Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara (review)

Reviewed by: Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara Alisa Ballard Lin Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era. Ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2021. ix+ 187 pp. £73. ISBN 978–1–7936–2838–1. Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century. Ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press. 2022. xxi+ 207 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978–1–943208–50–0 (open access 978–1–943208–51–7). Students are changing. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and racial justice awareness (especially in the United States), the effects of the 2017 #MeToo movement, transgender and disability activism, the politics of right-wing extremism, new media and technology—all of these factors have made university student organizations [End Page 645] far more attuned to evaluating fairness and to sniffing out privilege than those we taught even a decade ago. In the literature classroom, instructors work to diversify and decolonize our syllabuses, to practise student-centred teaching, and to judiciously consider the new technologies we might bring into the classroom. But in our efforts to balance appeal to the social moment with our sense of responsibility to our discipline, academics frequently run into dilemmas over how to handle canonical texts or authors who have, rightly or wrongly, fallen under the axe of contemporary cancel culture. One such sticky author is Vladimir Nabokov. His Lolita may often be deemed one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, but it also urges its reader to identify with the perspective of a paedophile and rapist, leading us through florid descriptions of illegal and non-consensual sexual acts. Further, as Galya Diment writes in her Foreword to one of the titles under review, Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, 'Nabokov had not only his share of strong opinions, he also had his share of strong prejudices, among them what my students perceive as obvious sexism, discernible racism, and unmistakable homophobia' (p. xiv). Today's students are also often suspicious of Nabokov's multiple domains of privilege as a white male academic raised in an aristocratic family. From childhood, Nabokov was trilingual, including fluency in English, which would enable his flourishing international career as a writer in emigration. Fortunately, despite the subject matter of Lolita, no stories have surfaced of Nabokov himself exhibiting sexually inappropriate behaviour, a point that saves the author from compulsory cancellation but which makes more complex and ambiguous the questions of whether and how to teach his work in today's classroom. Both of these edited volumes on teaching Nabokov take up these concerns in the light of the changing needs of today's students. Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era, edited by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, has a narrow but urgent focus: how to teach Nabokov's most famous novel at a time when our culture is finally listening to victims of sexual assault rather than their assaulters. Meanwhile, the collection edited by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara, takes a broader approach, both to the pressures exerted by contemporary culture and to Nabokov's œuvre, offering a wide range of fresh and socially conscious perspectives on teaching Nabokov's most commonly taught works today. Both books contribute valuable and practical insights for engaging our students in study of Nabokov, and many of their ideas can also be applied to the teaching of other politically and socially challenging writers. Nabokov scholarship has been abundant over the past few decades; instructors already have numerous resources at their disposal for making sense of his texts, including a number of book-length guides to interpreting the major novels. But as both of these volumes imply, this massive scholarly corpus is insufficient for wrestling with the conundrums that our social moment exposes. Even the helpful earlier volume Approaches to Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita', edited by Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008), is seen in both of these new books as already out of touch with [End Page 646] today...