Persepolis Then and Now

I was so surprised to see the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi on our reading list for this semester. I was first introduced to this graphic novel in my sophomore year in high school. In my Global History class, we were discussing the roles and influences of women in other parts of the world. We discussed and analyzed how girls our age were being treated in different parts of the world based on their religion and society. Some of the things we discovered shocked us. It amazing how us as Americans who have so much freedom take the littlest things for granted. In other countries around the world girls are fighting for their right to read and write and their right to gain an education.

Picking up this novel now almost four years later, I look at it and it's contents in a different light. We focused on one section, "The Veil" where the main character describes the Cultural Revelution in Iran and how everyone was forced to conform and become one. People were being divided based on race and views on the world. People who didn't agree with the new laws, and spoke out began to fear for their lives as Marjane depicts when she talks about how her mother's photo was in a magazine and her mother ended up changing her appearance.

Reading this book twice and analyzing it in a new and different way has given me a new vision of how this novel can be used as a tool to discuss how women are treated in different parts of the world or as how a graphic novel portrays a story to the masses.

Graphic Novels vs. Text Novels

There are many similarities and differences when it comes to a story that has been written in different formats such as between graphic novels and text novels. In a text novel there is more details when it comes do describing certain people, places and things while in graphic novels there are pictures and illustrations that show you what these things should look like. Many times a graphic novel gives you the gist of the story since there isn't alot of room for text. In my opinion I would much rather pick up the  text novel of a story against the graphic novel version because I like creating different images in my head of what the characters or scenery may look like so I can get a realist visual in my head. With the graphic novel, an animated version is given to you to look at and that, in a way dumb downs the book in my opinion. A story with a great plot line gets lost in a graphic novel because it tries to appeal to a younger audience.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

While reading and analyzing the novel, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junto Diaz, I began to realize that there were hidden messages and information within the lines of the text. In order to fully understand these messages that helped you get a better understanding for the book there are other texts you need to read in order to do that and if you haven't then it flies over your head. If you're picking up the book without any background knowledge in the texts he reference in the novel that you really only get the gist of what's going on in the story. It became a little frustrating at first when we would talk about the hidden connections between two texts based on a revision of a line in the novel. For example the last lines in the novel are "The beauty! The beauty!" which is a reference to Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.