Reading Lolita In



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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi. Published in 2003, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has been translated into 32 languages. Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), the book she wrote about her experiences, has been translated into thirty-two languages, won multiple awards, and spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. 'Unfortunately you have to be deprived of something in order to understand its worth,' Nafisi told an interviewer.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2003-12-30
ISBN 10: 1588360792
ISBN 13: 9781588360793
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2015-10-13
ISBN 10: 0141982616
ISBN 13: 9780141982618
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-01-01
ISBN 10: 0733630537
ISBN 13: 9780733630538
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

A professor teaches seven women forbidden literature in revolutionary Iran. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular: several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading — Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita — their Lolita, as they imagined her, in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.

Iranian Women in the Memoir

Author: Emira Derbel
Publsiher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2017-05-11
ISBN 10: 1443892661
ISBN 13: 9781443892667
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

This book investigates the various reasons behind the elevation of the memoir, previously categorized as a marginalized form of life writing that denudes the private space of women, especially in Western Asian countries such as Iran. Through a comparative investigation of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (1) and (2), the book examines the way both narrative and graphic memoirs offer possibilities for Iranian women to reclaim new territory, transgress a post-traumatic revolution, and reconstruct a new model of womanhood that evades socio-political and religious restrictions. Exile is conceptualized as empowering rather than a continued status of loss and disillusionment, and the liminality of both women writers turns into a space of artistic production. The book also resists the New Orientalist scope within which Reading Lolita in Tehran, more than Persepolis, has been misread. In order to reject these allegations, this work sheds light on the representation of Iranian women in Reading Lolita in Tehran, not as weak victims held captive by a totalitarian version of Islam, but as active participants rewriting their stories through the liberating power of the memoir. The comparative approach between narrative and comic memoirs is a fruitful way of displaying similar experiences of disillusionment, loss, return, and exile through different techniques. The common thread uniting both memoirs is their zeal to reclaim Iranian women’s agency and strength over subservience and passivity.

Reading

Jasmine and Stars

Author: Fatemeh Keshavarz
Publsiher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2007
ISBN 10: 0807831093
ISBN 13: 9780807831090
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present day Iran provides

The Republic of Imagination

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Penguin
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014-10-21
ISBN 10: 0698170334
ISBN 13: 9780698170339
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Perfection Learning
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2003-12
ISBN 10: 9781613838488
ISBN 13: 1613838484
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

The author presents a memoir of her life in post-revolutionary Iran, focusing on her organization of a group of young women in 1997 who met secretly once a week to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature.

Things I ve Been Silent About

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2008-12-30
ISBN 10: 1588367495
ISBN 13: 9781588367495
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

'Absorbing . . . a testament to the ways in which narrative truth-telling—from the greatest works of literature to the most intimate family stories—sustains and strengthens us.”—O: The Oprah Magazine In this stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets, a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place” (Newsday). BONUS: This edition contains a Things I've Been Silent About discussion guide. Praise for Things I've Been Silent About “Deeply felt . . . an affecting account of a family’s struggle.”—New York Times “A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce.”—New York Times Book Review “An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage, by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A lyrical, often wrenching memoir.”—People

That Other World

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publsiher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2019-06-25
ISBN 10: 0300159757
ISBN 13: 9780300159752
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

The foundational text for the acclaimed New York Times and international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation’s foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells the poet’s death and announces the critic’s secret identity as the king of a lost country. The greatest of Vladimir Nabokov’s enchanters—Humbert—is lost within the antithesis of a fairy story, in which Lolita does not hold the key to his past but rather imprisons him within the knowledge of his distance from that past. In this precursor to her international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi deftly explores the worlds apparently lost to Nabokov’s characters, their portals of access to those worlds, and how other worlds hold a mirror to Nabokov’s experiences of physical, linguistic, and recollective exile. Written before Nafisi left the Islamic Republic of Iran, and now published in English for the first time and with a new introduction by the author, this book evokes the reader’s quintessential journey of discovery and reveals what caused Nabokov to distinctively shape and reshape that journey for the author.

Lipstick Jihad

Author: Azadeh Moaveni
Publsiher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2007-03-31
ISBN 10: 1586485490
ISBN 13: 9781586485498
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution. Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran — ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes — is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.

Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

Author: Jacki Lyden
Publsiher: HMH
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1997-10-01
ISBN 10: 0547745710
ISBN 13: 9780547745718
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars’ Club and Angela’s Ashes” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). As an NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden visited some dangerous war zones—but her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Lyden’s mother suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder or manic depression. But in a small Wisconsin town in the sixties and seventies she was simply “crazy.” In her delusions, Lyden’s mother was a woman of power: Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba. But in reality, she had married the nefarious local doctor, who drugged her to keep her moods in check and terrorized the children to keep them quiet. Holding their lives together was Lyden’s hardscrabble Irish grandmother, a woman who had her first child at the age of fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. In this memoir, Lyden vividly captures the seductive energy of her mother’s delusions and the effect they had on her own life. She paints a portrait of three remarkable women—mother, daughter, and grandmother—revealing their obstinate devotion to one another against all odds, and their scrappy genius for survival. “What distinguishes Daughter of the Queen of Sheba from any other book about dysfunctional parents . . . and turns this exotic memoir into compelling literature is the dreamy poetry of Lyden’s prose. In graceful imagery as original (and occasionally as highly wrought) as her mother’s costumes, Lyden—a senior correspondent for National Public Radio—loops and loops again around the central fact of her mother’s manic depression and how that illness shaped Lyden’s life growing up with two younger sisters, a scrappy Irish grandmother (whose memory she holds like ‘a cotton rag around a cut’), a father who left, and a hated stepfather.” —Entertainment Weekly

The Persian Puzzle

Author: Kenneth M. Pollack
Publsiher: Random House Incorporated
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2005
ISBN 10: 0812973364
ISBN 13: 9780812973365
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

A former CIA analyst, National Security Council official, and author of The Threatening Storm looks back at the turbulent relationship between Iran and the United States on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis, examining the hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra scandal, the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack, and U.S.-Iran clashes over Afghanistan and Iraq. Reprint.

The Shoemaker and his Daughter

Author: Conor O'Clery
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2018-08-23
ISBN 10: 1473544785
ISBN 13: 9781473544789
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

'O'Clery takes us into the hidden heart of Soviet Russia... An arresting and evocative story.' Keggie Carew, author of Dadland 'A tour de force ... Love, politics, murder, wars, and the fracturing of ties, personal and ethnic. O'Clery is a gifted writer.' Luke Harding, bestselling author of Collusion The Soviet Union, 1962. Gifted shoemaker Stanislav Suvorov is imprisoned for five years. His crime? Selling his car for a profit. On his release, social shame drives him and his family into voluntary exile in Siberia, 5,000 kilometres from home. In a climate that's unfriendly both geographically and politically, it's their chance to start again. The Shoemaker and His Daughter is an epic story spanning the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, taking in eighty years of Soviet and Russian history, from Stalin to Putin. Following the footsteps of a remarkable family Conor O'Clery knows well - he is married to the shoemaker's daughter - it's both a compelling insight into life in a secretive world at a siesmic moment in time and a powerful tale of ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary times.

The Book Collectors

Author: Delphine Minoui
Publsiher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-11-03
ISBN 10: 0374720290
ISBN 13: 9780374720292
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

'An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion.' —Susan Orlean Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place—a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits. And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had six thousand volumes; in a month, fifteen thousand. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity. The library offered a marvelous range of books—from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library’s founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read. The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of words.

Nine Parts of Desire

Author: Geraldine Brooks
Publsiher: Anchor
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010-02-24
ISBN 10: 0307434451
ISBN 13: 9780307434456
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize winning author presents the stories of a wide range of Muslim women in the Middle East. As an Australian American and an experienced foreign correspondent, Brooks' thoughtful analysis attempts to understand the precarious status of women in the wake of Islamic fundamentalism. 'Frank, enraging, and captivating.' - The New York Times Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam's holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith. As a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women.

Ready Reference Treatise Reading Lolita In Tehran

Author: Raja Sharma
Publsiher: Lulu Press, Inc
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-08-30
ISBN 10: 1365364054
ISBN 13: 9781365364051
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL
Ready Reference Treatise Reading Lolita In Tehran Book Review:

When the author, the professor, refuses to wear a veil in the university, she is expelled from the institute. Eventually, she begins to teach students, a few female students, at her home. The novel describes how the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War created a deep impact on the lives of the common people, particularly women, in Iran. The author presents the story through several personal anecdotes that she weaves together very skilfully. Ready Reference Treatise: Reading Lolita In Tehran Copyright Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Plot Overview Chapter Three: Major Characters Chapter Four: Complete Summary Chapter Five: Critical Analysis

The Ulysses Delusion

Author: Cecilia Konchar Farr
Publsiher: Springer
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2016-04-08
ISBN 10: 1137542772
ISBN 13: 9781137542779
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes, even at family reunions – they are persistently pressed to talk about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I mean when I say a book is 'good'? Why do contemporary novels like these, conversations like these, matter to professors of literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and answers their call for more engaged conversations about books. Through topics like the Oprah's Book Club, Harry Potter, and Chick Lit, Cecilia Konchar Farr explores the lively, democratic, and gendered history of novels in the US as a context for understanding how avid readers and literary professionals have come to assess them so differently.

Daisy Miller

Author: Henry James
Publsiher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2011-11-14
ISBN 10: 1460400828
ISBN 13: 9781460400821
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes. This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.

Soft Weapons

Author: Gillian Whitlock
Publsiher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2010-02-15
ISBN 10: 0226895270
ISBN 13: 9780226895277
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies. Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Reading Lolita In Tehran

Author: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Publsiher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2008
ISBN 10: 9780811217507
ISBN 13: 0811217507
Language: EN, FR, DE, ES & NL

Nabokov's first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked, with a new Introduction by Michael Dirda.

Section 4 - Austen

In the last section of her book, Nafisi focuses on the works of Jane Austen and reflects her life and the lives of her students upon these works.

Nafisi focuses mostly on Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice, in this section. Pride and Prejudice is a romance novel regarding the life of Elizabeth Bennet and her problems with marriage and righteousness in a 19th century refined community. Elizabeth's happiness lies at the core of her relationship with Darcy, a wealthy bachelor, and a potential fiancé. The rest of the community believes that Darcy is snobbish, and Elizabeth loathes and judges Darcy based on these outside beliefs. However, Darcy grows to love Elizabeth, and Elizabeth realizes that her first impressions of Darcy were wrong. She wants to make amends with Darcy, but under the public eye, it is hard for her to do so without becoming judged herself.

Elizabeth and Darcy's tense relationship reflects the problematic relationships shared by men and women in the Iranian Republic. Nafisi recounts several of her students' stories, all of which involve such relationships. Many of her female students are confused about the concept of love, and how to handle a romantic relationship because the Islamic regime has redefined all things sexual. Modesty takes the form of a veil. The regime has branded harmless gestures such as laughing in public to be 'seductive'. Eye contact between a man and a woman is no longer friendly; it becomes guarded and leery. Love is no longer that of the heart; it has become a duty to spirituality. Such restrictions placed on these people confuses their own private wants with the expectations generated by the public and makes it hard for women living during the regime to establish a happy and healthy relationship with the opposite sex.

Reading Lolita In Tehran Discussion Questions

Nafisi smoothly concludes her memoir with the discussion of this last book. With this book, Nafisi paints a collective portrait of the stresses that the Islamic regime has placed on its own people--whether it is a loss of identity, of dreams, or of one's relationships with other people. Towards the end of her memoir, Nafisi makes the pivotal decision to go to America to escape her suppressive surroundings. Such a decision reveals a deeper perspective of Nafisi's wants and that of her students. After hearing of Professor Nafisi's decision to leave, America becomes the elusive symbol of freedom for the students. America is the symbol that embodies their thoughts; their imaginations of a better place; which are made all the more tangible with the study of Western literature in their secret class. This fact brings the reader around full circle to the beginning of the memoir, and forces them to realize why Nafisi decided to create her secret literature class: to find freedom.





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