aesthetic Nabokov

I'm listening to a lecture series from Professor Amy Hungerford at Yale on the modern American novel (from 1945). Anna and Kitty and I got into a discussion about pure aestheticism and this novel definitely takes the concept into account.

Here is the video lecture offered through Academic Earth:

The question is, does Nabokov have a moral stance, or does he empathize with Humbert? He wants us to judge, while begging us not to. Nabokov wants us to think of Humbert having a sort of innocence.

Invokes Poe's Annabelle Lee. Perhaps because Poe married his 14 year old cousin. Poe becomes a sort of model for pedophilia, and his "language is fully clothed in the language of romance."

Overwrought prose, cliche, then originality, which allows us to understand what Nabokov himself thinks, ways in which he distances himself from Humbert. The poetry, the romance, somehow justify the prurient, forms a certain type of morality, purity.

How can Nabokov make us identify with a pedophile? Lionel Trilling called this the greatest love story of our time. Was he seduced by Humbert? Nabokov is using the shape of love stories, and using that in a distorted way.

The world of the aesthetic is very much in evidence in this novel. Imagination is a privileged realm for Nabokov. Is Lolita a romantic novel from the prospect that it lives within the imagination of Humbart? Is the novel an unmasking of the romantic mind, by bringing to light (one of the author's frequent themes) the ugliness that lives in the individual imagination?