Reading Lolita in Tehran reaches American readers through an aestheticized culturalist Islamophobia.

Evidence

It is sometimes said that an author writes with one eye on a particular audience or type of reader. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi turns full face toward an obviously non-Muslim American reader with a stare of disconcerting fixity, willing—almost begging—that reader to respond in the desired manner to the lesson she seeks to inculcate. To that end, nothing is left to chance, no room allowed for dissent from the book’s determined humanist message. Nafisi’s Islamophobia exists in her text’s surface-level endorsement of the neoconservative culturalist suspicion of Islamic societies as hostile and inferior and operates through aesthetic value judgments as much as through a depiction of the miasma of Orwellian tyranny that pervades Iran and overshadows the lives of her students. Nafisi proposes that the Euro-American novel embodies certain political potentialities—democracy through polyphony, dialogicality, and choice—even as she claims that the greatest novels are apolitical. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the fictionalized memoir move the reader will weigh against Naqvi’s and Hamid’s first-person narrators who also court a Western reader. — connects to: A bestselling memoir’s one-dimensional Iranian characters helped legitimize a tough US line on Iran.