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Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), is noted for its subtitle, A Memoir in Books, since major literary works are interwoven into the very fabric of her account of her life story, thereby typifying Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality. The memoir is divided into four sections, each framed in relation to well-known novels and writers. In so structuring her book, Nafisi may be said to contest Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, which, as he postulates, results from a psychological struggle to gain aesthetic strength. While Bloom's perception of influence denigrates intertextual connections as the source of the author's/poet's uneasiness with his/her predecessors, Nafisi's recourse to canonical texts is a coping mechanism. It is the aim of this paper to examine Nafisi's memoir vis-a-vis Bloom's theory of influence, showing how she absolves herself of any impending anxiety through an array of Western classics that intersect with her writing, instead of having her talent belligerently pitted against them. In so doing, influence may be said to wield a liberating impact, rather than being the source of a writer's anxiety and incapacitation. In contradistinction to Bloom's theory of influence, Kristeva's notion of intertextuality may be said to offer an apt lens through which Nafisi's memoir can be read.

It is the aim of this paper to shed light on how Kurt Vonnegut responds to the complexities and absurdities of life in A Man Without a Country (2005), by adopting a light-hearted tone that mitigates the traditional postmodernist pessimism. In its broadest sense, postmodernism adopts a skeptical standpoint towards established truths and assumptions whose authenticity has gone unquestioned for a long time. In Vonnegut's hands, this pessimistic stance is imbued with a humanist dimension, and a search for a glimpse of optimism in the midst of a highly fragmented and incoherent postmodernist world. Black humour, laughter, irony, a light-hearted tone and a tendency towards optimism are often the conduits he opts for to expose the inexplicable absurdities that run rife in his postmodernist world, while at the same time maintaining a hopeful outlook on life and humanity. Throughout the book, Vonnegut weaves a tapestry of his own personal views regarding disparate topics.