Azar Nafisi, Excerpt from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Why does Nafisi spend so much time describing the members of her reading group? What different motives may have brought these readers to Nafisi's apartment? We may normally think of reading as a solitary activity, unlike watching movies or sports; why was it so important for the women to meet together as a group?  

2. Judging from the information that Nafisi provides, why do you think her reading group selected the particular works she mentions: A Thousand and One Nights, as well as Invitation to a Beheading, Lolita, and other novels by Nabokov? Why might religious authorities, not only in Iran but also in the United States, object to the teaching of such works?  

3. Early in Chapter 10 of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi writes, "Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives." Without consulting a dictionary, and drawing instead on Nafisi's account, define "totalitarian." What social and psychological effects does the totalitarian regime have on Nafisi and her students? In what sense might Lolita provide a "critique" of totalitarianism?  

Questions for Writing:  

1. Does Nafisi present a theory of interpretation? In other words, what does she see as the "real" or "correct" meaning of a work of art? Does she accept Nabokov's claims that "readers were born free and ought to remain free"? Would Nafisi say a work of art can mean anything we want? What is the value of art if it has no determinate or "correct" meaning? If art has a value, is its value simply personal? Does it also have social, political, and cultural value?  

2. Nafisi and her students read Nabokov against the backdrop of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In that setting, what does the experience offer them? Would their reading of the novel provide the same experience if it took place in the United States? Does literature serve a different social function in our society? How might reading a novel in a private group differ from the experience of reading the same novel in an American high school or college classroom?  

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1.  A world away from where Nafisi met with her students to discuss Lolita, Henry Jenkins is now at work exploring the ways that new media are transforming not only reading, but also the communities that emerge around shared texts. Both scholars clearly have a deep respect for the act of reading, but do they value reading for the same reasons? Could the communities that formed around Harry Potter also form around Lolita or any of the other novels Nafisi taught? Or is the kind of reading that Jenkins celebrates something one outgrows with age? Drawing on Nafisi and Jenkins, discuss the role that reading plays in social transformations big and small.

2. Toward the close of his essay "The Mind's Eye," Oliver Sacks asks, "Do any of us, finally, know how we think?" Assuming that the answer to this question is no, what conclusions can we reach about the ways that each of us interprets our individual worlds? If everyone makes things meaningful in his or her own way, what purpose might be served by an activity such as meeting to discuss a work of literature? What does the individual gain from the communal reading of a work of fiction? Do the blind subjects of Sacks's essay have anything in common with Nafisi's students? Do Sacks and Nafisi, taken together, show that there is ultimately only one way to achieve "a rich and full realization" of an inner life?

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