What I have for my final paper so far:

Persepolis, By Marjane Satrapi, is a graphic novel about a girl growing up during Iran's Islamic revolution that was waging during the 1980s and the 1990s. In Chute's article, "Graphic Narrative as Witness," she argues that Satrapi has a good mixture of maturity and naivete within the novel, causing the story to really stick with the reader, and making it memorable. in Satrapi's novel, she dances along the lines of naivete and maturity by the content that makes up her story, expressing war and violence, and matching it up with simple depictions in the form of a graphic novel.
"Persepolis is inspired by a different tradition of the avant-garde; it is expressionistic and minimalist. The stylization of Persepolis suggests that the histrocially tramatic does not have to be visually traumatic" (Chute 137). Throughout the novel, Strapi depicts the violence that she saw growing in a simple way. Being in black and white, the novel already draws the reader away from waht could be potentially gruesome images, that would colorfully depict bloody limbs, or decrepit skin tones from those that are dying, or dead. This simplistic way of showing the images helps to draw the reader away from the potentially brutal to focus on what Satrapi has to say about what is going on in each image, and to tell the reader what is significant to her when she was younger and experiencing all these things. A good example of Satrapi using simplicity of an image, without tarnishing it with violence is when the parents are worried about a family friend while bombs are going off in a city called Abadan

Insert of image

In the image, Satrapi has drawn a bunch of cars surrounded by flames.

........

For my final paper, I want to write about Persepolis and how its naivete in design and writing help to make the novel more mature, despite the fact that it is written as a graphic novel, and involving the author's childhood.
I haven't exactly formed a thesis yet, but I have been able to gather the quotes from the literary theory that I want to use. I want to use "Graphic Narrative as Witness" for my theory piece for my final paper. From there, I have gathered three quotes.

• "Persepolis is inspired by a different tradition of the avant-garde: it is expressionistic and minimalist. The stylization of Persepolis suggests that the historically traumatic does not have to be visually traumatic." page 137
• "' I wanted people in other countries to read Persepolis to see that I grew up just as other children do.'" page 138
• "Persepolis not only does not forget but also, more significant, shows us the process of 'never forgetting' through its layers of verbal and visual narration: it presents the procedure, in addition to the object, of memory. Persepolis proliferates selves on the page." page 143

The pages I want to use from Persepolis to convey my point:

• Page 89
• Cars surrounded by a fire but not burning
• flames are not eve touching the cars.
• brutality in the picture, but it's not actually being portrayed.
• Page 18
• Bottom left panel, talks about Satrapi interrupting her parents to ask them if they want to play Monopoly
• Image of her being a normal child, and wanting to do childlike things despite what is going on in the world around her.
• Page 91
• Images of a family friend's sons and how their childhood was not hindered by any of the world's events.
• They talk about pop culture things, like Star Wars, and wanting to play games.

"I want people in other countries to read Persepolis, to see that I grew up just as other children do."
Marjane Satrapi
"Graphic Narrative as Witness"
page 138

"I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could."
Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis
page 32

I think it is really to point out this quote that Satrapi made of herself and her book. I know for me, there is no way that I grew up like her. Yes, I understand that she was a child once, as all of us are at some point, but not everyone has to live through what she lived through. I know I grew up very differently from Satrapi, and I never had to live through a civil war, or an uprising, or persecution. Yes, I struggled growing up, but I never feared for my life, even though I did grow up in Flint, Michigan, a very dangerous city to grow up in.
There is some truth to her quote though, and that is coming to realization of when one loses their naivete. I feel that Satrapi portrays this aspect of herself on page thirty-two in the last frame. It is at this point that Satrapi is tired of asking for answers and having to have everything explained to her, or not explained fully, and she wants to know the whole truth, so she buys a bunch of books and teaches herself about what is going on around her. This is almost like shrugging off her childhood in order to be more aware of her surroundings, even if her surroundings are morbid and dangerous.
I remember our discussion in class the other day, and I remember a few of my classmates said that she lost her childhood and naivete when she wondered about the theater fire, but I think that its in this scene on page thirty-two, because this is her wanting to grow up, and wanting to know what is going on with the world; children don't often seek to find the answers to war, or violence, but she does, and she gets rid of her naivete to do so.

"In Jane Austen's world, human worth is to be judged by standards better and more enduring than social status; but social status is always relevant. With amused detachment, she registers exactly the social provenance of each of her characters, and judges them for the ways in which they judge each other. The importance assigned to class distinction is the source of much of her comedy and her irony, as of her social satire."
McMaster 129

I think this quote is very important in picking out one of the most prevalent aspects of Austen's novels. A character's wealth, how they obtained it, what they do with it, and what happens to it, is a point that Austen makes known with all of her main characters. Through this, though, she also makes known that money is not always an important issue in her novels. So why does she make a point to let the reader in on the monetary value of all of her characters?
For Austen, it is a means to show that money is not something that should be of importance. In her time, money was important, because it was a means to survive, it was a way to show hierarchy, but that is what Austen wants to banish; she wants people to marry for love, and not for money. Now, that's not to say that that didn't happen, I am sure many people married for love during that time, but there were also many occurrences of people marrying for money too, to preserve a name, or preserve a family. Also, Austen showing the value of a family also helped to put people of certain wealth into perspective. The Bennets, for instance, were a very happy family, despite not having a lot, and they managed to make do with what they had. At first, Mr. Darcy, seemed like the kind of man that kept to himself, and that included his wealth, and as his polar opposite, Mr. Bingley just wanted everyone to have a good time, and to enjoy his company.
This idea that money can create a society that is basically a slave to their fame and fortune is mostly what Austen wants to make known about her society, and wants the reader to learn about. Austen wants readers to see that there is more to a person than their title, and more than the dowry that they get in a marriage; she wants us to see the characters as people, and wants us to relate to them.

Literature of Lesbianism

I tried very hard to relate this article back to Pride and Prejudice, but I struggled to find a part of this article to draw from to take back to the characters of Jane Austen's novel. I did, however, manage to find some very interesting aspects of this article.
One of the main things that stuck with me throughout this article, was the idea of lesbian literature, and what are the qualifications of it. At first, it was determined that lesbian literature was written about lesbians, but then what about the women who were declared lesbians, or led homosexual lives?
"More damagingly, even as we labor (with greater or lesser unease) to pigeonhole individual women, we are confronted with the aggravating ambiguities of the term lesbian itself: its psychic and behavioral imprecision, its obscure to refer unequivocally, precisely at those moments when one wants most that it should." -page 5
I love this quote, because we, as people, and as readers, want to group things together, whether they be types of novels we read, authors we like to read, what those authors read or produce, and main themes we like to read about, we are forever trapped asking what types of novels one kind of author writes. This point was made specifically about women who may have led homosexual lives, but never related themselves in that way, nor would they relate their novels that they wrote in that way. These authors just wanted their novels to be something to read, something to be enjoyed, and something to be talked about, and not judged on what kind of content that they produced. This even goes as far as men who wrote about lesbians in their books. There is no way that readers could call men lesbian writers because men cannot lead lesbian lives. So this draws back the question of what defines a lesbian writer or novel, as well as any other types of novels or writers.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Pride and Prejudice.
Opening line of the novel.

"Whether she becomes an objet d'art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of her self- of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both- that is the beautiful angel-woman's key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven."
"The Madwoman in the Attic"
LT page 817

Looking at the combination of these quotes, one can figure that a man must always want a wife, but that woman, on becoming a wife, must make many sacrifices in order to do what she needs to do as a wife. This angel-figure that the man falls in love with is an image, driven by the creation of man, written down by men. This figure is then spread all throughout literature, that a woman is divine and that she needs to be there to care for the man, and this is what Gilbert and Gubar argue in the article, "The Madwoman in the Attic." From the woman's perspective though, this marriage could drive the woman to become the monster, and could drive her to become something that the husband did not see when he first saw her as the angel. This struggle between what is right for the woman, and what is right for the man, causes a division in literature, and in the image that we use on both men and women in real life.
Women, driven by this concept of being perfect because that is what literature has told us to become, then become overwhelmed and turn into the monsters. They could also become monsters, with the knowledge that the man they are going to marry is "in possession of a good fortune," and its this fortune that turns the women into monsters, because they  only marry they man for their money, and are angels to begin with because they are trying so hard to win over the man with the money. If it's not the woman trying to be the wife, it's the mother or father of the woman that is creating this angel/ monster combination to earn money for the family. This can be seen in Pride and Prejudice, especially with the girls' mother trying to marry all five of them off. So, in retrospect, it is the man's money that is turning the mother into a monster, and therefore turning the angelic daughter into a monster because she wants to money because her parents tell her she needs to money to save them.

Prompt 3

"One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race." - Page 1008

"Haply for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or for I am declined
Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague of great ones;
Prerogatived are they less than the base.
’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death." -III.iii.267–279, Page 61

Through this quote in Shakespeare's Othello, one can see how Toni Morrison's argument for the scarcity of race can be seen. Despite the fact that Othello's argument for being black dates back to the fifteenth century, there hasn't been a whole lot in the way of showing race as a problem in literature. Even in Othello, this argument does not pose as a huge argument in the story, because there are other points to the story, and the story is certainly not all about race. Toni Morrison makes it known that there are not a lot of novels that use race as a theme throughout the whole books or novels, instead, they beat around the bush, or just pass by the problem completely. She poses that a huge problem in novels, especially American novels, written by white men, never seem to touch on the subject of race, and this idea is jarring to her. This quote from Othello, helps prove to Morrison that race is not a common theme amongst white men, and that Othello is an example of a book that touches on the subject, but there aren't very many books that look at race as a problem.

Prompt 1

"For literature to be literature, it must constantly defamiliarize the familiar, constantly evolve new procedures for story-telling or poetry-making. And such change is entirely autonomous of the social and historical world from which the materials of literature are taken." - Page 5

"I am no prophet - and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid."
     "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" by T.S. Elliot

When I read that quote from Rivkin and Ryan, I didn't immediately agree until I read it a couple of times. At first, it seemed to me that they were stating that one must defamiliarize their writing in order to make whatever story they have into a piece of literature, but if I was to write a story about my day at school, and I wanted everyone to understand what I was talking about? I would want my peers to understand what it was like to travel across campus, to cross the Red Cedar, to fully grasp how beautiful that day was. So why would I not want that piece of writing to be familiar to those who wished to read it?
From here I was able to gather that that they act of writing if different from everyone; everyone sees their writing in their own way, and everyone writes differently. Therefore, it would be automatic when writing to put my own feelings and emotions into the work, and not those of others, even if it is for them, and I want them to understand what I am telling them. Looking at Elliot's work written above, I was struck with the answer to my question. To me, that piece of the poem states that he is getting old and that he soon will meet his Maker, and act that he is afraid of, but has come to terms with his inevitable end, in which everyone must face. Reading this passage, I do not know what it is like to be old, and therefore cannot express my fear on growing old and having to die. Although, there is still the fact that everyone faces death every day, and depressing aspect that we all face, but still, something that we don't think about every waking moment. So, I may not fully be familiar with what Elliot is writing about in this passage, but its with deeper thinking and diving into the rest of the poem, or the writing, that a reader can become more familiar with what the author is telling them. So if someone were to read about my day at school, they may have not lived through that experience, but in time they will grasp, understand, and become more familiar with what I have said in my piece.