Reconfiguring the Contract of Reception: Regimes and Conditions of Acceptability in the Adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran
This article offers a semio-pragmatic analysis of the film adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran, conceived as a reconfiguration of the contract of reception. The reception of Azar Nafisi’s book (2003) has been shaped by a persistent critical tension between readings that valorize Western literature as a resource for emancipation and interpretations that situate the work within a neo-imperial imaginary. Rather than reducing this diversity to a single polarity, the study shifts the analysis to a different plane—not that of ideological content, but of the operative conditions of meaning. It examines how the film’s dispositif configures the formation, circulation, and sustainability of interpretive positions within Roger Odin’s theoretical framework through an analysis of the regimes of reception the film activates.
The analysis identifies three interdependent operations. From the outset, the film activates a documentarizing regime that anchors the represented world in attestation, establishing a horizon of credibility prior to the emergence of interpretive conflict. This configuration does not impose a univocal meaning; rather, it regulates in advance the conditions under which subsequent hypotheses may circulate. The reading scenes then displace the locus of conflict toward a dynamic of validation: through the organization of exchanges and the distribution of enunciative positions, interpretations are subjected to progressively explicit criteria of acceptability. Plurality persists, yet it becomes hierarchized according to the institutional, historical, or moral supports on which particular readings rely. Finally, the denouement consolidates and hierarchizes this regime of validity by shifting into a testimonial mode and reconfiguring the conflict within a memorial frame, without formulating an explicit verdict.
The adaptation thus emerges as an intervention in the pragmatic economy of meaning: it recalibrates thresholds of credibility and asymmetrically redistributes the resources through which interpretive positions attain legitimacy.
