“Upsilamba!”: the Joy and Sanctuary of Fiction in Reading Lolita in Tehran
| dc.contributor.author | Bardaglio, Anne | |
| dc.contributor.department | Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | en_US |
| dc.contributor.program | Bachelor's Degree | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2016-02-19T20:32:41Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2016-02-19T20:32:41Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004-11-05 | |
| dc.description | From the faculty nominator, Irline Francois: Ann Bardaglio emerged from a Mid-Term assignment for my Women' Studies 227 class entitled, Becoming Visible: Fictions of International Female Identity. The course looks at the social and political construction of femininity within different cultural, political and historical contexts. We consider, for example, how the authors write about experiences particular to women within their socio-cultural geographical and historical contest as shown in their struggles to survive adversity, the wounds of history, what gives them pain and joy. I composed a list of questions in which students had to choose one: Ann's paper incorporated two of my essay questions for her Mid-Term paper while providing a personal response to her essay. It was made abundantly clear from the first sentence the novel touched Ann very deeply. Her paper title "Upsilamba!! The Joy and Sanctuary of Ficton in Reading Lolita in Tehran is both a love letter to literature, an affirmation of its life-sustaining ability. I responded strongly to Ann's paper because it was beautifully written echoing the beauty and power of Nafisi's words.It was also well-researched. Her paper showed not only her profound love for the power of language with her citing of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but also how literature enables one to connect with Iranian women through the written world, the universal yearnings of the soul. At its most powerful, literature offers the possibility to transgress, to resist, to provide solace for the soul...Hence, Ann eloquently affirmed these human aspirations in her essay. | en_US |
| dc.description.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. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Irline Francois | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 9 p. | en_US |
| dc.genre | research papers | en_US |
| dc.identifier | doi:10.13016/M2C43K | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11603/2294 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.relation.isAvailableAt | Goucher College, Baltimore, MD | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Verge: the goucher journal of undergraduate writing;2 | |
| dc.rights | 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. | |
| dc.subject | Research -- Periodicals. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Humanities -- Research -- Periodicals. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Social sciences -- Research -- Periodicals. | en_US |
| dc.title | “Upsilamba!”: the Joy and Sanctuary of Fiction in Reading Lolita in Tehran | en_US |
| dc.type | Text | en_US |