Lolita as a major work of literature and as the source of the Lolita archetype.” His account includes a helpful compilation of materials that should prove indispensable to prospective students. Tania Roy and John Whalen-Bridge teach what sounds like an intellectually precocious crew at the National University of Singapore, since they use Adorno, Horkheimer, Barthes, Benjamin, and de Certeau to introduce a cultural studies course on consumption that focuses on Lolita. In the process, they point out how different editions generate “different meanings and associations,” discuss issues related to censorship and pornography, analyze sex as both symbol and symptom “of larger patterns of cultural consumption,” define Lolita as “ideal consumer” and “literary love object,” and explain their use of a contrapuntal approach to help students “appreciate the intricate relations among identity, sexuality, pleasure, and power in the novel.” You see the range.

The Contexts section that follows is as helpful and as multi-faceted as the first. Most of the essays in it concentrate on Russian and American literature. Julian Connolly makes a strong case for the relevance of Pushkin’s Rusalka as a source for Lolita, and sees in Lolita’s characterization a Nabokovian commentary on Dostoevsky’s lapses in some of his major novels. Priscilla Meyer links Nabokov to Pushkin as well, and argues for the importance of...