[Hac-announce] Conversations Oct 04, 2014," Reading Lolita ...."

[L.M.C. Harvey]

You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the mailing list of the  Humanist  Association of Connecticut.    
To unsubscribe click on the link below.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Conversations, HAC                                                                                                                                                       October 03, 2014

Hello Everyone,   

This Saturday, Oct 04,  we will view and discuss a talk by Azar Nafisi author of  “Reading Lolita in Tehran” which was published in 2003.  This talk was given in 2004 at the National Press Club and the video may be found on You Tube.  The  NYTimes references and quotations below will give you some idea about the book if you haven't read it and the second has more biographical info.  

Cynthia Harvey
Please send comments and suggestions to Coordinator at cthumanist.org

Kakutani, Michiko,  book review   ' …. Azar Nafisi's remarkable new book, ''Reading Lolita in Tehran,'' is a memoir of the author's life in Iran from the late 70's to the late 90's, but it is also many other things.

It is a visceral and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in that country and its fallout on the day-to-day lives of Ms. Nafisi and her students. It is a thoughtful account of the novels they studied together and the unexpected parallels they drew between those books and their own experiences as women living under the unforgiving rule of the mullahs. And it is, finally, 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.  …. [ Lolita ]  Ms. Nafisi reads as a chilling story about ''the confiscation of one individual's life by another.'' Her students' identification with this Russian émigré's works, she notes, went deeper than their identification with his themes, to a shared sense of the precariousness of life. ''His novels are shaped around invisible trapdoors, sudden gaps that
 constantly pull the carpet from under the reader's feet,'' she writes. ''They are filled with mistrust of what we call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality's fickleness and frailty.'' …. there were no boundaries between the public and the private in the Islamic Republic of Iran: the government and its morality police told people what they could read, what they could wear, how they should behave. '

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/books/books-of-the-times-book-study-as-insubordination-under-the-mullahs.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A11%22%7D

Salomon, Julie, [ more biography ]  ' …. Ms. Nafisi's students, at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies here, appeared interested but a little sleepy. Not quite, she said, the level of intensity she was accustomed to when teaching Western literature in Iran, after the Islamic revolution there, in the 1980's and 90's; nothing like the riot that almost broke out when she gave a talk in Iran on Flaubert and ''Madame Bovary'' or the time she decided to put ''The Great Gatsby'' on trial in her classroom at the University of Tehran because her students were so incensed by that novel.

Therein lies Ms. Nafisi's appreciation of contradiction. In Iran she detested the restrictions placed on women, including wearing the veil, and left with her family in 1997. Yet the constraints of a ruling totalitarian theocracy turned banned literature into forbidden fruit and gave teaching undergraduate staples like Jane Austen the panache of leading an underground rebellion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/24/books/professor-s-rebellion-teaching-western-books-in-iran-and-in-us-too.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias:w,{%221=%22:=%22RI:11=%22}=&pagewanted=2


What is humanism? Life in this world is the central and defining focus of humanism. We envision a world in which every individual's worth is respected, and human freedom and behaving responsibly are natural aspirations.  
Humanist Institute                                                                                              http://www.humanistinstitute.org/what-humanism-1

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

To unsubscribe go to:   http://lists.cthumanist.org/mailman/listinfo/hac-announce  

and follow the instructions at the bottom.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cthumanist.org/pipermail/hac-announce/attachments/20141003/a2be40ac/attachment.html>