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Trilling and Nabokov

Email|Link|Comments (1) Posted by Christopher Shea September 12, 2008 02:44 PM

I'm not sure why this is suddenly getting noticed, but it's worth noticing. Lionel Trilling and Vladimir Nabokov discuss "Lolita":

Trilling: "I think that the book is shocking. I'm glad that it's shocking."
Evidently Nabokov did not let go of those notecards (on which he famously wrote his novels) even during interviews.

Part two is here.

Via James Wolcott.

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1 comments so far...

One thing that strikes me as remarkable about this dialog is that one never hears (so far as I know) anything like the accent and diction of any of these men anywhere in American society anymore. It might used to be the case that one could go, say, to the Harvard faculty lounge, or perhaps to a society ball and hear accents such as these. But one never hears such a highly "mannered" way of speaking these days -- certainly not at Harvard, for example.

The accent of standard "anchorperson" American English seems about as high-brow -- if it could possibly be called such -- as any accent to be found anywhere. Even at Harvard, it seems to be the highest limit to which they aspire.

Posted by frankly0 September 13, 08 01:23 AM