Vaingurt, Julia. Unfair Use: Parody, Plagiarism, and Other Suspicious Practices in and around Lolita. 2011

Julia Vaingurt’s “Unfair Use: Parody, Plagiarism, and Other Suspicious Practices in and around Lolita,” explores the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Nabokov’s modernist novel, in Pia Pera’s postmodern parody of it, and in Dmitri Nabokov’s remarkable lawsuit against the latter. The essay demonstrates how parody probes and reassesses not only the aesthetic value of the original, but also the very concept of aesthetic value.