Abstract
Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s contentious novel Lolita has stirred heated controversies that originated from Nabokov’s treatment of a thorny subject matter. What makes his achievement so stupendous is that he penned a book about a forbidden desire and succeeded in persuading his reader to feel for the deviant. The present study intends to fathom Nabokov’s success in his art of deception drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist ideologies of aestheticism and despair in order to offer a new insight regarding the elements used in Humbert’s narration and character which bestow upon him the distinctive personality of the aesthete. Referring to Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence introduced in his “Either/Or,” it is suggested that Humbert, similar to Kierkegaard’s Johannes, aesthetically alienates himself from commitment and consequence while keeping an eye open for the interesting and relishing sensual immediacy. It is this shrewd aestheticizing of Humbert’s character that grants him his unique status that has elicited both attraction and aversion.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Eigentum und Metapher: Überlegungen zu Franz Kafkas „Der Bau“
- Beyond Thought’s Limits: Celan, Heidegger, and the Crooked Path of Art
- Szene im Kirschgarten: Zu einem Gedicht von Paul Celan, mit einem methodologischen Exkurs
- Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness
- An Aesthete in Despair: Reading Lolita through Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Sphere of Existence
- When Translation Reshapes Reception: The Curious Case of Zeruya Shalev in the German Literary Sphere of World Literature
- Reviews
- Marc Redfield: Shibboleth. Judges, Derrida, Celan. New York, NJ: Fordham UP, 2020. 176 S.
- Dominik Finkelde: Logiken der Inexistenz: Figurationen des Realen im Zeitalter der Immanenz. Deutsche Erstausgabe. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2019. 170 pp.
- Donatien Grau, Hg.: Pierre Guyotat, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022. 280 S.
- Rochelle Tobias: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 208 pp.
- Agnes Hoffmann: Landschaft im Nachbild: Imaginationen von Natur in der Literatur um 1900 bei Henry James und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2020. 356 pp.
- Hua Li: Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. 248 pp.
- Varja Balžalorsky Antić: The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization. Übers. Erica und Lukas Debeljak. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 310 Seiten.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Eigentum und Metapher: Überlegungen zu Franz Kafkas „Der Bau“
- Beyond Thought’s Limits: Celan, Heidegger, and the Crooked Path of Art
- Szene im Kirschgarten: Zu einem Gedicht von Paul Celan, mit einem methodologischen Exkurs
- Doktor Faustus and its Variations on Lateness
- An Aesthete in Despair: Reading Lolita through Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Sphere of Existence
- When Translation Reshapes Reception: The Curious Case of Zeruya Shalev in the German Literary Sphere of World Literature
- Reviews
- Marc Redfield: Shibboleth. Judges, Derrida, Celan. New York, NJ: Fordham UP, 2020. 176 S.
- Dominik Finkelde: Logiken der Inexistenz: Figurationen des Realen im Zeitalter der Immanenz. Deutsche Erstausgabe. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2019. 170 pp.
- Donatien Grau, Hg.: Pierre Guyotat, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022. 280 S.
- Rochelle Tobias: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 208 pp.
- Agnes Hoffmann: Landschaft im Nachbild: Imaginationen von Natur in der Literatur um 1900 bei Henry James und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2020. 356 pp.
- Hua Li: Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. 248 pp.
- Varja Balžalorsky Antić: The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization. Übers. Erica und Lukas Debeljak. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 310 Seiten.