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Taylor Campbell

Lolita: A Cultural Image explores the relationship between the book cover as an image and its greater context: how it relates to its text and how it is received by different individuals within their own contexts. Lolita is a book that has permeated our visual culture, and continues to do so. From Hollywood archetypes to fashion, loli-con fetish to pop music, Lolita continues to be reinterpreted in a skewed reflection of its original manifestation: a disturbing narrative of the sexual exploitation of a 12 year old girl transcribed in seductive, mesmerizing prose. Through censorship, cognitive dissonance, and the effects of pop culture, Lolita has come to represent something more than Nabokov could have ever imagined. 

 

Viewed through different lenses, the text is interpreted in disparate ways. There is a naiveté offered by the narrator H. H.’s testimony of the relationship as a fanciful romance, and there is the understanding of the physical acts that blacklisted the book as debauchery.

 

Sector C: Art Practice and TechnologyAdvisors: Lindsay Fiorelli (PHIL) | Sharka Hyland (FNAR)