On The Defamiliarization In Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov,or known by his pen name Vladimir Sirin,is a RussianAmerican novelist.Throughout his life,he created a lot of works such as:Lolita,Pale fire and Ada.His world-famous novel Lolita(1955)is the most controversial one in the 20 th century.Since its publication,Lolita drew considerable attention of readers and scholars at home and abroad.In recent years,Lolita has been discussed from many different perspectives by literary critics and scholars.These perspectives are mainly about the themes and postmodern features presented in Lolita.Butnot many researches on its defamiliarization have been made.Under such situation,the present author makes efforts to analyze this novel in light of Shklovsky’s defamiliariztion theory.The analysis of defamiliarization is conductive to drawing readers’ attention to the novel itself and its artistic techniques and driving readers to think about the creation of novels.Defamiliariztion,one of the important concepts of Russian Formalism,was first put forward by Victor Shklovskyin his famous essay “Art as Technique”.In Shklovsky’s words,defamiliarization can be simply understood as to make common and familiar things strange and unfamiliar.Through breaking limits of the habitual perception,defamiliarization can arise people’s interests towards the familiar things once again.This thesis strives to analyze the defamiliarization from three aspects.First,in Chapter One,the author deals with the defamiliarized language presented in Lolita.In this novel,defamiliarized language is realized through two ways: poetic language and word games.The poetic language brings readers aesthetic bliss.There is a bit of difficulty for readers to work out series of puzzles.Frequent occurrence of word games increases the difficulty of reading,impedes people’s understanding and prolongs the aesthetic progress.Then,the present author tries to probe into the multiple narrative techniques.The transformation of the narrative point of view gives the narrator a favorable position to defend for himself.Suspense to the greatest degree stimulates’ readers’ curiosity.And the employment of digression is helpful in increasing the reading time of readers.Finally,parody is the key word of Nabokov’s novels.In Lolita,Nabokov parodies the traditional fairy tales in a new form,which breaks readers’ set thinking and subverts their common perception towards familiar objects.The parody of the fairy tales endows readers with a sense of surprise and makes them have a general comprehension of Nabokov’s attitudes towards creation.