Beyond Martha Nussbaum's Cognitive-Evaluative Approach to the Emotions: Separating Reader and Narrative Affective Experience from Ethical Judgments in Lolita

Martha Nussbaum has famously argued that narrative fiction can expand readers' capacity to make appropriate ethical judgments because it requires readers' discernment of nuanced ethical situations, and because the emotional dynamics of engaging with the particulars of a fiction aids that discernment. In this essay, I argue that Nabokov's Lolita pushes Martha Nussbaum's philosophy of emotions and ethics to its limits by creating the audience...