What You'll Learn:
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. She has held several academic leadership roles at universities such as Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Oxford. After her emigration, she became a prominent writer, known best for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which topped The New York Times Best Sellers list and remained on it for over two years. In Reading Lolita, Nafisi recounts her experience teaching censored Western literature in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Key Insights:
- Under the totalitarian regime of the day, fiction became both a release and a resource for understanding.
- From Nabokov’s Lolita, one learns of dehumanization and alienation.
- In a totalitarian regime, freedom of thought is poisoned at its roots.
- From F. Scott Fitzgerald, one learns about the complexity of moral judgment.
- From Henry James’ Washington Square, one learns to distinguish between integrity and happiness.
- From despair, one can learn of hope.
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