Native of St. Petersburg, author of works in Russian and French as well
as English, and sometime goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge,
soccer team, Vladimir Nabokov would not appear to be the most obvious
avatar of American Studies in the subject's nationalist phase of the 1950s.
My argument, however, is that Lolita, which first appeared in 1955, can
be seen as symbiotically intertwined with various classic texts of American
Studies that helped to invent and define the field during the Truman and
Eisenhower years. At times, the dream of Eden that permeates Nabokov's
narrative impels it towards becoming a parody of the early American
Studies movement, which harboured within its collective consciousness
similar vestiges of an imaginary paradise. More dexterously, though,
Lolita makes the theoretical parameters of this movement visible, so that
Nabokov's novel might more accurately be described as a metafiction of
area studies: a text which holds up a mirror to the implicit assumptions
of American Studies and renders them translucent. Just as the process of
metafiction can reilluminate ways in which more traditional artefacts have
been constructed, so Nabokov's virtualization of American Studies also
reflects back upon the established boundaries of other national formations
and nation-states, foregrounding the contingent status of their supposedly
naturalized values and social markers. In particular, by focusing upon the
cultural reception of Lolita in Britain, we will see how the book brings
into play troublesome questions about the relationship between formal
aesthetics, public morality, and social power. In this sense, Nabokov's
perverse reinscription of American Studies might be seen ironically to
highlight the multiple dilemmas involved in circumscribing specific
national territories for academic study or political jurisdiction.
From the Greek Revolution of 1821 to the Metapolitefsi: Historiographical Debates in Greece across Two Centuries
