Intellect defeats tyranny in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

This paper aims at analyzing Azar Nafisi‘s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) which was republished in 2015 as an e-book to cope with the digital world in which we live. In the novel Nafisi tells us a large part of her autobiography before and during the Islamic Revolution (1978-1981) that took place in Iran, and how she presents herself along with other female characters as alienated in their own country. Throughout the duration of the story these women are fighting to retain their individuality and beliefs. This novel is divided into four sections: "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and "Austen." The first shows us the reading group including the professor and her students; "Gatsby" and "James" shed light on Nafisi's years teaching at universities in Iran, through the revolution and the war against Iraq. These two middle sections contain violent and cruel trials against professors; air raids; the regular fights in class between Marxist and reactionary Muslim students; the death in prison of a particularly talented student, who as a child stole books from the houses where her mother worked as a servant; a young soldier who went to war and then returned to a university where he'd never belonged and finally committed suicide by setting himself on fire. In the last section, "Austen," we finally learn about the personal lives and the different experiences of the girls. The "fairy-tale atmosphere" of these Thursday mornings spent talking