CHAPTER 2: SIMPLIFIED SOCIAL REALITY
The magic of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is that, it has the ability to condense a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant funny scene. The novel is an elegant, witty and moving weapon of mass destruction. Marjane Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country Iran. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. What makes Satrapi’s novel a masterpiece of the phenomenon of a simplified social reality is that it synchronises both tragedy and humour in a raw, honest and an incredibly illuminating manner. As comics are getting a charge out of a freshly discovered respectability, realistic books can be viewed as "another scholarly frame" as it is an available vernacular structure with mass appeal. Marjane Satrapi is a charismatic woman who is loyal, funny and brutally honest, with a big soul that is visible through her work of art and also can be considered as one of the most original artists working today. It was her way of expressing herself through both writing and drawing. In an interview Marjane cited that “Because creation, you know, it means that you don’t have any salary, you don’t have any retirement, all of that. So if you
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Marji didn’t understand the need to fully cover their heads in a veil and in one incident during the class Marji raised the question, that why would a man be aroused by the two inches of hair that is flowing out of her head and whose morality it actually questions. Her rebellious attitude had often worried her parents but they never stopped her from being her own self as they knew that it was not wrong on her
Orientalism is a way of viewing the world as divided into two unequal halves: the Occident and the Orient. Occidental means Western Hemisphere, and Oriental means Eastern Hemisphere. These ideas of orientalism are challenged in Satrapi's Persepolis. A book about a young girl Marji who lived in Iran in the 1980’s, and therefore is placed in the beginning years of political and religious turmoil in Iran. Satrapi Juxtaposes the western view of Iran to Iran by showing similarities between America and Iran through Marji’s youth and adventures throughout the book.
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.
In the graphic novel, Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, Satrapi’s childhood was highly impacted by American culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of American culture on Satrapi’s view of the Iranian Revolution.
During our class discussions, the issue of identity in Marjane Satrapi’s novel, Persepolis (2004), became a contentious issue. The question was asked whether Persepolis might be understood to being in-dialogue with western ways of seeing and did the effects of modernization influence the identity of Marjane’s protagonist in Persepolis. How does the novel involve the issue of identity? I will extend the argument and, through the exploration of Marji’s changing ideologies, I will attempt to prove that Marji is caught between the traditional eastern culture and western modernization.
In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s childhood experiences allow her to demonstrate the cultural changes that occurred in post-revolutionary Iran, as well as those perpetrated by western culture. In Persepolis, western culture plays a major role in the author’s attempt to dispel the
The religion of Islam was imposed upon Iranians, whether they liked it or not. Marjane and her classmates “...didn’t like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to”(Satrapi 3). The young girls were against wearing the veil because they were not practicing
The way they dressed quickly changed as shown when Marji asserted that “In no time, the way people dressed became an ideological sign. There were two kinds of women. The fundamentalist woman [and] the modern woman. There were also two sorts of men. The fundamentalist man [and] the progressive man” (75). Satrapi uses the two frames on page 75 to illustrate the idea associated with the two different ways in which both men and women chose to dress whether it be tradition, or not. Satrapi expounds how their choice of dressing then depicts their view on the Islamic Revolution. She explains how the modern women rebelled by wearing heard scarves, instead of the traditional full veil, along with letting some hair slightly fall out to show opposition against the Iranian regime. She continues with how the progressive man also showed their opposition by tucking their shirts in and shaving their facial hair, in contrast to the fundamentalist man who leaves his shirt hung out, along with a full beard. Satrapi denotes that both genders of characters take the risk of not dressing like a fundamentalist, in order to show their form of rebellion in a settle way, knowing of course that there is always a possibility of
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.
In the novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Satrapi’s childhood was highly impacted by American culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the affect American culture had on how Satrapi viewed the Iranian Revolution.
It is tough to comprehend and obey any rule driving people to modify their means of living. In the book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi there were many variations in the method of existing throughout the Revolution. Persepolis was built on Satrapi’s recollections of her youth through the times when she was a kid. Satrapi describes the problems she had altering her usual habits and getting in trouble for showing herself through the things she enjoyed. It was not only Satrapi who had to deal with situations but other people as well and even the culture as one.
The book I have chosen to do my novel study on is an graphic novel called The Complete Persepolis and the author of this book is Marjane Satrapi and in my opinion the genre of this book is comics and Autobiographical. This graphic novel is autobiographical because the books shows us the events that took place when the author Marjane was a kid and her experiences in Tehran in the 1980s. The main character of this book is a girl named Marjane or Marji for short
After reading the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I find that Satrapi's childhood and young adulthood is impacted by living under the oppressive Islamic Regime that rules Iran in many ways. Marjane is finding for her personal identity and individuality for her childhood in Iran. She is testing what she can and cannot get away with. These actions put her in many dangerous situations.
Tehran is where most of Iran’s artistic community resides and, hopefully, will one day prosper despite the many censorship restrictions regarding who can do what and under which circumstances (Crowder). Many artistic expressions are banned in Iran; expressions such as posters, books, films, women’s clothing as well as music are banned in Iran (Crowder). Navigating these constraints has become an art form in of itself, but Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is not shy about calling out the Islamic regime’s rules that took over power of the country after the 1979 Revolution. Throughout Persepolis, Satrapi blatantly ignores the rule that there should be no representation of one’s faith, criticizes the brutality of the regime as well as questions their power by challenging the regime’s idea of sending thousands of people to die in an attempt to keep control over Iran. Because of these reasons, among others, that Persepolis has been a subject of controversy in Iran and has been banned entirely (Billet).
Introduction My main focus was to find an essay that was filled with errors and grammatical mistakes because they would tend to lack the qualities of a proper technical document. I decided to use an essay I had written in 2011, my sophomore year of high school. I knew that my high school writing abilities were incoherent and had numerous grammar mistakes. For the assignment that I am writing the memo on, I was assigned to read the graphic novel, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, then write an evaluative essay on what external forces affected the main character’s life.
Reflective Statement After finishing Persepolis on my own, I came up with a conclusion that Iran was a nation of terrorism and fundamentalism at that time, which was just an “axis of evil” in contrast with Western countries. The culture in Iran, symbolizing the Eastern part, was also contradicted with that in the West. After the interactive oral, my appreciation to the cultural and contextual considerations of Iran’s identity has been brought to a new level. With a perception of “all the activities Marjane done in Iran and Austria that shaped her identity” in the oral, I suddenly caught the author Satrapi’s message to us: Westerners’ perception of Iran’s identity is a misconception, causing the division of Eastern and Western cultures. Under this message, two new ideas are developed for me.