“Upsilamba!”: the Joy and Sanctuary of Fiction in Reading Lolita in Tehran
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Date
2004-11-05
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Department
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Program
Bachelor's Degree
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Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.
Abstract
I wrote this piece for a class with Irline Francois called “International Feminist Identity.” About halfway through the semester, we began reading a memoir called Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi organized a clandestine English literature course for a group of her female students while living under a dictatorship in Iran. Nafisi writes with such understated elegance that I often found myself reading entire paragraphs or even pages out loud. I became fascinated with the book. Because of Nafisi’s intensely personal approach to her subject, I found myself not only examining the role literature played in Nafisi’s memoir, but in my life as well.