NOJ / !"#: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. II / 2008 TEACHING NABOKOV ________________________________________________ Forum, Winter 2007 Participants: Priscilla Meyer (Wesleyan University) David Rampton (University of Ottawa) Christine Raguet (Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvellei) Corinne Scheiner (The Colorado College) NOJ: Every discipline has its own language and its own pedagogical needs. How would you try to set them out for Nabokov Studies? David Rampton: One of the best teachers I had at university taught a Shakespeare course I audited as a graduate student. As an undergraduate, I had taken the same course with someone else. Unfortunately, it was the late 1960s, and the very impressive Shakespeare scholar running the class thought giving lectures simply confirmed the dynamics of the authoritarian power structures we should be intent on destroying. A very dreary, 35-person, equal opportunity ‘seminar’ was the result, in which students earnestly exchanged their stock responses and Shakespeare was more or less forgotten, while the professor dreamily surveyed the wreckage, her credibility gone but her egalitarian credentials intact. The professor I was hoping would help me fill in the resultant gap was 1