Writing From The Body

The essays, The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of by Azar Nafisi and Death of a Mannequin by Mehrangiz Kar both hinged on the regime’s removal of the Family Protection law that, “since 1967, had helped women work outside the home and provided them with substantial rights in their marriage”(Nafisi, 3) and “which guaranteed women the freedom to work, travel, and divorce at will” (Kar, 31.) The Family Protection law was a stake or even character in the essays that held both light and dark. The Family Protection law was light because what it provided/assisted women and the people of Iran with. The law enabled Iranian women to be seen as some the most progressive women of that time (prior to the regime’s takeover.) Overall, in both essays the author’s expressed the importance and impact the law had/has past/present on women’s rights in Iran. That was the light. But, the darkness that is the law also is the fact that the law had to be implemented ...

Miguel Cervantes 11/13/17            In reading The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of and Death Of A Mannequin I found myself transported to a world permeated by the undeniable sense of the Orwellian.   These were not tales of fantasy, of a chastened and repressed citizenry crying out for the liberating sacrifice of a singular hero.   Rather, these were accounts of a revolution led by an ethos that held one single vision for all of Iranian society, a vision that would progressively strip Iran’s female population of their rights in such a way as to assault their very identity as women.   We can see this happening in such a visceral way in Mehrangiz Kar’s description of the gradual dismantling (or perhaps, more accurately, mutilation) of the female mannequins she witnessed in the days and months following the Iranian Revolution. “The shop owners were confused and did not know what to do to save ...

Courtney A.  Cannon I am still interested in the topic we discussed last week about crafting a story with style, and I see how style choices can bring a different dimension to, or elicit a new level of understanding and emotional connection/ reaction from the reader, when it comes to writing a piece set in a particular historical and political moment.  The way Nafisi in " The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" and the way Kar in "Death of Mannegquin" approaches heavy and dark political moments is to connect the human emotion and tangible realities to another, all-be-it, so-called "lighter" topic. A style choice of both Nafisi and Kar in approaching narrating experiences of opppression is to illustrate human psychological and visceral connections to the world around them. For Nafisi, in "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of," she--the protagonist-- copes coming home to a very different "home" by finding a new centering of her identity, and sa...

Courtney A. Cannon Lahiri's Style Upon reading Jhumpa Lhahiri's Interpretation of Maladies and after discussions in our class, I have come to wonder about the concept of "style." In particular, I am now contemplating what I would classify my writing as, and I wonder if I can actually pinpoint what style I am using most of the time. As it relates to the four stories we discussed in detail in class, I have noticed that Lahiri ends her tales in unexpected places. Her choice to end in seemingly abrupt places or in the middle of heightened emotion does not bother me, as I have mentioned in my previous post and peer responses for "A Real Durwan" and "This Blessed House." I believe these endings are strategically being used by Lahiri to manipulate the readers' emotional response to the characters and the plot turns. This form of "style" is used, I gather, to elicit thought and personal introspection of how we feel about the occurrences...

Arya Samuelson Both stories challenge the idea of a “singular historical moment.” Nafisi makes it clear that every action of the regime pointed backwards. Ayatollah Khomeini claimed to be “restoring women’s dignity and rescuing them from the degrading and diabolical ideas that had been thrust upon them by Western imperialists and their agents, who had conspired for decades to destroy Iranian culture and traditions” (3). In other words, Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that he was trying to make Iran great again. As Nafisi counters, “in formulating this claim, the Islamic regime not only robbed the Iranian people of their rights, it robbed them of their history” (3). She goes on to discuss the powerful “process of self-questioning and transformation” that comprised the acquisition of rights for women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.   By the time of the revolution, “women were active in all areas of life in Iran.” This section prompted me to consider the distin...

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of             Before anything else, I just have to say – wow. Azar Nafisi is one hell of an inspirational writer. She starts off talking about her sense of home. That Iran had always been the home that she wanted to go back to when she was studying abroad and that classic novels and poetry became a sort of home for her. Then she tells us that she finally did go home to Iran only to find that it was not the home she remembered. She arrived to witness the stripping of rights and freedom, of creativity and imagination. Lastly, Nafisi challenges her readers to ponder our own humanity.             Her words are eloquent and impactful. They’re the type of words you’d expect to hear from a great leader. She started slow and worked her way up to a profound ending. I didn’t expect the beginning, where Nafisi describes herself as a spoiled brat running...

By Lila Kalick "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" and "Death of a Mannequin" I thought a lot this week about the role of artists and writers in society and about the notion that the things these individuals make can last beyond their historical moment. With all that is happening these days -- in the news, in the world -- it can be hard to keep perspective beyond the present day. It seems me that there is a hard question that we need to ask ourselves as artists: Can we live in our imaginations exploring the space of what things "can be?" Should we? A lot of what I'm learning is that we don't have to disengage fully with the world in order to make things that last, but it is somewhat helpful. Ultimately, if we disengage enough in the current moment, ignore minutia, and focus on the bigger picture, I think we'll (or at least I'll) be more effective at making art that is transformative and that creates the change we want to see in the ...