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Loading... Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (original 2003; edition 2008)by Azar Nafisi (Author)
Work InformationReading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I was so interested in the subject, I wanted to know about the student's lives in Tehran and the experience of freedom this class gave them. I only got through 10%. While what I listed above that is definitely a part of the book, the majority of it seems to be about the author, her experience, and how it affected her. In the first 10% I read, there is an almost exhausting amount of 'I's and 'me's. As some other reviews have said, it does come off as self-important. The subject matter is compelling, but I found the framing awkward and the literary connections forced. At times it feels a bit like an Iranian Dead Poets Society, and Nafisi makes sure we are aware of the Western cultural capital that allows her to intellectually transcend the strictures of the Islamic state. Like Satrapi's Persepolis, this seems intended for a Western audience and is written from a place of privilege. The young women in her reading group are not really developed as people - we are given details about their lives, but in the end they feel interchangeable, and that they were used to illustrate the conflicts women face in a theocracy.
The charismatic passion in the book is not simply for literature itself but for the kind of inspirational teaching of it which helps students to teach themselves by applying their own intelligence and emotions to what they are reading. [A]n eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction--on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual. A spirited tribute both to the classics of world literature and to resistance against oppression. Has as a student's study guideHas as a teacher's guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. They were unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl or protests and demonstrations. Azar Nafisi's tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in revolutionary Iran. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)820.9Literature English English literature in more than one form History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one formLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Nafisi is a professor of English literature, and the best parts of the book are the scenes of Iranian students in the early days of the revolution, and later in Nafisi's private study group in the late 1990s, reacting to the novels she loves and teaches. The classroom "trial" of The Great Gatsby, in which an ardent Islamic revolutionary student condems the book as a part of the decadent and immoral West, while another student argues in defense of its moral value, was a high point. Nafisi's drawing of a parallel between Humbert's "pinning" of Lolita and forcing her to be the person of his own imagination and what Nafisi sees as a similar act by Khomeini and the Islamic Republic in forcing Iranians to conform to their fantasies of how people should behave also struck me as interesting.
But there was less of that than I would have thought, and more of Nafisi's own condemnations and rants against the Islamic regime and its supporters and how it all made her feel. And most of the book's scenes with her small private study group of women equally alienated from the regime is spent complaining about their lives and the government, rather than discussing literature. Though to be sure, they have plenty to complain about, no argument there.
The book is interesting and worth reading, but I do wish Nafisi could have toned down her obviously strong impulse to write about "how the Islamic Republic made me continually feel depressed" and concentrated somewhat more on the actual works of English literature and how her students responded to them in their particular, much different, society.
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