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Re: a paedophilia story from "Lolita's perspective" ...
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Sandy Klein sends: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/dangerous-liaisons-too-much-too-young-2265996.html
An excerpt:
"Maureen Freely, an author and English literature academic at Warwick University, suggests that this brand of 'literary non-fiction' which presents true accounts in a literary register, often carries an added burden of responsibility toward its readership. 'The idea of literary non-fiction challenges people's moral understandings of the world we live in,' she says...'People read stories all year long and accept them, but they read non-fiction in a completely different way. You have to establish for them, and they have to believe what they are reading is true. With non-fiction, you are having to negotiate with everybody else in the world that it happened this way.' The opprobrium that has greeted Tiger, Tiger suggests that as far as Lolita's story goes, truth can be far more dangerous, and problematic, than fiction."
JM: The boundaries between the "literary" and the "artistic" or between "true accounts" and "fiction" are not as clear-cut as Maureen Freely seems to consider.
In many ways, as it happens with Nabokov's "Lolita," fiction is truth*.
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*I doubt it that Keats' final lines in the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" ('beauty is truth and truth beauty') is a statement he seriously intended to be considered as philosophically representative besides a poetic sentiment or wishful-thinking. I was reminded of an epigraph I just read in a collection of ancient and modern texts about "Language" (from Plato to Foucault): "Philosophy is a fight against language's bewitching powers over thought." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parargraph 109).
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An excerpt:
"Maureen Freely, an author and English literature academic at Warwick University, suggests that this brand of 'literary non-fiction' which presents true accounts in a literary register, often carries an added burden of responsibility toward its readership. 'The idea of literary non-fiction challenges people's moral understandings of the world we live in,' she says...'People read stories all year long and accept them, but they read non-fiction in a completely different way. You have to establish for them, and they have to believe what they are reading is true. With non-fiction, you are having to negotiate with everybody else in the world that it happened this way.' The opprobrium that has greeted Tiger, Tiger suggests that as far as Lolita's story goes, truth can be far more dangerous, and problematic, than fiction."
JM: The boundaries between the "literary" and the "artistic" or between "true accounts" and "fiction" are not as clear-cut as Maureen Freely seems to consider.
In many ways, as it happens with Nabokov's "Lolita," fiction is truth*.
....................................................................
*I doubt it that Keats' final lines in the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" ('beauty is truth and truth beauty') is a statement he seriously intended to be considered as philosophically representative besides a poetic sentiment or wishful-thinking. I was reminded of an epigraph I just read in a collection of ancient and modern texts about "Language" (from Plato to Foucault): "Philosophy is a fight against language's bewitching powers over thought." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, parargraph 109).
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/