Azar Nafisi, Excerpt from Reading Lolita in Tehran and:
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Literature, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Meaning (Assignment 3)
Drawing on the work of O’Brien, Postrel, and Nafisi, discuss the role of art, aesthetics, and literature in a democratic society. Be sure to formulate an original argument that you clearly state in your introduction and be sure to support your argument with textual evidence.
Questions to consider:
-The narrator in O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” resists stories with easy morals and generalizations. In contrast, he wishes to constantly retell and change his story, adding and subtracting details “to get at the real truth” (O’Brien 396). How is this desire related to Postrel’s “‘dynamist’ model in which the direction of progress is understood always to be unpredictable, open-ended, and contingent” (Miller and Spellmeyer 420)? How is it related to Nafisi’s support for a forum for thought and discussion where ideas “are not determined in advance” (Miller and Spellmeyer 334)?
Michael Leong, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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Reconciliation (Assignment 4)
Context:
- Both Matt Shepard and the women of Iran faced oppressors who sought to obliterate them; however, we meet the women as they struggle to survive in “two worlds” and Matt only after he no longer survives in any world. Most of Matt’s glbtq community, however, lives to struggle on.
- Nafisi writes of the “two photographs” as emblems of the “two worlds” the women lived in. “The second photograph belonged to the world inside the living room. But outside, underneath the window that deceptively showcased only the mountains and the tree outside our house, was the other world, where the bad witches and furies were waiting to transform us into the hooded creatures of the first” (24).
- In your last essay, you looked at the causes of prejudice and oppression, and you may find that many of them, including but not limited to religiosity (not to be confused with religion or spirituality), ignorance, and jealously guarded, insecure power, will also apply to the revolutionary regime of Iran. In this essay, you will look not at the sources of oppression in the victimizers but at the means of surviving and perhaps thriving under oppression in the victims.
Assignment Question: What can the experiences of the glbtq community in Laramie and Nafisi’s students in Tehran tell us about the resources oppressed people can use to survive and perhaps overcome their ordeals?
Questions to Prime the Pump:
- Nafisi clearly believes that art, literature, imagination, color and dreams figure in the women of Iran’s survival skills. Are those things relevant to the communities in Laramie?
- Did all of Nafisi’s students truly live in “just” two worlds?
- What complicates the “two photograph/two worlds” theory?
- What role did community play among the survivors of Laramie and the survivors of Tehran? Is the act of forming community in itself an act of reconciliation?
- What is the relationship between Sheherazade who “breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement [. . . and] fashions her universe not through physical force [. . . ] but through imagination and reflection” (19) and the literature class in Tehran? Are imagination and reflection “players” in the university community in Laramie?
- What are we to make of Nafisi’s apparent endorsement of lying (17) if reconciliation is indeed predicated upon truth? And what of the versions of the “truth” that came from the journalists in Laramie?
- Are some differences “irreconcilable”? If Nafisi’s students cannot or should not seek reconciliation with the regime, then of what sort of reconciliation is Nabokov’s art meant to facilitate? Was Matt’s life irreconcilable with a homophobic community?
Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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Reconciliation (Assignment 5)
Context:
- Both Nafisi and O’Brien are concerned with the complexity and real difficulty of truth-telling in situations badly in need of reconciliation.
- Both Nafisi and O’Brien are convinced of the power of stories.
- O’Brien claims, “You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask” (83). Nafisi was also interested in the questions Nabokov’s “stories” – and the women’s stories – raised.
- The women of whom Nafisi writes and the characters of whom O’Brien writes are all actively engaged in a struggle to survive unspeakably difficult circumstances.
Assignment Question: What can Nafisi and O’Brien tell us about the nature of “truth telling” – its challenges, its importance, its various manifestations, and its effects?
Questions to Prime the Pump:
- We know Nafisi and “her girls” lied to survive. Are there different levels of truth? Are there lies that actually serve truth? Are there truths that are in fact lies?
- Many of O’Brien’s readers become upset when they learn The Things They Carried is a work of fiction. Nabokov also writes fiction, and Sheherazade, herself a fiction, created more fiction to stop the slaughter. What is the relationship between fiction and truth?
- A common assumption states that “the first casualty of war is truth.” Is this phrase applicable to the Iranian revolution? To the Vietnam War? Would Nafisi and O’Brien consider “truth” a “casualty” in their works? In their worlds?
- Beyond the obvious needs for reconciliation among “warring factions,” the women of Iran were in need of reconciliation within their own identities while the soldiers of Vietnam were in need of reconciliation within their minds and consciences. What kinds of truth helped them achieve these reconciliations? What failed them?
- O’Brien said a “true war story is never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it
[. . . I]f you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie” (69). How would Nafisi respond to this statement?
Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, Fall 2005
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