Intro: >>Azar Nafisi's bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003) has become a popular choice for required summer reading for incoming students at many colleges and universities across the USA, including my own. It has also been immensely popular with book clubs, library organizations and the like. Translated into thirty-two languages, it has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. Clearly, it offers a message that 'resonates' for a significant portion of the US – and world – reading publics. As a choice for incoming first-year students, Nafisi's book seems compelling because, as a reviewer from the New York Times is quoted on the cover as saying, it is an 'eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction'. But what kind of reading practices is the book describing and encouraging, and what reading practices are being declared significant intellectual engagements with literature, and with Iran, in this positioning of Nafisi's book?<<
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
