week 12

November 16

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

LOLITA

• Vladimir Nabokov
• Jeremy Irons
• 'books are better than movies because they imagine everything for you- books have a verbal structure (images and words work together), and a movie can't capture it' ~ Michael Sexton
• structured like a chess game: he moves the pawns around to win
• it is about what you do, not what you accomplish
• the Queen is the most important or 'the abduction of the Queen'
• also found in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'
• Carol was fascinated with young women
• as was Edgar Allen Poe, Annabel Lee
• Charles Dickens was obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood
• Jerry Lee Lewis was too
• 7 aspects that Nabokov in each novel:

1. parody
2. coincidence
3. patterning
4. allusion
5. the work within the work
6. the staging of the novel
7. authorial voice

• Nymphet: an immature yet sexually attractive girl (to certain people)
• this is Nabokov's one clear contribution to the English language
• Lolita is provocative to Humbert because she is a child
• Nymph: illusive, fleeting, has not yet reached sexual maturity
• butterflies= nymphs (pubba)= Doll (Dolly)
• psyche: mind and soul (originally) an image associated with the butterfly
• obsession is pathological, corrupt, and digesting
• the novel is all about change, transformation, and metamorphosis
• not about what it means, or about what the message is (because there is no lesson) but about the experience of the reading and writing of the novel!
• aesthetic: perceived/felt; beauty (what is beautiful), bliss (what he wants to experience while reading (all about the style))
• STYLE IS THE SUBJECT
• shows how ugly transforms to beautiful (like the caterpillar and the butterfly)
• this the the most repulsive subject ever, but he transforms it into something beautiful