TRANSNATIONAL VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOLITA APPROACHED VIA KELLY’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCT APPROACHED VIA KELLY’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCT AND NEMOIANU’S THEORY
TRANSNATIONAL VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S LOLITA APPROACHED VIA KELLY’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCT APPROACHED VIA KELLY’S PERSONAL CONSTRUCT AND NEMOIANU’S THEORY

Summary/Abstract: The paper focused on Nabokov’s Lolita suggests, through these two proper names, the transnational dimension of this novel due to the fact that the novelist was born in Russia, educated in Cambridge, lived first in Germany, then in France and finally in the United States and embraced most of the previous literary experiments (surrealism and dadaism) from these countries, polishing them up through his verbal and intellectual refinement. For decoding the profound psychological implications of Nabokov’s Lolita, Kelly’s personal construct theory will be turned to account through its considerations on the self “as if” it were a community of selves (the logical and the emotional one) and on the fact that personal reality is in “feeling, in felt engagement, not in the events described” (Kelly in Mair, 184). Since any good piece of writing should be concerned with transformations of awareness, at least in the readers, Nemoianu's theory of the secondary will be also employed by us in order to show that construction and deconstruction paradoxically go hand in hand. Jung’s archetype of the shadow will be finally exploited by us in order to show that only through reconstructing oneself, through surfing the dark side of one’s personality, one experiences the annihilation of the dark self, its death, followed by a symbolical moral rebirth.

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