Blog Post 11/26

1a) “I find people confusing….The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words.” (14 Haddon). 

1b) “(Temple Grandin) is now aware of the existence of those social signals.  She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it” (197, Zunshine). 

2)         How does the first-person storytelling of Persepolis and The Curious Incident differ to better accommodate the events in the novel?

3)         Reading both Persepolis and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in a row, it is clear that both deviate from common literary storytelling devices.  While both texts uses unconventional devices to tell a story, Persepolis manages to maintain a more “coherent” story throughout the novel.  This is mainly due to the fact that Satrapi allows herself to describe how the other characters, besides her, react to the situations around her.  She is, more or less, aware of her environment to the point where she can aptly describe the situation through picture or text.  With Curious Incident, Mark Haddon’s use of the first person perspective through the eyes of a person with these “difficulties”, ones that often associated with autism, allows this story with a more “narrow” view of the environment this story takes place.

            As I started to find topics for my final paper, Liza Zunshine’s “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness” provides a “scientific” approach to how autistic people have trouble comprehending fictional stories due to the fact that they are unable to “mind-read” people’s actions.  Zunshine uses Temple Grandin as an example of she was unable to read “social signals”, a problem that the main character, Christopher, often face in the novel.  The novel’s unusual, often cryptic, pace left me in the dark in numerous occasions, mainly due to the fact that Christopher’s retelling of his experiences were often the opposite of what I expected.  Like Persepolis though, both novels dealt with describe minute details that wouldn’t usually be in “ordinary” literary texts.  Persepolis allows the drawings to convey the details, where Curious Incident uses Christopher’s uncanny attention to detail to express these small moments.       

Blog Post 11-12

1a) “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.” (Benjamin, Lit Theory, 1236).

1b) “No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger” (Satrapi 142). 

2) How do the historical aspects, or “tradition”, of Perseopolis affected the “uniqueness” of the work?   In other words, why use the graphic novel approach to tell about the Islamic Revolution?

3)         As I read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, I was having a difficult time connecting it to Persepolis.  Walter Benjamin has a very Marxist approach in his article, someone that Satrapi brings up multiple times throughout the graphic novel.  The idea of how “reproduction” removes an “aura” from work was fascinating, especially when looking at his reasoning behind it.   The idea that the removal of this “uniqueness” is political in nature allowed me to make a connection to Persepolis.  While the graphic novel may be a reproduction, the pictures or drawings, unlike, say photographs of “revolution,” provide a unique approach to the story.

            The graphic novel approach allows Satrapi to use this medium to find the “aura” in tradition.   She is able to explain the brutality and sadness of the Revolution in a simple comic square.  As Satrapi explains the time where she founds her friends’ body in the rubble, the story cuts to a completely black stare, and she says “No scream in the world could relieved my suffering and anger” (142).  This “unique” approach to the story allows the reader to remove the “politicized” nature that a straight-forward story about this situation might bring.  It is merely using the “uniqueness’ of the medium to explain the “historical aspects” of her life in much different life.   Explaining her emotions with a simple black box allows the reader to understand the emotional “traditions?” that this revolution caused, rather than the politicized ones. 

P.S. This post may not make that much sense.  Had a hard time connecting the two.  

Weekly Response 11/5

1a) “Cartooning, he (Scott McCloud) argues, is a way of seeing, not just a way of drawing, so the simplicification of characters and images toward a purpose can be an effective tool.” (Naghibi 228).

1b) “And this is a class photo.  I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me.” (Satrapi 3). 

2) How do the use of the graphic novel conventions and its use of “cartooning” to tell the story of Persepolis play in part with the story’s theme of “identity”?

3)         Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis can be seen as a “familiar” coming-of-age story where “identity” plays a crucial part in the protagonist’s quest.  Yet, the story takes place in a revolutionary Iran, which is far from the “coming-of-age” style.  Many “English” teenagers would find this to be interesting, but would have a hard time relating themselves to this aspect of the story.  If Persepolis was written in a traditional novel approach, the reader would most likely have a disconnect from the main protagonist, because the written words provide a story of an “other”, not themselves.  Naghibi relates to McCloud’s saying: “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face- you see it as the face of another but when you enter the world of a cartoon- you see yourself” (228).  Just like a photo or realistic drawing, text provides some “relatability” for the reader, but Satrapi’s “cartooning” illustrations provides the reader to put themselves in her shoes and to relate with her struggle with identity.  Satrapi immediately enters her story with an identity crisis by stating the readers “don’t see me” in a class photo.

            Yet, why does Satarpi use the “cartooning” approach to tell her story?  Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan discusses the power of “English” literature on a world scale, by saying “It is (English) also, Paul Gilroy would argue, transgeographical, a culture without national boundaries that thrives on a lateral connections and syncretism, a culture where in-betweenness replaces identity as the defining trope of culture production (1074).  While Persepolis was translated from French, the idea that with English, “in-betweenness” replaces “identity” is a very interesting concept.  It can be seen that with Persepolis, Satrapi knows that language brings a lack of “identity”. In order to connect on a “transgeographical” level, illustrations, or “cartooning” will provide the “identity” for readers from different continents and countries to fully understand how this coming-of-age story can relate to their own personal struggles with “identity”.