This paperback is a compilation of responses to essay questions Vladimir Nabokov assigned during his term as a professor of Literature at Cornell University. His students were asked to choose one question from a series on one of seven novels, then answer it however they saw fit, bearing the spirit of Nabokov’s pedagogy in mind. The results range from the textual, visual, or graphical; some were realized from a mix of these approaches.

“The aim in reactivating Nabokov’s teaching—this appropriated version of Nabokov’s teaching—was to try to find out what methods and forms of reading his suggestively-worded questions might elicit today. Today, that is: some fifty years after the moment of their articulation in a lecture course, and some thirty years after the publication of that course, when how to respond to literature, how to do what we still might want to call literary criticism, what forms such critical engagement could take and what counts as good reading still, or once again, or possibly even only now, feel like new, vital questions.” – Information as material