Azar Nafisi was born and raised in Iran, and her credentials as an Iranian woman and scholar are not in question. Her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir of some of her life lived in Iran, but many aspects of it are shared with historical traveler's accounts which can be seen as "exposing the subtexts under the seemingly innocent details of the trip to Iran. other lands that allow us to see more clearly the way in which travelers [in this case an Iranian of origin, but speaking in the same spirit] construct the cultures they experience. From travelers' travel stories, we can trace the presence of cultures. Stereotypes and the way an individual reacts to what is seen elsewhere may reflect trends in the traveler's home culture. (Bassnett 93, mine in parentheses). It is this similarity to historical travellers' accounts that helps create the illusion that Dr. Nafisi only visited Iran, even though she considered it her country, and that she was never truly at home there. She. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayRoland Barthes, in his book Mythologies, wrote a short chapter on “the writer on vacation”. In it, he mocks the details that newspapers give us about what famous writers do on vacation. It seems that Le Figaro likes to recount in detail the “sartorial and taste functions” of writers (Barthes 31), as if this could humanize them and make them accessible to their readers. Barthes protests against this, asserting that “Far from the details of his daily life bringing me closer to the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer to me, it is the entire mythical singularity of his condition on which the writer places emphasis. 'the accent of such confidences'. (31) In Nafisi's work, she does not hesitate to add details of food and clothing, and at times, details of houses and interiors. This oddity of writing, in a memoir filled with incomplete accounts of his own and others' lives, serves, one assumes, to bring the reader closer to the subject at hand and to better understand it. For example, we are repeatedly told that the author likes coffee ice cream, with coffee on it, and nuts (Nafisi 314). She even says it's her only way to solve problems. Add to this the detailed descriptions of her students' clothes when they first come to her house and the care with which she dressed for that first day of class (12-18). With these details, she attempts to humanize the girls, to make them real and recognizable to the reader, and not to make them simple “Iranian students”. It is interesting to note however that Nafisi gives us very incomplete information about each young woman, and it is quite difficult to tell them apart. Because none of their stories are told from the beginning (and perhaps because of this reader's inexcusable unfamiliarity with Persian names), it is easy to confuse their details. Was this intentional? Did Nafisi intend to strip them of their identity and “replace them with a cipher from [our] own imagination” (Stringer-Hye 209)? Nafisi wants us to “imagine ourselves, we will only exist if you imagine us” (210) but she gives us such incomplete information about each woman that it is difficult to imagine any of them as a person real. There are bits of reality, like the conversation between Nafisi and Nassrin in his office when Nassrin is preparing to leave the country (321). During this passage, the reader sees areal dialogue between two people, which has a coherent beginning, middle, and end, unlike most of the book club-style conversations in Nafisi's classes, in which the action oscillates between the students' conversation and the parallels with the literature they read. This trope might be entirely stylistic, but it resembles the type of synecdoche used in travel writers' stories. This is reminiscent of Tacitus, making his experiment with a few Germanic men and women had enough experience to make generalizations about their "chastity" and "nobility" (Shaffer 47) without knowing any statistics or having any proof of this as a truly general characteristic of these tribes. From Nafisi, we have these scraps of Iranian women's experience – Sanaz's unhappy love story, Azin's nail polish, Nassrin's lies to her father – but we do not have the whole of their experiences, nor of their stories. It is true that we hear about their imprisonments and their difficulties with their husbands, their brothers and their parents, but since we do not have a complete picture of a single woman, we are left with an incomplete picture that we , American readers uninformed about Iran. , to be considered with caution. There are no complete stories here; even Azar Nafisi doesn't tell us the whole story of his own life, so we are left with details like pastries and coffee shops and the strange habits of Nafisi's "magician", about whom we know nothing other than he was a former professor and writer who, under the Islamic regime, withdrew from the world. In Nafisi's defense, there are two reasons for the fragmentary nature of the account; one political, the other formal. In the "Author's Note" (ix), Nafisi explains that the events of this story have "been altered primarily to protect individuals" and that "the facts of this story are true to the extent that any memory is always true ". There is good reason not to tell the full story of these young women, as they could be easily discovered and prosecuted under the current regime. The other is that Nafisi titled this book “A Memoir in the Books.” It is not an autobiography, a multi-biography, nor even a personal history or a partial life story. A memoir, a form that is often about people the writer has known more than about herself, is not intended to tell life stories or to produce comprehensive character studies of human beings. And Nafisi adheres to this form, with the difference that we know more about her life than that of any of her students. The aim, as the title tells us, is to weave an intertext through the main books studied by the group of women and their lives, and in this Nafisi largely succeeds. However, the resemblance to travel memories is surprisingly real and a little unsettling. . Nafisi, even though she explains that these women became part of her family life (especially Nassrin), still gives us the impression that she was "just visiting" these women. We hear stories of domestic violence, romantic difficulties, and friendship tensions, but we don't really become invested in any of these women because they are "numbers" – nothing more than names with attributes attached to them. As JB Scott said during his trip to France and Italy: "The women of Livorno are singularly blond in general... They wear a sort of white veil hanging from the top of their head... Their earrings are usually of immense size. » (Bassnett 93) Although we certainly get more details about lifestudents than Scott gives us on the women of northern Italy in the early 19th century, the effect is the same. By the end of the book, the reader feels no empathy with these women, because they are too thinly drawn and contain too many anecdotes and details rather than a story for us to consider them as characters. What does this do to the reader's perception? of these women? If we briefly consider a transactional critique of the reader's response to the text, we might say that the stimulus for empathy with the characters is a shared suffering or effort, or an experience with which the reader is able to identify. Certainly, these women do not lack suffering or difficult experiences, but it is so lightly told, and so quickly brushed aside in favor of literary criticism or Nafisi's own reflections, that it is very difficult to read. in the "aesthetic mode," [when] we experience a personal relationship to the text that focuses our attention on the emotional subtleties of its language and encourages us to make judgments." (Tyson 173). For example, when Nafisi recounts the emotional discussion that she has with Nassrin, the young woman is about to leave the country, Nassrin alludes to the "illness" she contracted in prison, but Nafisi doesn't even ask her what the illness is (. 322). Perhaps this is a case where his professorial detachment came into play, or perhaps a desire not to interfere in Nassrin's life, but if that's how this conversation went actually unfolded, then the truth is not in the service of the aesthetics of this book. A much more effective dramatic device would have been to put a name to Nassrin's illness, or to explain to us why we are not told, but either the truth of the episode, or the narrator's detachment. prevent it, and the pathos of the moment is subverted. Granted, this is nonfiction, and perhaps the dramatic intensity was of little or no interest to Nafisi, but it also serves to detach the reader from the emotions and events that occur in the story. what is the consequence when the reader is detached? It becomes easier to make assumptions and read this as a light summary of a life in Iran rather than as a true memoir, whether in or out of the books. This detachment makes it easy to dismiss characters and make generalizations about Iran and its people. There is less identification here with individuals than with a group of victims and the harm done to them. Additionally, Nafisi's teaching of Western classics such as Daisy Miller, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice smacks unpleasantly of the "Westernization" of a culture in the traveler's mind. mind, or “create” this culture in your own image while traveling through it. As Bassnett reminds us, Mr. Scott was happy to find that the people of northern Italy hated the French like him. Isn't this the discovery that these young Iranian women, despite coming from a culture very far from the one that gave birth to these books, appreciate, like us, novels like The American and Lolita? There is a common element that would appeal to American readers, seeing their favorites explored and extolled by women from a culture that, given the history between the two nations, is both threatening and frightening to the United States. United. As Ramazani explains, "...a reader unfamiliar with Persian literature will reach the last page of this book without suspecting that there are many contemporary works written by Iranian women whose reading could have been a whole as subversive as reading Nabokov. » (278) “Nafisi therefore seems to be reading literature, 2006.