Title Literatura americana_gradul II_2025.pdf ✅

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) • “I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany” (26). • Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
General Features of Nabokov’s Works • art for art’s sake: • From the afterword to the novel: “I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction. Why do I write books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. [...] Lolita has no moral in tow. [...] For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” • attention to detail, nuance, shades of meaning; • themes of madness, cruelty, and suffering explored from the unsettling perspectives of the perpetrators;
Lolita (US, 1958): Structure • Foreword by one John Ray Jr., Ph.D. • Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male • “I am writing this under observation” • “the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, for what he terms ‘nymphets’ in general and the twelve-year-old girl he calls Lolita in particular, and their wanderings across America. [...] He imprisons her within his own reality, denying her the right to hers – and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious yet charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child” (Gray 768). • Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012.