This study examines how upper secondary students respond to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov in an educational context, with a particular focus on how reading stances, affective responses, and ethical dilemmas interact within classroom meaning-making practices. Situated within literary didactics research on ethically and aesthetically challenging texts, the study addresses a significant gap by providing an empirical account of how younger students engage with a canonical yet controversial novel.

The empirical material consists of recorded classroom discussions, reading logs, and field notes. The analysis is informed by a theoretical framework combining Rosenblatt’s (2002) transactional theory of reading, Felski’s (2008) concepts of affect and shock, Persson's (2012) reasoning about instrumental reading styles, provocative literature and didactic risk-taking, and Torell’s (2002) model of literary competence. The findings demonstrate that students move between aesthetic, experiential, and moral reading stances, which emerge as dynamic and situational rather than fixed categories. These stances interact continuously, forming a complex interpretive process in which affect is not an obstacle to analysis but a driving force in meaning-making. Discomfort, ambivalence, and moral indignation function as entry points into reflections on language, narrative perspective, and rhetorical manipulation.

At the same time, the study highlights how these processes are shaped by the didactic and social conditions of the classroom. In particular, the findings underscore the importance of instructional design, as written reflection tasks enable more elaborated and text-oriented analysis than whole-class discussions. Student response thus emerges as an interactional and context-dependent practice, where literary competence is activated differently depending on the conditions of participation.

The study’s key contribution lies in its empirical demonstration of how affect, ethics, and aesthetics intersect in upper secondary students’ reading, and how this intersection is mediated through classroom practices. In doing so, it extends previous research, primarily based on university contexts or theoretical claims, by showing how literary complexity is negotiated in school settings. The findings further suggest that, when supported by ethically informed and pedagogically structured instruction, engagement with controversial literature can serve as a powerful resource for developing students’ critical literacy and their capacity to navigate complex aesthetic and ethical interpretive challenges.