Reading Lolita In Tehran And The Rhetoric Of Empathy

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The title of Theresa A. Kulbaga's essay in the May 2008 issue "Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy"—seems ironically revealing, for the author's pleasure appears to derive from teaching us that any pleasure we may have experienced in reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is misplaced; at best, it is a guilty pleasure (she aligns the book with "American Oprah culture" [509]); at worst, it is a pleasure that is hopelessly tainted by American imperialism, by a conservatism both political and cultural.

Kulbaga is preoccupied with the uses to which Azar Nafisi's book has been put, noting that "Reading Lolita in Tehran has been mobilized in the service of conservative military and political agendas in the Jewelry On Sale United States and used to call for a return to a 'Great Books' ...
... approach to literary study".

She goes on to argue that "Reading Lolita in Tehran appeals to U. S. audiences by mobilizing fundamentally nationalist discourses and affective responses that position the United States as the geopolitical center of freedom, choice, feminist empowerment, and human rights". In other words, she fears that the book might be used by neoconservatives to justify an attack on Iran.

Kulbaga's argument implies that readers who might have enjoyed Nafisi's "memoir in books" are aligned ideologically with the forces of interventionism (as well as with advocates of Great Books pedagogy and the "consumer culture of the women's book group").

Nafisi's own explicit rejection of foreign intervention, in which Reading Lolita's author asserts that she wants only to appeal to "the progressive forces of the world to empathize with the plight of the Iranian people" is simply dismissed by Kulbaga: "Empathy to what end Reading Lolita in Tehran may not advocate Western intervention in Iran, but it circulates within public rhetorical spheres of influence in which empathetic identification and military violence are not necessarily considered mutually exclusive". But Kulbaga seems to be making her own claim to exclusivity here.

Might the book not also circulate within other, noninterventionist spheres of influence My experience, and that of a number of colleagues who have read the book, was quite different from the one that Kulbaga assumes. I find the book's depiction of the Iranian regime's tactics, such as the marginalization of intellectuals and the Pandora Jewelry enforcement of what we might call patriotic correctness, hauntingly similar to the approach employed by the Bush Administration during its conduct of the "war on terror." Academics and intellectuals who were critical of American policies were characterized as elitists who "hate America."

Particularly in the immediate aftermath of September 11, Americans were famously warned by presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to "watch what they say, watch what they do." And there have been numerous reports of professors' academic freedom being challenged by students on political grounds, much as some of the teachers in Nafisi's book were confronted by patriotically correct students. For many of us, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran was a chilling reminder of the similarities in tactics employed by two ideologically distinct regimes.

As to Kulbaga's apparent disappointment in Nafisi's choice of texts and her implication that Reading Lolita's readers must subscribe to a traditional pedagogy, I can only ask this question: Who among us, after laboring to design courses that include some of the most diverse and noncanonical texts imaginable, have not occasionally had a memorable teaching experience with a Great Book