On June 12, Washington DC's Middle East Institute (MEI) hosted the webinar "Writing Covid-19" with authors Elias Khoury (Gate of the Sun), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Ece Temelkuran ...(Women Who Blow on Knots), in discussion with MEI's president Paul Satem. The discussion reached well beyond COVID-19 and touched on the dangers of fascism, threats to values and culture, and writing as a means of human connection and a method to reclaim human dignity. Khoury acknowledged that political and economic powers and culture are always connected. The neoliberal ideology that has framed political, economic and social strategies has "destroyed values and put society in such a situation where only the powerful can survive," he argued.
According to Anderson’s positions on nation and nationalism as cultural artifacts, Azar Nafisi’s literary memoirs show a controversial case study, focused on the ambiguities of the exile discourse ...and of the so-called «imaginative knowledge». Through the lens of a recurring celebration of Western myths of freedom, a series of stereotypes and paradoxes will be examined, in relation to the censorship experienced by the author under the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moreover, Nafisi’s juxtaposition of political and literary perspectives will be shown as an ambivalent narrative strategy, despite her search for a true self without any ideological engagement. In the end, the explored duality between oriented dissertations and pure imaginative recreations will enable to reconsider Nafisi’s memoirs as committed depictions of a Westernized national legacy.
Azar Nafisi titled her best-selling memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran", a book that details her time reading several Western classics in her secret, subversive, female-student book club in her home ...country. In taking this for her title, she makes "Lolita" a synecdoche for great Western literature and a model text for exposing solipsists who deny their subjects humanity. Grogan argues that Nafisi's uncritical praise of "Lolita" is problematic, but her memoir succeeds in providing Western readers with an insider's view of the cruel patriarchal practices many Muslim women experience. Here memoir suggests that at the dawn of the century books about father-daughter incest were being imported not necessarily to comment on the act itself but to articulate a history of female subjugation in which incest is just one part of a larger network of oppression.
This article argues that Azar Nafisi's uncritical praise of Vladimir Nobokov's "Lolita" is problematic, but her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" succeeds in providing Western readers an insider's ...view of the cruel patriarchal practices many Muslim women experience. Her memoir suggests that at the dawn of the century books about father-daughter incest were being imported not necessarily to comment on the act itself but to articulate a history of female subjugation in which incest is just one part of a larger network of oppression. Strikingly, Nafisi's 2003 book, which functions simultaneously as personal memoir, literary analysis, and political commentary, employs "Lolita," of all books, to expose the insidious trauma females in Iran experience on a daily basis.
Donadey and Ahmed-Ghosh examine why Americans love Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita is a 350-page memoir on life in Iran under a theocratic Islamic regime between 1979 and 1997. ...The book provides the kind of ideological perspective that American and European audiences have come to expect, if not demand, from women in Muslim countries. In addition, its greatest weakness is that it was written exclusively in terms of an Iranian context, yet written for a US audience that is not provided with the historical and political tools to understand the text other than in western terms. Despite Nafisi's distaste for ideologically driven literature, her memoir can ironically serve to bolster a dominant US ideology of individual freedom, which is often used in the US to cloak the operations of globalized capital.
Blumenthal examines the text of Islamic diaspora writers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi, and Khaled Hosseini, that seek relief in their conflicted status as "Westerners" and Muslims, ex-Muslims, or ...ex-citizens of Islamic nation. Hirsi Ali queries the status of women within Islam in the film Submission, her book, The Cage Virgin, and her autobiography, Infidel. Nafisi and Hosseini trouble the notion of "homeland" as it relates to female Arab and Muslim Diaspora. This multivalent trope locates "homeland" geographically, ideology, and textually. These authors manipulate the genre and para-text of their books that both relieves and worries their vexed identities as citizens of multiple "homelands."
Women and Reading Flint, Kate
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
01/2006, Letnik:
31, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Flint explores Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is remarkable for the ways it lends new eyes to those who take the reading privileges of a Western democracy more or ...less for granted. Reading--presented, to be sure, by someone whose experience has made her a fervent advocate of Western liberalism--becomes simultaneously an escape from oppression, especially gender oppression, an intellectual transgression, and a promise that life might and can be otherwise.
