-------- Original Message --------
Dear List,
I just mailed a response to Michael May's announcement ("Reading Lolita
in
Dubuque"). My first experience of America was precisely in Dubuqe, as
instructor at Loras College; there was a kind of exchange between the
Catholic
University of Angers where I was teaching then and Loras College. You
may not
believe it, but they asked me to teach three courses of "Freshman
English"
plus one of "French culture". It was a great experience.
I hadn't heard of Nabokov at the time, having always studied and taught
in
Catholic schools in France; it was the following year that a Sorbonne
professor (to whom I am immensely grateful) made me read "Pale Fire".
And I
bought my first copy of "Lolita" (Appel's annotated edition) at the
Notre Dame
bookstore in 1970 (where I had just been appointed as assistant
professor).
Strangely, I found Dubuque, and Loras College, very liberal, as
compared to
France and the University of Angers. When I was teaching at the
Sorbonne in
the seventies, a senior professor forbade me to teach a course on
"Lolita"
("It might shock the girls", he said. He was a specialist of Whitman
and
taught courses on him, not bothering if that shocked the boys!).
Maurice Couturier