Has RLT really had an impact in undermining multicultural education and world literature programs at American Universities?
HD: Of course not. The main customers of this book are kaffeeklatsch gatherings in suburban boredoms of this empire. The point of my argument was to see through the potential consequences of such books—and what the neoconservative backers of Azar Nafisi are up to. I am a teacher of comparative literature. I am part of a global struggle to restore literary dignity to world literature, which obviously includes western European and North American literary masterpieces but is not limited or defined by them. The exclusive celebration of “Western classics,†as they say, in RLT, and its almost total rejection and ridicule of Persian literature tally perfectly well with the colonial function of English literature the way scholars like Gauri Viswanathan have excavated and argued. The manner in which a kaffeeklatsch reading of a select number of European literary masterpieces is packaged here goes even against the very historical fact of the way people read world literature in Iran, as I ex
