A Tempest in a Test Tube: Reading Lolita as Metafiction

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/tt44pn13w

Abstract

By tracing the functions of metafictional devices in Lolita, this thesis examines how the novel questions the moral goodness of art in the post-Holocaust world. The devices of parody, mise en abyme, metalepsis and appeals to the creative chronotope lay bare the processes of reading, writing, and world-construction. Consequently, the text becomes self-critical and inculpates the audience in Lolita's suffering through a performance that critiques the discourse of morality. This metafictional performance leaves a moral gap in the text that must be filled by the reader. Resultantly, morality in Lolita appears as a Levinasian process of reading - reading as a challenging, dialogic encounter with an Other which discovers the limits of transgression. Morality, though malleable, is not infinitely flexible: its one limit is the suffering of the Other. Lolita, then, serves as a critique not only of modernist life-construction and moral discourse, but also of modern forms of violence.

Creator