Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis, makes important strides toward altering how Western audiences perceive Iranian women. Satrapi endeavors to display the intersection of the lives of some Westerners with her life as an Iranian, who spent some time in the West. Satrapi, dissatisfied with representations she saw of Iranian women in France, decided to challenge them. In her words, “From the time I came to France in 1994, I was always telling stories about life in Iran to my friends. We’d see pieces about Iran on television, but they didn’t represent my experience at all. I had to keep saying, ‘No, it’s not like that there.’ I’ve been justifying why it isn’t negative to be an Iranian for almost twenty years. How strange when it isn’t something I did or chose to be?” (Satrapi, “Why I Wrote Persepolis” 10). In acknowledging both Eastern and Western feminism, Satrapi’s novel humanizes the female Iranian perspective in a way that can easily digested by Western audiences.
This novel acts as an autoethnographic text, a term coined by Mary Louise Pratt, in which Persepolis acts as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 35). This novel, which depicts her life so far, demonstrates a mastery of the spaces of representation. As one theorist has argued, “In discussing Persepolis in relation to the theme of women and space, we will draw upon a framework suggested by Pollock for reading the work of women artists…Pollock refers to three spatial registers: first, the locations represented by the work (and, in particular, the division between public and private space); second, the spatial order within the work itself (concerning, for example, angl...
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... and changed Western perceptions in doing so.
Works Cited
Gökarıksel, Banu and Anna Secor. The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze: Turning the Inside Out. Signs, 40, 1 (Autumn 2014): 177-200.
Miller, Ann. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: Eluding the Frames.” Johns Hopkins University Press: L’Espirit Createur, Vol. 51, No. 1, Spring 2011: 38-52.
Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2, Winter 2004, 357-385. Online.
Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Perspolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. Print
Satrapi, Marjane. “Why I wrote Persepolis: a graphical novel memoir: writer Marjane Satrapi faced the challenges of life in post-revolutionary Iran. She used the graphic novel format to tell her unique story.” Marjane Satrapi. Writing!, Nov-Dec, 2003, Vol.. 26(3), p. 9(5) Cengage Learning Inc.
In Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, the characteristics and qualities of revolution are portrayed through rhetorical devices such as visual text, similes, and pathos. Satrapi’s use of rhetorical devices enhances and supports her expression of the revolution in Iran. Persepolis was Marjane Satrapi’s way of allowing people to see how the revolution in Iran affected her family's lifestyle and her upbringing. This memoir also allows the readers to analyze how war changes the way of the people and government in a country.
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Persepolis is a coming of age story written by Marjane Satrapi in 20001. Depicting a young girl growing up during the religious revolts in Iran. Throughout the story the main character loses her innocence. The author uses the appeals of genre, ethos, pathos, and logos, historical context, and illustration to depict the loss of innocence in the main character.
In America, many have come to recognize Iran as a terrorist nation, but in reality, many Americans stereotype Iranians because they misunderstand the country and how it got to that point. In Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, she gives her readers an inside look of Iran by writing about her childhood during the Iranian Revolution and the changes in her life during that time. The frames in Satrapi’s graphic novel draw similarities and differences between advertisements and the Iranian culture. After analyzing the Satrapi’s graphic novel to advertisements we will look at the similarities and differences of how graphic novels and advertisements use words and images to establish the visual rhetoric.
“Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return” is a graphic-novel as well as a memoir, which molds the life of Marjane Satrapi with the use of illustrations and words. In Marjane’s second book about herself, she is living in Austria and speaks about her education there as well as a social life. Marjane lives in Austria for a span of four years where she experiences a lot of hardships and calamities. In this span of four year, Marjane has trouble housing herself when the fam...
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In the graphic novel, Persepolis, the author, Marjane Satrapi, uses the literary element of symbolism and the graphic element of captions to illustrate the transformation of Marji. Marji transforms from an innocent by-standers to a head strong activist.
Due to the serious tensions looming in the air, many people would think it is strictly forbidden to laugh a little or have fun in Iran. The constant political instability makes it seem like the citizens live like robots under extreme oppression. However, in Marjane Satrapi’s biography, Persepolis, she gives an inside look at her experiences growing up in Iran and adds comic relief throughout the novel. As the main character, Marjane, evolves from an innocent girl into a mature woman, Satrapi adds bits of comic relief to highlight her typical personality while living in the midst of an oppressive society.
Marjane Satrapi in her memoir, “The Complete Persepolis” enlightens readers with the reality of living in Iran, as she tells her journey through her life of becoming a woman during the Islamic Revolution. Iran similar to other countries has made different prescribed roles for their women and men based on their cultures religious and traditional set of laws. Society to them was a depiction of what their people were expected to look, and act like when in public. When trying to understand the importance of gender along with their roles in society, it’s crucial to acknowledge outside factors, for instance things like culture and social class. The characters throughout her memoir illustrate how their
Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is not a run-of-the-mill comic book. It is written with purpose. Satrapi wrote and illustrated this book to show Americans that their perspective of her home country, Iran, is askew. She believes Americans are too focused on the “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism” (Satrapi ii), of the nation and that they forget to notice the normality and humanness of it. Since these two perspectives have vast differences, Satrapi wants to change their minds. Thus, it is crucial that she effectively communicate this humanness of Iran to the literary audience in America. Since the literary devices in a work are needed to correctly convey a message, she found it necessary to include these and manipulate them in her favor. Satrapi uses the innocence of a child along with morals in her pictures and a relation of cultures to effectively communicate her message. It is necessary to examine how she manipulates such literary devices in order to gain a full understanding of the text.