Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran chronicles the experiences of author from the year 1978 to 1997, when she returned to Iran during the revolution (1978-1981) and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. The act of writing this memoir, gives her an opportunity to tell her own story and the stories of her students in her own words, from her perspective. By doing this, she saves herself and her girls from falling into the trap of tyrannical regimes, who in order to rule the masses take away their histories and personal stories from them, imposing homogeneity, thus, making them irrelevant and insignificant. The book is centered around a private class comprising seven students, all of them female, chosen …show more content…
It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction.”
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and Professor Azar Nafisi. The book is an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction -- on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual.
The book is a memoir which chronicles the experiences of author from the year 1978 to 1997, when she returned to Iran during the revolution (1978-1981) and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. It narrates her teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, her refusal to submit to the rule to wear the veil and her subsequent expulsion from the university, life during the Iran-Iraq war, her return to teaching at the University of Allameh Tabatabei (1981), her resignation (1987), the formation of her private reading classes (1995–97), and her decision to