Prospectus
Persepolis is a graphic narrative comic written by Marjane Satrapi where Satrapi shares her experience as a child during and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. How Persepolis will be close read in this paper is both rhetorical analysis of language and formal analysis of visual images in the narrative. The narrative implies that that the west and the east are not so different after all by speaking to the american public about the fact that radicals do exist but the majority of the Iranian population are benign people that care about the same things the west does. The book tries to distort this idea the west has on the east, especially by highlighting the similarity between women in the west and the east because people in America feel that people of the Middle East are vastly different and also primitive. Ties in with the time the book was published because it was published in America two years after the 9/11 attacks.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is significant because it brings cultural and historical factors of Iran in order to bring the west to understand more about the east. Persepolis is a narrative the includes both written word and black and white drawn pictures to create a more childlike and docile feel to the book. The use of this is to make the reader relate more to the context and cause them to put themselves into Marjane Satrapi’s shoes. The further a reader from the west is put into her shoes the more they realize the similarities between the west and the east and closes this gap of “us” vs. “them”. Questions like how does the medium of a graphic novel affect the message of the book? How do cultural events affect the main character and how do these events reflect larger meanings about the Iranian Revolution in a general sense? and How does feminism play a large role in Satrapi’s novel and what is its use to the overall message of the narrative? Will be discussed in this research paper. The interdisciplinary approach of this paper is literature analysis, art analysis, the cultural and historical significance of the Iran Revolution.
The academic journals by Hilary Chute, Leigh Gilmore, and Nancy K. Miller all present a feminist interpretive debate that all generally coincide. The academic Journals by Theresa M. Tensuan, Nima Naghibi and Typhaine Leservot all present a Orientalist/Occidentalist debate that do have few disagreements but generally coincide.
What I hope to find out how Satrapi’s narrative affects the readers of her novel with the use of general cultural norms. I feel like the core of my paper will be supposed by the existing scholarship but i with more of the example that I have found in Satrapi’s narrative and in Iranian culture to further prove this point.
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