RUSS 0770 - GIRLHOOD: NABOKOV'S LOLITA & TAYLOR SWIFT

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
What would Nabokov's most famous novel sound like from Lolita's perspective? Would it sound like a pop song? This course aims to explore a certain mode of young femininity by juxtaposing one modernist literary masterpiece and the corpus of one contemporary pop star's career. The first half of the semester will be devoted to a close and careful reading of Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel. We will examine the novel's representation of childhood and adolescent feminine subjectivity and objecthood against the backdrop of bourgeois American culture. We will consider the critical and ethical debates that have arisen around Lolita, and we will look at Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation. We will spend many class sessions focusing on Nabokov's prose at the level of the sentence, word, and syllable; and students will be asked to write several short interpretive essays ("close readings") on his language and style. The second half of the semester will be devoted to the work of contemporary American pop star Taylor Swift. Starting with her early country music and moving with her into maturity, we will trace Lolita's themes of adolescence, aspiration, and American feminine experience through songs such as "You Belong With Me," "Blank Space," and "Delicate." Are some permutations of gender, generation, and class better suited to ethical representation through music and song? Does the pop music medium have an especially strong claim on the listener's senses, memory, body? Is there something specifically "feminine" about the way musical expression represents and models experience? As we attend to Taylor's verses, more pressing interpretive questions will bring our readings of Nabokov to bear on her lyrics. How should we interpret cliché? Is it possible to critically orient ourselves to a speaker or character's "relatability"? What, after all, has the image of a young woman been made to represent to us at this moment in history, and in what manner does she evade interpretation?
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Seminar
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Attributes: DSAS Literature General Ed. Requirement, Writing Intensive Course (WRIT)

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