Film Adaptation Of The Novel Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov is known as an outstanding novelist in the20th century. He is famousfor using complex plots and language games in the novel. Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955)written in a particular narrative pattern of fiction, meta-fiction, is regarded as his mostimportant and widely known novel. As soon as Lolita (N) was published, it immediatelybecame a bestseller.Lolita (N) was filmed by the famous American film director Stanley Kubrick in1962.Kubrick was one of the most fascinating and successful filmmakers in the latter half of the20th century. His incredible film style has earned him rave reviews. The film Lolita (F) wasnominated for a number of awards, and has won an Academy Award for Best AdaptedScreenplay.Nowadays, both the novel Lolita and Kubrick’s film of the same name have been theclassic. Many critics and scholars abroad and at home have appreciated Lolita (N) and Lolita(F) from different perspectives. However, studies on them just focus on the theme, languagestyle, narrative techniques, comparison between the novel and the film and so on. Somescholars have noticed that Lolita (N) has meta-fiction features, but few studies associate the“meta” feature of the novel with adaptation of the film. Novels and films are inseparable.They borrow ideas from each other and help each other forward. Thus, the film adaptation ofthe special type of fiction, meta-fiction, can be regarded as the cross-media intertextuality forthe fiction text.This thesis attempts to use the intertextuality theory to analyze the adaptation ofmeta-fiction Lolita from the novel to Kubrick’s film Lolita. It falls into six chapters: theintroduction, four chapters of analysis and the conclusion. The introduction part includes a brief introduction of Vladimir Nabokov’s lives andaccomplishments, the novel Lolita (N), the director Stanley Kubrick and the film Lolita (F).Next, the literature review abroad and at home to the novel and the film is included. Then, thesignificance of the thesis is presented: by using the intertextuality theory, a more open andinclusive idea to analyze the adaptation from meta-fiction Lolita to the film, it can provide thereaders with a fresh interpretation and appreciation of the novel and the film.Chapter One is the theoretical foundation of the whole thesis. It first introduces thedefinition and development of intertextuality theory, and then tries to analyze intertextualitybetween the novel and the film adaptation from three aspects: content, narration and style ofliterature. Intertextuality exists between literature and film. The content of the novel and thefilm are interwoven, and integrate with each other. The novel narrates by writing while thefilm narrates with the lens. These two ways of narration learn from each other and help eachother forward; the novel possesses the spatial vision feature of film, film has the time lapsefeature of literature, and the intertextual reading of two different media can help to promotethe reader’s understanding of the novel and the film through their relations and comparisonswith each other.Chapter Two provides an analysis of intertextuality of the meta-fiction Lolita and thefilm from the perspective of content. The first section briefly introduces the content of themeta-fiction Lolita and the film Lolita. The second section compares the differences betweenthe meta-fiction with the film, and points out that the additions and deletions of the film fullyshow the plot of the meta-fiction Lolita, and make characters of the meta-fiction moredistinctive. Thus, the content of the film present an intertext to the content of meta-fiction.Chapter Three provides an analysis of intertextuality of the meta-fiction Lolita and thefilm from the perspective of narration. Meta-fiction has a unique narrative structure, adoptinga kind of cleft nonlinear narration, always on not only one narration level. Film, as an intuitive visual art, mainly uses the live pictures collected from the actual world as the basiclanguage units. Although the flash cuts that appear over and over again in Lolita (F) make thefilm seem scattered on the surface, Kubrick achieves the goal of narration by using differentpermutation and combination forms of the pictures, forming masterly intertextuality with themeta-fiction narration.Chapter Four provides an analysis of intertextuality of the meta-fiction Lolita and thefilm from the perspective of style of literature. In the first section, examples are given toillustrate the meta-fiction feature of Lolita (N), and it also points out that meta-fiction is thefiction of fictions, while meta-film is the film of films. Section Two puts forward that filmgenres are the intertextuality of fiction genres on the basis of generalized textuality. It is alsostated that how to reflect the features of meta-fiction in the films is a tremendous problem inthe process of adapting meta-fictions into films. However, it is a pity that this black-and-whitefilm of Kubrick has not fully realized the transformation from meta-fiction to meta-film. As aresult, this fiction still has much more space for adaption.According to the analysis and discussion mentioned above, conclusion points out that thetwo kinds of art forms, the meta-fiction Lolita and the Lolita (F), have many differences.However, no text exists in isolation, and fictions are closely related to films. They learn fromeach other and get mutual progress, and so the film text can be seen as the cross-mediaintertextuality of the fiction text. Compared with the problem of “similar” or “not similar”concerned by the traditional film adaption, using intertextuality theory to explain the adaptionof Lolita (N) from meta-fiction to film broadens the ideas of adaption from fiction to film.