![]() ![]() ![]() Rewatching Woody Allen’s Manhattan in the #MeToo era, Dederer can’t ignore how the director’s otherwise masterful comedy of self-indictment singularly fails on one subject: old dudes having sex with teenage girls.Įxcusing artists by pointing to different eras and social mores gets short shrift in some cases. Dederer describes the author as an “anti-monster” – a novelist who risked being tainted by association, who wrote so convincingly in the voice of a monster to expose the ordinariness under Humbert’s delusion of exceptionalism. Her teenage self was appalled her mature reading is a knockdown defence of art’s remit, including the darkest corners of human experience. Our relationship to art changes over time, after all, and perhaps the most brilliant chapter of original literary criticism is Dederer’s reading of Nabokov’s Lolita – first as a 13-year-old girl, and again in middle-age. ![]()
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