Our Group (#3) Presentation

We had a difficult time coming up with a presentation topic. Initially we had played with the idea of doing a kind of skit or play type of thing where each person would play a character from one of Nabokov's books, and then possibly making the setting "Humbert Land." After discussing it, we couldn't decide how we would go about doing that and incorporating the theme of discovery into it.

The next idea that got brought into play was a game. After all, Nabokov is quite fond of games, especially chess. We initially came up with an extremely confusing idea in which there would be a question regarding 5 topics (memory, time, illusion, framing, and coincidence). Somehow we were trying to make the answer for each question correspond in a way with all of the other questions. However, a number of the group members found the game too confusing, and we figured it might be too confusing for the class as well so we nixed that idea. Next, we talked about doing a kind of jeopardy type game or possibly a cranium kind of thing where a representative from each team would come up and try to act out, draw, or sculpt something for their team to guess. This is similar to what we ended up with, but felt that we needed to participate more in the game, and so we decided to do the acting ourselves.

First we decided that we wanted the last question to be an anagram composed of the first letter of each answer. So we came up with the word "lepidoptera." It was a word that we thought would be relatively hard to guess, although that didn't end up being the case. From there, we decided on answers who's first letters begin with letters in the final word and have to do with discoveries (a lot of them were literary allusions that we discussed in class) from the novels. Once we came up with those, each person was assigned certain ones to act out or draw, and we went from there.