Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 , 12:00 PM — 01:30 PM

Duration: 1 hrs 30 mins

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Reading Circle

@

Newport Public Library

Tuesday, October 11

12:00 - 1:30 p.m.

Reading this Month:  Reading Lolita in Tehran  by Azar Nafisi . 

The Newport Public Library's Reading circle meets on the 2nd Tuesday of each month from noon to 1:30 p.m.  Come join us in the McEntee Meeting Room -- and bring a lunch.

More about Azar Nafisi:

1.  Azar Nafisi is a professor at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. She attended The University of Oklahoma and later Oxford University and taught literature at three Iranian universities, including the University of Tehran, from which she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil. Azar Nafisi left Iran with her family in 1997. She has written Anti Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels and written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Azar Nafisi lives in Washington, D.C. and is director of The Dialogue Project, and she will soon be at work on her next book.  (from an interview with Azar Nafisi on identitytheory.com )

2.  ...Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. ...  (from Steven Barclay Agency: Lectures & Readings )

3.  Moving Stories:  Azar Nafisi.  BBC World Service's The World Today programme is asking migrants who have been successful in their adopted countries how they got to the top of their field. ... (from BBC News )

More about Reading Lolita in Tehran:

1. ... Nafisi's new memoir is a riveting story of hope, disillusionment, and hope rekindled. Despite the strictures imposed by the regime, Iran's women continue to contest its patriarchal premises. They now outnumber men in the universities and have been a powerful force in favor of reform. "Just recently, a female professor was expelled because her wrist had shown from under her sleeve while she was writing on the blackboard," Nafisi wrote in a New Republic cover story in 1999. "Yet, while these measures are meant to render women invisible and powerless, they are paradoxically making women tremendously visible and powerful. … Every private act or gesture in defiance of official rules is now a strong political statement. ..."  (from The Middle East Forum )

2.  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. ... (from ReadingGroupGuides.com )

3.  Reading Lolita in Tehran is presented as a memoir. Nafisi taught literature at a number of Iranian universities in the 1980s and 1990s, but eventually was forced out and/or left these positions. She begins her account in 1995, less than two years before she left Iran, when she gets together seven of her "best and most committed students" and begins to hold class again (having left the last of her academic positions) -- now in the privacy and relative safety of her house. This book group, and the books discussed, are the focal points of the memoir, but her account is more comprehensive, as eventually she recounts much of her life (and some of that of her students) in the Islamic Republic of Iran -- as well as a bit from pre-revolutionary times. ...  (from The Complete Review )

posted Monday, 10 October 2005

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