Reading Lolita in Tehran Term Paper

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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, after the fundamentalist revolution in Iran has taken sway over the land, find a private life in dialogue, in discussing great works of Western literature.

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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,….....

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"Reading Lolita In Tehran" (2004, December 03) Retrieved April 29, 2024, from
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/reading-lolita-tehran-59623

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"Reading Lolita In Tehran" 03 December 2004. Web.29 April. 2024. <
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"Reading Lolita In Tehran", 03 December 2004, Accessed.29 April. 2024,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/reading-lolita-tehran-59623
   

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