Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era and Online seeks to answer: how do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content? Innovative assignments, creative-writing exercises, and new interpretations give readers an opportunity to engage with and reimagine the novel.

Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era seeks to critique the novel from the standpoint of its teachability to undergraduate and graduate students in the twenty-first century. The time has come to ask: in the #MeToo era and beyond, how do we approach Nabokov’s inflammatory masterpiece, Lolita? How do we read a novel that describes an unpardonable crime? How do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content? This student-focused volume offers practical and specific answers to these questions and includes suggestions for teaching the novel in conventional and online modalities. Distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered nature of Lolita by sharing innovative assignments, creative-writing exercises, methodologies of teaching the novel through film and theatre, and new critical analyses and interpretations.

INTRODUCTION: The Anxiety of Teaching Nabokov’s Tale of Non-Consent, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers

PART I: ASKING THE QUESTION: WHY TEACH LOLITA?

Chapter 1: (How) Should a Feminist Teach Lolita in the Wake of #MeToo? Marylin Edelstein

Chapter 2: Why I Teach Lolita, Anne Dwyer

PART II: OFFERING SUGGESTIONS: HOW TO TEACH LOLITA

Chapter 3: Not for the Faint of Heart: My Students’ Lolita Jury Duty, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers

Chapter 4: A Requiem for Dolores: Teaching Lolita in a Russian Prison Literature Course, José Vergara

Chapter 5: Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama, Alisa Zhulina

Chapter 6: Three Lolitas: The Evolution of a Cultural Icon in Fiction and Film, Julian W. Connolly

Chapter 7: Author- Dolores Haze, Charles Byrd

Chapter 8: Nabokov and #MeToo: Consent, Close Reading, and the Sexualized Workplace, Eric Naiman

Chapter 9: Resisting Humbert’s Rhetorical Appeals: A Reevaluation of Lolita’s Ethics, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya

Chapter 10: Reading Lolita as a Teenage Girl, Francesca Capossela