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¶ … Lolita in Tehran -- Reading the Politics of Azar Nafisi
Lolita -- otherwise known as Dolores Haze, the object of Humbert Humbert's affection. Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Daisy Miller, protagonist of Henry James' most famous long short story. These heroines and heroes of fiction might not, upon their surfaces seem to be politically oriented protagonists. Indeed, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran begs her own, presumably Western reader, not to make superficial analogies between, for instance, Humbert Humbert's child victim Lolita and the marginalized status of women intellectuals in Iran. Although a reader could say that both were small, fragile, and oppressed by outside forces who could not appreciate their true inner worth until it was too late, Azar Nafisi argues that it is even more radical to simply appreciate Western works of literature for what they are, great texts that create and explore the world within their own plot frameworks. A reader does not need to make easy symbolic analogies for these texts to be relevant.
Rather than to politicize every aspect and element of books, as the Iranian regime desires to do, the girls whom the author teachers in her home as part of a small seminar, apart from the university,...
Some of the girls are fundamentalists. Others are more secular in their outlook. But, by leaving their own time and place in their minds, a land where everything is judged upon the significance, merit, and relationship to the politics of the Islamic regime, and by entering instead momentarily into the different fictional worlds of the West, the girls participate in perhaps the most radical act of all. By reading Lolita, they are suggesting that there are other issues of relevance not immediately applicable to Islam, Iran, and that moment of Iran's history. Azar Nafisi loves her native country -- that is why she stays, perhaps stays too long in Iran, even while opportunities close up all around her for professional advancement -- and she loves literature's potential to give her a life and a voice that the public discourse of Iran increasingly denies her as a woman. She encourages her students to find their own voices in literature as well.
Many of the works Nafisi studied with her girls, and even before during her professorship at the Iranian university, were either banned…
Work Cited
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York; Random House, 2003.
Lolita in Tehran -- the Threats of Western Literature and Freedom Reading the great classics of Western literature in Tehran during the height of the fundamentalist Iranian regime's power over its citizens was a threatening and radical act of defiance. This was not simply because these books were banned. Specifically, Western literature and Western fiction in particular offered the girls who gathered for discussions in the author's living room the
Meditation in Thurman and Nafisi Reading and Meditation are similar because they both involve using the imagination. When one reads, one creates a vivid picture in the mind of what the words are suggesting: it is an active process on the part of the reader, who must "picture" the events as the words are described (as opposed to sitting passively before a screen and allowing the projector to do all
But the girls can read the text from Lolita's point-of-view. They can appreciate her powerlessness, as they are powerless in the context of a state, held in the force of an oppressive regime even if the book is not explicitly about Iran. Nafisi defends her choice of European classics because they uphold the integrity of the individual, and the individual was given scant appreciation in Tehran at the time. A
Subtly, between the pages of memoir and of literary and political criticism, this book deals with the uncertain and uneasy solipsism of the world. The way in which the totalitarian, theocratic regime seeks to impose its will on the women of Tehran is certainly horrific. Girls are forbidden to have any sort of color in their attire or about their person, as if someone the very existence of color would
She does not accept a world in which their native land has fallen and they have no emotional reaction to leaving it. So she negotiates an identity which has lost something. When her husband cannot accept this identity, and then apparently abandons her at the train station, she negotiates the idea of an identity that is strong enough to survive and find love and gratification and recognition without him.
The Representation of Muslim Women in Eastern and Western Literature: A Comparison Representations of women in Middle Eastern literature represent a means by which the appreciation, perspective and overall role of women and how they are viewed by society can be determined. While some argue that literature and actually lived daily life are separate, literature serves as a measuring stick by which one can ascertain a definitive viewpoint on what the