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

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 powerful 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 difficulty 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 various methods that researchers use in creating publishable material.

I. Background: The Course

Research Methods introduces students majoring in English and Education to the process of advanced literary scholarship. On the one hand, this learning objective means reinforcing and developing students’ knowledge of the methods of advanced research. The class works on developing the skills required to move from undergraduate to graduate research—skills such as finding and justifying good research questions and developing the work patterns necessary to complete long-term projects. For the former skill, the course introduces students to the major critical strategies scholars have developed for reading texts. Students practice a range of critical approaches, starting with New Criticism and finishing with Cognitive Poetics. For the latter skill, I stress the value of writing daily, even if for only twenty minutes, by presenting Robert Boice’s research about writing habits.¹

Focussing so closely on just one novel means that students are able to develop a deep knowledge of the novel, its context, and its criticism. Rather than being faced with a “novel of the week,” they are able to read and reread the novel, shifting their readings and critical strategies in a variety of ways. Moreover, they are able to immerse themselves in the scholarly community that has developed in response to Nabokov’s work. It is an opportunity to pursue a text to a depth that they have not usually had a chance to experience, and students are thus afforded the time and mental space to become, at least in part, full-time researchers, an assignment that most accept unequivocally. Along the way, students are able to see an example of how a body of scholarship takes form and how scholars negotiate it. Criteria for assessment can be tailored to emphasise to students that they are becoming researchers.

To encourage students as emerging...