No novel divides readers quite like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), a work of fiction that is as beautiful as it is shocking. In this series of four weekly seminars, Merve Emre, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, will guide participants through the story of a brilliant, cruel, and obsessive man’s love for a twelve-year-old girl, touching on debates about freedom and morality, high art and mass culture, Old Europe and young America, and the entwined fates of comedy and romance in the postwar novel.
Schedule
Four One-hour sessions at 7pm EDT
Mondays: April 1, 8, 15, and 22
About Merve Emre
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, where she also hosts the podcast “The Critic and Her Publics.”
