Question 1

What novels does Reading Lolita in Tehran discuss?

Accepted Answer

The memoir is organized in four sections, each named for a major Western novel. The first section, 'Lolita,' covers Nabokov's novel and its relevance to Iranian women living under a regime that, like Humbert Humbert, creates a fictional version of reality that serves its own desires. The second section, 'Gatsby,' covers Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and the themes of the American dream and desire's relationship to reality that Nafisi and her students find relevant to their own situation. The third section, 'James,' covers Henry James's Daisy Miller and Washington Square, using James's portrait of women who resist the demands of the world around them to explore the situation of women in the Islamic Republic. The fourth section, 'Austen,' covers Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and uses Austen's comic treatment of women's social world to explore how private life and private judgment can survive in a public world that seeks to control both. The novels are not simply discussed as literature; they are used as mirrors through which Nafisi and her students examine their own lives, and the memoir argues that this use of literature — as a means of maintaining interior freedom when exterior freedom has been suppressed — is one of the most important things that literature does.

Question 2

Is Reading Lolita in Tehran controversial?

Accepted Answer

Reading Lolita in Tehran has been both enormously successful and significantly contested since its publication in 2003. It was a bestseller in the United States and has been widely taught in university courses on memoir, Iranian culture, and the politics of literature. It has also been criticized, most notably by the Iranian-American literary scholar Hamid Dabashi in a 2006 essay that accused Nafisi of writing a 'colonial' narrative that presented Iran through the eyes of someone who had become an American and that served to provide Western readers with a comforting story about Western cultural superiority. Nafisi has responded to these criticisms, and the debate about the memoir's political implications continues. The memoir's portrait of Iran is self-described as partial — it is Nafisi's own experience, from her own educated secular perspective — and readers who want a more complete portrait of Iranian cultural life under the Islamic Republic will want to read other accounts alongside it. What the memoir does well, most readers agree, is portray the specific experience of intellectual women in Tehran who used literature as a form of private resistance to a public regime.

Question 3

Why does Nafisi focus on Western novels rather than Iranian literature?

Accepted Answer

Nafisi's choice to organize her memoir around four canonical Western novels — Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen — rather than Persian or Iranian literature has been noted by critics and by Nafisi herself. The choice is not accidental: the Western novels that she and her students read were specifically the novels that the Islamic Republic had identified as problematic or dangerous, and reading them was therefore a political act as well as a literary one. Nafisi has also argued that the Western literary canon, far from being irrelevant to Iranian women's experience, was directly relevant: the questions that Austen and James posed about women's interior freedom in societies that sought to control them were the questions that her students were living. The memoir's argument is that great literature is not the exclusive property of any culture but belongs to anyone who reads it with attention, and that Western canonical novels can illuminate experiences that they were not written to address.

Reading Lolita in Tehran Reading Order

Complete Reading Lolita in Tehran Book List

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Things I've Been Silent About

Reading Lolita in Tehran — Frequently Asked Questions

What novels does Reading Lolita in Tehran discuss?

Is Reading Lolita in Tehran controversial?

Why does Nafisi focus on Western novels rather than Iranian literature?

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