Literacy

Smashing the Lightbulbs: A Review of Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters (174 pp. Scholastic. $34.99)

January 23, 2019 by Derek Furr Leave a Comment

[Nicholas Wright returns to this blog to review Disrupting Thinking, the latest from Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. Nicholas is an English teacher and graduate of the Bard MAT Program in New York]

I came to scholars Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst when I read their book Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. While I wholeheartedly agree with and still use their strategies from 2012, I cannot say the same for their 2017 collaboration, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. This slim volume offers the usual introduction and conclusion. The middle section, comprising three uneven parts, can be summed up as follows: If we want new readers ready for the future, we first need to create a new framework for reading. While students change, teachers will need to reconsider core beliefs many of us were exposed to in our education classes. In particular, we need examine what we learned about improving test scores, keeping our students’ attention throughout every unit, promoting silent reading and class-wide readings, and using classroom discussions.

What does a reader ready for the future? Beers and Probst suggest that she/he be responsive, responsible, and compassionate readers. To foster these values, teachers at any level must emphasize and teach students to read aesthetically in an era where students’ efferent readings matter more than they should. Beers and Probst borrow aesthetic and efferent from Louise Rosenblatt’s 1938 classic Literature as Exploration to help encourage students to be life-long readers and be resistant to the idea that “books [are] burdens imposed upon them” (56).

To become readers who see books as “invitations to experience new thoughts” (56), Beers and Probst introduce the “Book, Head, Heart” (BHH) framework. This technique helps students remember “to pay attention to the text, to [their] thoughts about it, and to what [they] feel and how [they] might have changed, no matter how slightly, as a result of reading” (63). The framework works for fiction and nonfiction.

Students begin with the usual analyzing techniques—the “B” in the framework—like Notice and Note Strategies, Some Wanted But So, Genre Reformulation, Sketch to Stretch, and Fix-Up Charts. More specifics of these favorite practices appear on pages 64 and 65. After these important analytical moments, students move to the first “H.” In the “Head” part, students wonder how Night surprised them, figure out what Mary Shelley expected them to already know, and determine in what ways didTo Kill A Mockingbird change, challenge, or confirm what they already knew.

With the “B” and the first “H” accomplished, the second “H” is admittedly the “hardest to define” (69) for Beers and Probst because “If ‘in the head’ pointed to the thoughts awakened during the reading—the questions, surprises, unanticipated new information, challenges to assumptions—‘in the heart’ refers more to the feelings aroused by a text” (68). Phrased differently, what “values, attitudes, beliefs, and commitments” (68-69) become imprinted on students after reading an essay from David Sedaris’s Calypso collection or a New York Times article about glitter or the most recent thoughts of Michael Pollan. At this moment, school readers begin transforming into life-long readers. Another excellent complement to the “heart” query would be reading Mark Edmundson’s Why Read (2004), or his earlier “Teaching the Truths,” in which he refers to teaching students to create what Richard Rorty called a Final Vocabulary, “the ultimate set of terms that we use in order to confer value on experience. It’s where our principles lie” (7). Granted, the students Edmundson works with are in college, but the questions can be translated with minimal effort.

At page 95, Beers and Probst begin a new section titled “The Changes We Must Embrace” part, are at their most radical. They move beyond the idea of a best practice in reading to imagining next practices in reading, ways to teach that “might be better for the future” (104). They reassess in about 50 pages the ideas of success, relevance, silent reading, classroom discussion, and reading the same book.

While I do not intend to give away all ideas in this section, I will share the most surprising course of action they suggest. I first read Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay “How Should One Read a Book” in my first year of teaching composition at SUNY New Paltz. The most radical of many radical moments for me in that reading came in the third sentence of the first paragraph. Woolf writes, “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions” (234).None of my former or current teachers suggested this idea. We all read the same text; we all worked through the text the same way. And, we moved on to the next text whether we felt certain or sure enough about the text. I, too, had prescribed all of the six essays we read that semester in Composition I. Should I have done otherwise?

Beers and Probst promote reading subjectively in a more simplified way than Woolf when they assert “we don’t think it [a class-wide novel] serves any children best if they never have the chance to choose what they want to read” (138). Notice that this claim is pointed at only novels, not shorter fiction works or non-fiction. The co-authors suggest that in grades beyond elementary, the likelihood that a class-wide novel will have positive effects on all students decreases drastically. To support their claim, they continue as follows:

When the intensive study of a single novel over several weeks is compared with reading that novel more quickly, and then moving on to read other independently chosen novels—in other words, extensive reading—the intensive study does not result in higher comprehension of that novel. But intensive study of a novel does result in more negative attitudes toward reading [Coryell, 1927; McConn, 2016]. In other words, intensive study of a single novel does little good and perhaps significant harm. (143)

I have concerns about this long quotation because of their vague language. How many is “several”? Two or three or four weeks? What are the qualities of comprehending a text? Being able to pass a multiple-choice exam or write an analysis paper? We should never spend five to eight weeks on one novel; we should never expect every student to adore Ethan Frome.

In a rather raw moment, Beers and Probst phrase that quotation above like so: “Neither of us can think of one novel we want to read for eight weeks. If we love the book, we want to devour it. If we hate it, we want to quit reading or at least want the torture to end quickly” (142). Reading quickly and eagerly confuses the issue at hand. Where is the time for a second or third read? Where is the savoring and lingering over scenes and sentences? Where is the chance to memorize the opening paragraph and deliver as a dramatic reading? Where is the close reading?

For me, the whole-class novel exposes students to literary hallmarks. So, I have adopted the practice of having students read the first two chapters of whole-class novels. This technique—like a wine tasting—has worked famously in the many British and American literature surveys I have taught. Students have remarked that they actually prefer just “dipping their toes” in the novels of Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather. I find comfort in this decision because I remember Woolf’s question “After all what laws can be laid down about Books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself” (234). And, I know that my college students can take other English electives. Additionally, I imagine that many high school students get a choice of taking a literature elective in their senior year.

If teachers want to stick with the class-wide novel, Beers and Probst suggest four guidelines: “Don’t expect students to read the same book in the same way; Don’t lose an opportunity to check-in with students as they silently read the book; Don’t choose the class-wide book without their participation; Don’t confuse listening with reading” (144-146). The last two suggestions need clarification. I do not think we need to involve students in every reading selection because that undermines the hours we have spent reading and coming up with common readings that help meet grade-level requirements. But, I do see the value in having students choose the first and last class-wide reading. That’s radical enough. With regard to confusing listening with reading, Beers and Probst point out that trying to speed up the pace by reading aloud the class-wide novel does not affect reading skills. That practice emphasizes listening skills and potentially note-taking skills. It seems, to me, that we still need to write and think about the class-wide novel.

All in all, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters has me conflicted. I do not think this collaboration is as carefully completed as Notice and Note. Many of the chapters edge to a solution, and the “Turn and Talk” technique that ends every chapter becomes ineffective quite quickly. But, I do find the “BHH” framework a promising tool for reading.

Coda: Practicing the Framework

About a week ago, I spent three days in a local Hudson Valley high school guest-teaching two sections of English 11 Honors. While my primary goals were to expose them to queer theory before they began reading Dracula by way of reading and discussing a queer poem, I also put Beers and Probst’s framework to work. On the second day of teaching, I asked my students three questions: What surprised you? What does Howe think you already know? What changed, challenged, or confirmed your thinking? (Beers 89). While these questions were new, these passionate students found textual evidence to support their personal claims and helped one another say back what they believe they heard about queerness.

While they walked away with some formal analytical practice with Marie Howe’s 1998 poem “Practicing,” they probably left with more questions, which is ultimately one of my goals in teaching English. It felt radical and necessary to allow those students’ subjective experiences of reading to sit next to objective/plausible questions about poetic elements.

Works Cited

Beers, Kylene and Robert E. Probst. Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. New York: Scholastic, 2015.

Edmundson, Mark. “Teaching the Truths.” Raritan23.1: 1-21.

Woolf, Virginia. “How Should One Read a Book?” The Virginia Woolf Reader: An Anthology of Her Best Short Stories, Essays, Fiction, and Nonfiction. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1984: 233-245.

I Hate This Too: Why It Can Be Good to Teach Books You Dislike

August 3, 2018 by Derek Furr Leave a Comment

[Must students and teachers like everything they read in class? Bard MAT graduate Matthew Denvir explores this question and discusses the benefits of teaching students why it is okay, and even good, to dislike certain books. Matthew graduated from the Bard MAT program in 2011. He currently lives in Virginia Beach where he teaches English, Creative Writing, and Global Media Analysis at Tallwood High School. Follow him on Twitter @TheRealMrDenvir.]

My students often ask a variation of the following question: “Did you choose this book?” The Tempest, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm. Did I choose these? Why? Reasons for asking vary. Some hate the book. Some love it. Some are curious about the process of teaching and creating curriculums. I usually give them a stock answer about curricular conformity, book-room availability, and grade-level expectations. I want to convey that books have value even if they’re not our favorites, that good readers—including students and teachers of literature—should always interrogate the quality of a book. But maybe I should be more honest with them. Maybe I should tell them, when applicable, “No. I hate this book.”

I imagine this is not shocking to fellow English teachers. We know that we sometimes have to teach books we hate. Julius Caesar is a popular target (“It goes nowhere interesting after the third act”), as is The Scarlet Letter (“I find it as boring as they do”) and Thoreau’s Walden (for this one, my colleague just did the finger-in-mouth puking gesture).

This is not to say we don’t love the field. Of course we do. Great teachers often have a contagious passion for their subject. But while we may love capital-L Literature, we don’t always love the literature of English class. I learned this lesson in 2016, when I started teaching Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I learned it’s okay to teach a book I don’t like. More than that, I learned it can be a good and valuable experience for students when the books we teach are not held up as objects of our praise and worship.

But First: We Need to Talk About Ayn Rand

If you are curious about Rand’s ideas but have a weight limit on your backpack, her slim Anthem is the place to start. At about one hundred pages, it’s a breezy and admittedly enjoyable summation of her talking points. The story involves a dystopia in which people are stripped of all individuality and free will, an imposition that has halted the advancement of knowledge and scientific progress. People in the society do not know the words “I” and “me,” making for an interesting narrative voice in which the book’s speaker refers to himself as “we.” Useless government bureaucracy abounds. For example, upon learning of electricity, the Council of Scholars rejects the technology on the grounds it would bring ruin to the “Department of Candles.” The narrative arc follows Equality 7-2521—named, like all other characters, with an ideal followed by a serial number—as he discovers his individuality, breaks free from oppressive collectivism, and gains knowledge from old world books. By the end, he learns “I.”

The story is engaging, but the preachy themes are troublesome. Another diplomatic word for the book’s message might be controversial, but many may find its themes odious. The protagonist’s discovery of self comes seemingly at the expense of all empathy. “I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them,” he says at one point of revelation (95). At another, “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them” (96). One crucial part of the plot involves Equality 7-2521’s invention of the light bulb, which he presents to the government as a way to improve society. Upon the invention’s rejection, however, he admits, “We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake” (76).

This is some radical stuff, stuff that might make even the staunchest right-winger a bit uneasy. Anthem isn’t about finding your strength and putting it to good use; Anthem is about bettering yourself with no altruistic regard for others. If you help others, in Rand’s way of thinking, you do so only because you benefit in some way from the help. There is no obligation to be a contributing member of society. “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers,” Rand writes. “That is freedom. This and nothing else” (101). It’s an odd message to be teaching in a public school, a place where we strive to build community, support each other’s success, and work towards common goals—all paid for with taxes, of course. And, aside from the oddity, it’s just disconcerting. Do we really want to teach adolescents to disregard the needs of others, to focus merely on self?

But Students Love It (at first)

In one class, when I asked students if they’d heard of Ayn Rand or her ideas, a student mentioned a T-shirt bearing the quote: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” Though attributed to Rand, this quote is inaccurate; she never said or wrote this. But the fact that the student liked the shirt illuminates why Rand is so appealing to high school students.

Rand has moxie. She has chutzpah. She makes a coherent philosophy of narcissism, and teenagers, going through the well-documented phase in which identity is asserted and self-concern trumps most else, latch onto Rand’s ideas with glee. Who’s to blame them? They are in the process of constructing identities in a world they find increasingly difficult and confusing; to read an author who intelligently makes the case that you are strong and self-reliant and you can do this will feel affirming. The revelatory narration in Anthem comes after Equality 7-2521 discovers singular pronouns. “I am. I think. I will,” he says (94). To fifteen year-olds, anxious about their role in a social world, these sentences have profound meaning.

Students also like Rand’s language, which is direct but elevated, with a tone whose straight-faced seriousness makes Hemingway look like Dave Barry. Characters do not talk like real people; they talk like mythic figures out of an epic poem or fairy tale, with language reveling in its own grandiosity—repetition, references to “the gods,” heavy allusion to the Western canon, anachronistic use of “shall,” etc. To high school students (so my theory goes), this seriousness strikes a chord. Their understanding of and concern for self is not frivolous or inconsequential. They care deeply about themselves, and they are moved by a novel that treats the subject of self with a reverence bordering on religiosity.

In teachers’ lounge conversations, my colleagues have confirmed the broader argument of my theory, if not exactly the particulars. It’s well known that high school students love Anthem.

In Which I Start to Push Them

The class discussions about Rand started to seem too one-sided. It’s not that I minded my students’ appreciation of the text; I just wanted to start a critical conversation about what this book was really telling us. This should not be specific to books we find problematic. We should encourage a healthy analytical distance no matter the book we teach.

To do this, I use questioning strategies that focus on author’s purpose over plot, theme, literary techniques, etc. Rand herself becomes the focal point around which our conversations exist. We no longer discuss the book’s ideas; we discuss her ideas as conveyed through the book.

Practical Suggestion: to get your students to develop deeper-level, critical thinking skills about texts, use authors’ names as much as possible. Change your lexicon to make clear you are discussing a real person’s ideas, not those of an abstract authorial figure. For example, instead of asking, “What does this passage show?” ask, “What is Hawthorne showing us in this passage?” Instead of “How is Ralph depicted in this scene?” use, “How does Golding depict Ralph in this scene?” You get the idea.

The first opportunity to challenge my increasingly Rand-loving students comes about seven days into the unit. We conduct a seminar in which students respond to guided questions posted on the board. Students are given some time to prepare answers with textual support and commentary before joining a class-wide discourse on the topic. The first question, after referring to the quote (supra) in which Equality 7-2521 admits he created the light bulb for its own sake, asks: What does this change of heart show about the narrator? What does it show about Ayn Rand’s ideas regarding selfishness?

Dutifully, students begin to talk about the importance of creativity, of giving remarkable individuals the space to innovate. I push back, just a little. Is it troublesome that our hero expressly does not want to help his “brothers”? That he does not create or innovate for any moral purpose, but just does so to do so? Can this be a problem? Some students take the bait. Discussion moves to why people should do work and how society could benefit from those who merely want to achieve. Fair enough.

The discussion moves along until we get to our final question, which refers to the penultimate chapter, in which our narrator didactically espouses his newfound ideas about individualism (didactic espousing being a kind of Rand staple). In this chapter, you’ll find Anthem’s greatest hits: “My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”; “I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me.”; “What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it?”; “I am done with the monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame ” (95-97). Etc. I ask students: Do you agree with what the narrator says in this chapter? Or do you think he has gone too far? How could Rand’s ideas help society? Or how could they hurt it?

These questions seem to be less revelation than permission. Students begin to disagree with Rand’s ideas in Anthem, some passionately so. Debates break out. Some students remark that they have hated this book the whole time, which leads to an honest question I have: Do students feel they have to like the books they read in school? If so, that’s a problem. Students cannot become good critical thinkers if they assume they must like what they are learning.

Why This Is Important

The ability to argue with a text is becoming an increasingly important skill in the 21^stcentury. Today’s students will read and view more “texts” than any previously, and many of these new texts deserve a level of scrutiny they are not getting. Social media provides users with a deluge of information, much of it designed to be consumed with little to no thought given to the purveyors of that information. Gallons of ink have already been spilled on the social effects of this—worldview bubbles, proliferation of fake news, simplification of complex issues—so no sense retreading that ground here. But think of the typical high school student scrolling through Instagram. Each post is a text, whether a picture, aphorism, or meme. It should concern one to imagine a complacent recipient of these un-vetted texts. We know that even a tweet from the U.S. President can espouse a gross un-truth. Therefore, a more skeptical student, one more able to see and argue with the “author,” should be less easily swayed by pithy, inaccurate memes.

That said, let us not make the mistake of thinking the World Wide Web is the only source of troubling texts. The very texts we teach, canon or not, are often just as deserving of a critical eye. After four years in literature classes, a typical American high school student will have read a number of books that, while arguably great art, perpetuate problematic or outdated ideas about race, culture, gender, and class. Take William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as an example, a staple in the typical high school English class. There is an important discussion to be had about the characters’ associating indigenousness with savage immorality. “Which is better,” Piggy asks Jack at one point, “to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?” (180). Perhaps there is a nuanced way to understand what is expressed here; perhaps the boys’ conflation of “painted Indians” with immorality is part of their uniquely English folly. Or maybe the book is just racist. Either way, the conversation is not an easy one to have. It’s made easier, however, if we encourage students to see the author.

My tenth grade students encounter this representational hurdle when we read and perform Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The play is perhaps most conventionally seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to his craft, but contemporary readers cannot ignore the colonialist relationship between Prospero and Caliban. Prospero today seems like a colonizer, taking over Caliban’s island and exploiting both the land and its sole inhabitant. Caliban resents this: “(I) showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. / Cursed be I that did so!” (1.2.404-406). Prospero, in return, makes an accusation that, today, seems loaded with racial and cultural implications: he accuses Caliban of trying to rape Miranda, Prospero’s daughter. “Would ‘t had been done!” Caliban responds, “Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else / this island with Calibans” (1.2.419-421). Caliban spends the rest of the play plotting to murder Prospero before learning his lesson, his rightful place.

Considering the play’s geography, it’s not a stretch to imagine Caliban as an African, an interpretation offered by director Julie Taymor, who cast Djimon Hounsou, an African actor, in the part for a 2010 film. But this is beside the point. African or not, Caliban is presented as the uncivilized indigenous being whereas Prospero is the civilized European. This dynamic is troubling and needs to be addressed when teaching the play. But, as with Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this conversation will prove difficult if students are not made to see author.

For example, I could ask my students: Why does Caliban try to rape Miranda? They may respond that Caliban is monstrous (he is scaly and fishlike), that he is naturally vicious and cruel. In an attempt to get students to analyze Elizabethan views about non-Europeans, I may bring up questions about Caliban’s nature as it relates to his non-European status. But, without building this discussion around author, the conversation could become vague and dangerous (e.g. “Is Mr. Denvir saying non-Europeans are natural rapists?” type thing). It is sometimes difficult for students to remember that characters in a fiction are total creations of another human being. So when we talk about why Caliban acts a certain way, we are not analyzing a person who exists in the real world; we are analyzing a fictive representation of an author’s ideas about how the world works.

To put it simply, don’t ask students, “Why is Caliban monstrous?” Instead, ask, “Why does Shakespeare make Caliban monstrous?” This way, students will make inferences about the author’s intent and purpose. Some will stand up for the author and offer interpretations that treat Shakespeare generously. “Sure, Caliban is monstrous,” they’ll say, “But Shakespeare wants us to see that his anger towards Prospero is justified.” Others will be less forgiving: “If Shakespeare wants us to sympathize with Caliban, why does Caliban need to learn a lesson in the end?”

Such conversations are crucial for this text and others, since otherwise students may unconsciously internalize the prejudices of an author. To be critical thinkers, students need to feel comfortable disagreeing with and even hating the authors they read. This may be hard for some English teachers to stomach—the idea that we shouldn’t even put William Shakespeare on a pedestal—but good literary thinking requires students to truly see authors not as icons, but as flesh and blood people with ideas deserving of investigation. This way, they can formulate and strengthen their own ideas about literature and the world. They’ll be more passionate and more articulate about the books they read in school.

In my own teaching, I have found that, when I remove the author from the discussion or try to convince students that the text has merit, the conversations become confusing and difficult. But when I encourage student inferences about what the author may be doing, and allow students to voice their opinions about whether or not the author is successful in doing so, students are more engaged and the focus of our discussions is clearer.

In the End, What Did Students Think?

After our Anthem unit, student opinions about the book were mixed and nuanced. In a survey given to the class, 77% of students said they enjoyed reading the novel. However, only 37% said they agreed with Rand’s ideas regarding individualism. In written responses, many students mentioned their appreciation of literary aspects—prose style, character, plot—but their disagreement with thematic ones. “I liked the story itself, but I didn’t like her ideas on individualism,” wrote one student. “I liked the book, but I didn’t agree about everything she wrote about,” said another.

Very few students responded that they unreservedly liked the book’s message, but a number expressed appreciation for getting to see Rand’s perspective. “Although I do not agree 100% with her,” wrote one respondent, “I opened up to a new way of thinking and I feel like I might have figured out something more about who I am as a person.” Another said, “I liked Anthem because it showed a different perspective that I would never consider seeing.”

It is a sign of good literary thinking to appreciate certain aspects of a text while expressing reservations about others. In order to hone this ability in students, teachers must show students how to see and analyze the author.

We English teachers should strive to cultivate a classroom environment in which the aggregate student response to a text is nuanced, considered, complex, but also divergent. If some of my students hated Anthem, I hope they hated it passionately rather than passively. And if they liked the book, I hope their enjoyment was thoughtful rather than thoughtless.

Some English teachers may believe it is their duty to make students appreciate the texts they read in class. Such teachers have good intentions but are, in my view, wrong-headed. Don’t get me wrong; the canon abounds with literary treasure. But we shouldn’t teach students to love texts so much as we should teach them to love the act of reading itself.

Works Cited

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Penguin Books, 2006.

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. Penguin Books, 1961.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2009.

Persepolis in the High School Classroom

March 5, 2018 by Derek Furr Leave a Comment

[In this edition of Field Notes, we publish the MAT research project of Wilberforce Strand. Wilberforce is a literature student in the Bard MAT program and is currently student-teaching at Kingston High School in Kingston, NY. The MAT research project in literature includes lesson plans, an annotated bibliography, and a critical essay, all focused on a text that is commonly taught in the New York public schools. Wilberforce writes about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.]

Lesson Plans

Lesson Number: 1

Learning Objectives

Students will know that Satrapi’s unique graphic novel both supports and subverts common comics tropes, and that she has reasons for engaging in, or not engaging in, these tropes. Students will also get an opportunity to work on free writing.

Prior Knowledge

Students will have finished reading the entirety of Persepolis. They will also be familiar with free writes.

Resources Needed

Students will need a copy of Persepolis, their notebooks, and pen/cils.

Teachers will need the same items, along with a black/whiteboard, and chalk/markers.

Learning Tasks

Students will write a quick list free write to the question, “What do you expect of a comic book? What might be some defining characteristics of comics in general?” (5 mins).
The teacher will then ask the class to provide elements from their lists, and write each of these up on the board, forming a class list. (8 mins)
The teacher will go down the list on the board, and for each item they will ask, “Does this fit with Persepolis? How? Why might Satrapi have chosen to support or subvert that particular comics trope?” (20 mins)
Students will choose one item from the list and write their own response to the latter question, “Why might Satrapi have chosen to support or subvert that particular comics trope? Why do you think that?” The teacher will circulate around the room and offer advice to any students who might need it. This piece will be collected as the students exit the room. (7 mins)

Differentiation

During the elements involving writing, the teacher could easily act as guide or scribe for any students who might have a hard time getting their thoughts down on paper.

Assessment

During the discussion aspects, assessment will involve the teacher paying attention to who is contributing, and who is not. They should also go out of their way to include students in the conversation who may be more hesitant to do so by asking them to supply aspects from their list. The final written response will be collected and used as a more formal assessment of the student’s understanding of the lesson’s focus. Because the items have just been discussed in class by the time this is written, the teacher will look for a more in-depth analysis of the comics trope than what has already been covered in class discussion. It is also important that the students not only answers the first question, but also answers the second (that is, explains their reasoning behind their first answer).

Lesson Number: 2

Learning Objectives

Students will know possible reasons why Satrapi would use the comics form, and not a different form, to tell her story. Students will also get an opportunity to work on free writing.

Prior Knowledge

Students will have finished reading the entirety of Persepolis. They will also be familiar with free writes.

Resources Needed

Students will need a copy of Persepolis, their notebooks, and pen/cils.

Teachers will need the same items, along with a black/whiteboard, and chalk/markers.

Learning Tasks

Students will write a free write to the question, “Why might Satrapi employ this particular genre to talk about this subject material?” (3 mins).
The teacher will then ask for volunteers to share their answers. (3 mins)
The teacher will ask the students to turn to the diptych on page 102, the page depicting young soldiers exploding on the battlefield in the upper panel and Marji and her friends dancing in the lower panel. The teacher will first ask, “What do you notice?” and get some responses to this question. Then they will move into questions along the lines of “Why would Satrapi choose to present this scene in this visual way? What might be lost (or gained) had she decided to tell her story in a more traditional prose form?” The teacher will begin to form a discussion around student reponses. (12 mins)
Students will form groups of three or four, find a similarly graphics-heavy page of the text (pages 15, 42, 61, 71, 77, 89, 95, 235, 245, 250, 281, 290, 305, 309, and 329 could all be potential options) and discuss these same questions, “Why would Satrapi choose to present this scene in this visual way? What might be lost (or gained) from this passage if she had decided to tell her story in a more traditional prose form?” in regards to their particular page or image. (12 mins)
Each group will share what they discussed. (5 mins)
The teacher will ask the students to write a focused free write to the prompt, “Based on what you’ve heard from the different groups, why do you think Satrapi might have utilized the graphic novel form to tell her story?” This will be collected as the students leave the room.

Differentiation

During the elements involving writing, the teacher could easily act as guide or scribe for any students who might have a hard time getting their thoughts down on paper, and the mixture of full-class and small-group work would provide students with different discussion preferences different opportunities to discuss the work.

Assessment

Assessment here will require the teacher to carefully pay attention to the full-class discussion, and then to walk around the classroom and listen in on/offer advice or suggestions to the small-group discussions. The final free write will serve as an assessment of each student’s engagement in the class’s discussion and their understanding of Satrapi’s aims in regards to her choice of medium. An effective answer to this final question would include thoughtful ideas and analysis from the student (to track engagement with the text), but would also include ideas presented by the other groups (to track engagement in class).

Lesson Number: 3

Learning Objectives

Students will know that Satrapi criticizes both Western views of the East and Eastern views of the West, forming her own humanistic point of view.

Prior Knowledge

Students will have read the entirety of Persepolis. They will be familiar with free writing.

Resources Needed

Students will need notebooks, pens/pencils, and a copy of Persepolis.

The teacher will need the same items, along with a black/whiteboard and chalk/markers.

Learning Tasks

The teacher will ask the students to free write in response to the prompt, “How does Satrapi present the ways in which the West views Iran in the text? Make sure to use textual evidence to support your claim.” If any students are having trouble finding evidence in the text, provide them with the page numbers 166, 173, 177, 195, and 220 as hints. (5 mins)
The teacher will ask students to share their findings, and make a list of these elements on the board. (7 mins)
Similarly, the teacher will ask the students to write to the prompt, “How does Satrapi present the ways in which Iran (or the East) views the West in the text? Again, make sure you include textual evidence.” Again, provide students who are having trouble with the page numbers 73, 93, 133, 143, 156, and 193 as hints. (5 mins)
The teacher will again ask for students to share, making a list of these elements on the board as well. (7 mins)
The teacher will then ask the students to write in response to the prompt, “So, then, based on these two lists, is Satrapi pro-West or pro-East? Does she agree with either of these two points of view? Where do her opinions or aims fall?” (5 mins)
The teacher will then ask for volunteers to share their answers, and build a discussion out of these responses to this admittedly trick question. (11 mins)

Differentiation

Because the lesson revolves around writing, students who have a harder time getting their thoughts out on paper could be assisted by the teacher acting as scribe.

Assessment

Assessment in this lesson will revolve around making sure to call on different students to get their answers to the different prompts, thereby ensuring the participation and understanding of all.

Lesson Number: 4

Learning Objectives

Students will know that Satrapi’s text seeks to deepen Western understandings of Iran.

Prior Knowledge

Students will have read the entirety of Persepolis. They will be familiar with free writing. They will also be familiar with the concept of the ‘other’.

Resources Needed

Students will need notebooks, pens/pencils, and a copy of Persepolis.

The teacher will need the same items, along with a black/whiteboard and chalk/markers.

Learning Tasks

At the beginning of class, the board will show the definition of transversalism. “Transversalism: the process by which people designated as enemies or others form new understandings of each other.” The teacher will make sure that the class understands this definition by asking a volunteer to re-state it in their own words. (5 mins)
Students will write in response to the prompt, “Does Persepolis engage in transversalism? How?” (5 mins)
The teacher will ask for volunteers to share their answers, fostering a discussion around the idea of the ‘other’. (10 mins)
The teacher will say, “Now let’s get a little more specific.” They will give a list of focuses from the book on the board, including Islam, gender, war, and Iranian history. The students will be divided into these categories by interest. They will then be asked to discuss and answer the following questions: “1. What are typical Western views of that aspect of Iran or the Middle East? 2. How does Satrapi seek to disrupt those understandings? Make sure to find at least five examples of textual evidence for the latter question.” Students will discuss and write down their answers in preparation for sharing those responses in the following lesson. (20 mins)

Differentiation

Small group discussion can help students who feel less comfortable sharing in a full-class setting share their ideas.

Assessment

The teacher will assess informally through listening in on small-group discussion.

Lesson Number: 5

Learning Objectives

Students will know that Satrapi’s text seeks to deepen Western understandings of Iran. They will also get an opportunity to compare and contrast a scene from the film version of Persepolis with the book.

Prior Knowledge

Students will have read the entirety of Persepolis. They will be familiar with free writing. They also will have participated in the small-group discussion from the lesson before.

Resources Needed

Students will need notebooks, pens/pencils, and a copy of Persepolis.

The teacher will need the same items, along with a black/whiteboard, chalk/markers, the link to the segment from the film version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1LPToZPf5c), and a projector.

Learning Tasks

Class will begin with each of the four groups sharing their findings from the previous lesson. If the groups leave out their textual evidence, the teacher will make sure to foreground the importance of that evidence. After each group, the teacher will ask if any other students from at the other groups have any input on that particular aspect of the text. (20 mins)
The teacher will say, “Now we are going to switch gears and take a look at the film version of Persepolis. The film was also made by Marjane Satrapi, though it is different. We will take a look at one scene, the scene in which Marji is stopped by the female Guardians of the Revolution because of her new Western clothing. As we watch, make sure to follow along in the book (pages132-134) so that we can compare and contrast the two.” Show the clip. (5 mins)
The teacher will first ask, “What do you notice?” After a few volunteers, they will ask, “What similarities do we see between the two?” After a few more volunteers, they will ask, “And what about the differences?” A few more volunteers will answer, and the teacher will help to foster a short discussion on the two versions of the scene. Finally, the teacher will make sure to tell the students to keep these ideas in mind for the following lesson on film versus text versions of Persepolis. (15 mins)

Differentiation

Looking at a film version of the story will enable more visually-inclined students to enter into the conversation in a new way.

Assessment

The teacher will assess based on careful listening to the students’ pseudo-presentations, and to their responses to the film clip.

Lesson Plan Rationale

In my lessons on Persepolis I attempt to draw from my external sources to create something that would be workable for many different classes and environments.

My focus on the book’s graphic medium comes from the simple fact that treating graphic novels as serious literature is still a fairly new and unexplored concept. Often viewed as a juvenile form of storytelling, or at least a relatively unknown one, the graphic novel deserves a form-based discussion that might be less necessary with a more traditional prose text. As a long time fan of the medium myself, I hope to engender such an interest in my students. This requires investigating the aspects of a graphic novel that set it apart from more traditional forms, and asking the question, ‘What can we get from a graphic novel that no other form can easily give us?’ Because these lessons take place after the students have read Persepolis, this would have to be addressed earlier in the unit, possibly even the first or second day of reading the text. These earlier lessons might include advice on how to read comics effectively, and how to analyze image and text together. But after finishing the book, thereby acquiring a more complete idea of it, the students are at a place in which they are more qualified to talk about the form, or at least Satrapi’s version of the form. Focusing in on different visual passages and drawing connections between these enables the students to see the power of the combination of image and text. This visual focus also enables readers who may be more skilled in visual analysis, or those who read comic books and have been told in the past that that ‘isn’t real literature,’ that their skills are valuable in the literature classroom as well.

The other main focus of my lessons centers around transversalism, the more content-based element of my project. This, of course, was inspired by Botshon and Plastas’ writing on teaching Persepolis, and the ways in which transversal thinking is championed by the text itself. I imagine the concept of the ‘other’ would have been discussed earlier in the unit, perhaps when reading about Marji’s experiences in Europe (For more information on this concept, I would look into Edward Said’s Orientalism). To maximize the effectiveness of the text and these lessons, I imagine giving background information on the 1979 Islamic Revolution before students begin the book. Similarly, before beginning the book, I would have the students list their own knowledge or assumptions about Iran so that we could track which of those hold true and which are less factual. However, I introduce the concept of transversalism along with its definition after the students have completed the book. I think that this would enable the students to address their position as American readers, and thereby reinvent their reading of the text, after they have read it through one time and gotten a sense of their ideas about the text before this direct awareness. Being aware of the idea itself can transform an initial reading into something more complex. However, I value the different viewpoints and interests of different students, so when analyzing different subjects of the book from our Western point of view (Islam, gender, war, and Iranian history), I would have them divide up by interest.

I also include a bit on analyzing the film version of Persepolis, and comparing the film and the graphic novel, a bit on which I would expand if I were to build a full-length unit around these five lessons. I think this relates back to investigating the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novel form, and the film would act as another version with which to analyze that. I see all three of these focuses coming together in the unwritten lessons that follow these five, in a larger discussion of the way form and content interact.

Critical Essay

“They don’t know anything of our centuries-old culture”: Rethinking American Assumptions of the Middle East with the Help of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

On January 29th, 2002, in his State of the Union Address, U.S. President George W. Bush infamously described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an ‘axis of evil.’ This phrase is often read as a strategy meant to rally the United States toward war in the Middle East and promote insecurity in the post-9/11 landscape. Indeed, according to Lisa Botshon and Melinda Plastas, two teachers writing in 2010, this kind of tactic has had lasting effects. “Recent polls indicate that a significant percentage of our nation’s citizens feel less ‘secure’ than they did before 9/11[…]one of the main factors contributing to Americans’ unease is their sense of Middle Easterners’ profound otherness[…]and the possibility that there are whole countries churning out terrorists to destroy the United States,” they write. The term ‘otherness,’ or ‘othering,’ describes the way in which one group of people (in this case, the U.S., or the West) creates constructions of another group (the Middle East) that are, by definition, precise opposites of the ways in which the original group views itself, thereby reducing the second group to a simple, unknowable ‘other.’ For instance, when Botshon and Plastas announce that they will be reading the book Persepolis, an Iranian’s graphic memoir, in their classes, they report that their students “often anticipate that this project will be a difficult challenge; after all, what could a member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ have to say of importance to them?” (5). This shows the lasting effectiveness of Bush’s ‘othering’ strategy. But Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, was driven by Bush’s statement in an opposite direction, and as she said in a 2008 interview, “[…]when you call a whole country ‘axis of evil,’ or fanatics, or terrorists or whatever, after a while people forget that these are people you are talking about, they are human beings” (Ghadishah). And a reminder of this fact is her aim. In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi seeks to humanize a demonized people by getting Western readers to re-think their ‘othering’ assumptions. This process is aided by both her own experience of education presented in the text, and through the text’s educative properties.

One of the most iconic images of any Islamic country, at least from the West’s perspective, is that of the veiled woman. Satrapi introduces us to this image in her very first panel, in which she is depicted as a child, wearing a black veil. In the second caption, she depicts her classmates in a class photo; they, too, all wear veils. In Satrapi’s minimalist black and white style, their black hair, though uniquely styled, blends into their black veils. This is meant to initially indicate, perhaps, to a Western reader, that this veil has become a part of their body, a physical reminder of their culture. But this indication is meant to trick a Western reader, and the third and fourth panels on the first page give the first of many Iranian history lessons in the text, explaining that the veil had only become obligatory that year, following the 1979 revolution that would later be called ‘The Islamic Revolution.’ The final panel on the page completely throws off the assumption that these veils had become a normalized part of these girls’ lives, as they are comedically shown using their veils as jump-ropes, bridles for playing ‘horsey’, or simply refusing to wear them because “it’s too hot out!” (3). Though these girls are growing up in a newly Islamic country, they are still just that: girls. As Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley put it in their 2005 article, “[In the first panel] Marji is separate, marginalized, veiled, and radically other; at the same time, she is a universal cartoonish figure of a child to whom presumably everyone can relate. Thus,[…]the reader’s moments of identification are destabilized by disidentification” (230-231). In other words, while Marji’s clothes establish her ‘otherness’, Satrapi’s illustrated version of her younger self can be widely relatable, as she allows for the reader to see their childhood selves in Marji’s nonspecific ‘cartoonishness’. This shows Satrapi’s commitment to portraying the complexity of Iranian identity to Westerners.

Given the fact that the veil only became obligatory for Marji when she was ten, this also reflects the shifting gender norms that accompany a shifting society. By the third page, Satrapi tells the reader that “everywhere in the streets there were demonstrations for and against the veil” (5). The panel holding this caption depicts two groups of women: on the left, four women in full black veils chant, “The veil! The veil!” while on the right, four women in tight, white shirts chant, “Freedom! Freedom!” (5). The veiled women’s bodies blend together, again as a result of the black and white color scheme, indicating a group or cultural mentality, while the lines separating the unveiled women are clear and each one has a unique hairstyle, indicating their individuality. This again challenges the Western notion of Islamic women, who are often viewed, as Botshon and Plastas put it, “as silent victims, lacking agency and any discernible past[…]By presenting Iranian gender rules as complex, changeable, and located in time, [Satrapi] invites readers to loosen their attachment to the politicized narrative of Iranian female passivity and victimhood” (10). These women, even those that demonstrate for the veil, have total agency in this panel as they fight for what they believe to be right.

Although the veil becomes a requirement for Iranian women, their agency evolves throughout the book. By the end, when Marji is an adult, she learns that “wearing the veil was a real science,” and that one could make a “special fold” that allowed tufts of hair to be seen from the front, but not in profile. “Year by year,” she says, “women were winning an eighth of an inch of hair and losing an eighth of an inch of veil” (293). Far from being static, as a Western reader might assume, Satrapi reveals that Islamic culture, at least in Iran, can shift. In fact, the veil, a symbol viewed by the West as the epitome of Islamic womanhood, is the very vehicle by which those woman can assert their agency and effect change, albeit gradually. Satrapi writes, “Showing your hair or putting on makeup logically became acts of rebellion” (302). In his 2011 article, Typhaine Leservot explains this phenomenon through a discussion of the Iranian government’s form of occidentalism, or ‘othering’ the West, in the text. As the Islamic regime is strictly anti-Western, “any behavior that is deemed non-Islamic [is] therefore necessarily western,” meaning that “showing one’s wrist or ankle, laughing loudly, even wearing makeup,” while not intrinsically Western or political, become so. Even in the face of such a powerful regime, women still have agency, even if it isn’t the more overt form found in Western countries.

Many Westerners view the Middle East as being populated completely by impoverished people. But to challenge this assumption, Satrapi highlights Marji’s experience of economic privilege, as her family is fairly well-off. Her parents encourage her from a young age to educate herself, and so she is constantly reading. One important book in her development is a comic book on Marx and dialectical materialism. Part of her is aware of her privilege, and she feels ashamed sitting in her father’s Cadillac. “The reason for my shame and for the revolution is the same: the difference between social classes,” she says, proudly (33). However, these Marxist tenets clash with the strict society she lives in. In one vignette, she helps the family maid, Mehri, communicate with a neighborhood boy whom Mehri has a crush on. When Marji’s father finds out, he forbids Marji from continuing and tells her, “You must understand that their love was impossible[…]in this country you must stay within your own social class” (37). Young Marji cannot understand the intricacies of her economic reality, and so responds stubbornly, “Dad, are you for or against social classes?!” (37). On one level, Marji interacts regularly with her own financial privilege, a privilege that Western readers might assume a girl in Iran would not have.

But another part of her is unaware just how far that privilege goes. Marji learns that young boys from the poorer areas of Tehran are given keys at school and told that “if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, [those keys] would get them into heaven” (99). This knowledge is followed by one of the most iconic pages in Persepolis. The page has two panels, and the larger, upper one depicts shadowy, faceless figures with keys around their necks being exploded by mines, their bodies twisted in the air. Underneath this, a smaller panel depicts Marji and her friends dancing, with a caption stating, “Meanwhile, I got to go to my first party. Not only did my mom let me go, she also knitted me a sweater full of holes and made me a necklace with chains and nails. Punk rock was in” (102). The child soldiers’ contorted bodies mirror the raucous dancing of the party-goers, their key necklaces reflect Marji’s punk accessory, and their implied shrapnel wounds are reflections of her ‘sweater full of holes.’ As Naghibi and O’Malley write, “The effect of the comparison of scenes—necessitated by their arrangement on the page—is a profound indictment; far from being a political gesture, Marji and her friends’ consumption of punk subculture becomes a shallow indulgence of privilege” (240).

Leservot argues that this page is just one of many reminders in Persepolis of the “contrast between[…]two Irans, the westernized elite and middle-class, and the fundamentalist poor,” a contrast of which many Westerners are not even aware. His argument revolves around the idea that the Iranian upper- and middle-class construct a form of the West in their lives for different purposes at different parts of the text. Ironically, as above with the use of makeup as rebellion, the government’s strict ideologies inadvertently caused these constructions: “Just as the regime forced the Iranian poor into acting as Fundamentalists, promising them paradise for de-mining war fields, it also indirectly fostered a particular westernization of the elite and middle-class” (Leservot 123). At this stage, the West and its culture is a means of escape. “[Marji] has been seduced by a homogenous West, which she has carefully constructed so as to escape the realities of her own country.[…]she takes refuge in the superficial fun of western popular culture” (Leservot 123). It is poignant that this particular piece of Western pop culture is punk rock specifically, as Satrapi seems to mock the performative violence of punk culture by placing it next to actual, unconscionable violence.

Marji’s interest in Western culture, or the version of Western culture she constructs, continues as she gets older. In one particular vignette, her parents take a trip to Turkey and smuggle a denim jacket, a pin of Michael Jackson, a pair of Nikes, and two posters back for Marji. The posters are of Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde. A big fan of Wilde, Marji later goes out to buy one of her tapes on the black market, fully decked out in her new jacket, pin, and Nikes. On her way home, she is stopped by two members of the women’s branch of the Guardians of the Revolution, a group formed to put Iranian women “back on the straight and narrow by explaining the duties of Muslim women” (133). They threaten to take her to their headquarters, and Marji knows that if that happens she could be held indefinitely and even whipped. So, she lies. She tells them that the man on her button is Malcolm X and not Michael Jackson, and that she wears Nikes to play basketball on her school’s team. Finally, in desperation, she tells them that if she is late, her stepmother will burn her with an iron or even send her to an orphanage. They let her go, and Marji returns home, puts on her Kim Wilde tape, and starts singing along, “We’re the kids in America, whoao!” (134). A Western reading of this vignette might use Western codes of youth rebellion to understand it. She gets in trouble because she emulates Western fashion, but also her familiarity with Western figures gives her a way out when she claims that her pin depicts Malcolm X, “the leader of black Muslims in America,” even if this strategy doesn’t work. This reading suggests that the West always provides the way to freedom. As Naghibi and O’Malley write, “Ironically, Marji’s tame, by Western standards, teenage rebellion is transformed, for Western readers, into a profound statement of resistance and individualism in the menacing face of a totalitarian, fundamentalist Islamic theocracy” (238). Satrapi encourages the Western reader to identify with rebellion as a part of coming of age, but she also highlights the different ways power circulates depending on one’s location, class, religion, and gender. Marji’s rebellion, here and elsewhere in the text, is not simply the teenage rebellion of the United States, though it may appear that way to a Western reader. Botshon and Plastas speak to this when they write, “While American readers may appreciate Marji’s rebellion, they also must realize the great danger in which she places herself by wearing her jacket and Michael Jackson pin on the streets of Tehran” (7). To get the opportunity to experience just a small piece of Western culture, and rebel against the strict islamic government in the process, Marji willingly jeopardizes her own physical safety. This would rarely be an issue for rebellious Western teenagers, but it is Marji’s unavoidable reality. The song choice at the end of the chapter is a heavily ironic one, then, because what she has just experienced makes clear that she is definitely not a kid in America.

Earlier in this chapter, Satrapi uses visual elements to support, then subvert, the cross-cultural similarity implied by the shared consumption of American pop music, again challenging the reader to look beyond their own assumptions. The title of the chapter, “Kim Wilde,” is accompanied by the image of the light-colored eye, eyebrow, and hair of a woman we can only assume to be Wilde herself. This links the chapter back to the first chapter, “The Veil,” as this chapter’s heading image also depicts the eye and eyebrow of a woman from the same angle, although this woman wears a headscarf. While this image is black on white, as with most of the book, the image of Wilde’s eye is white on black, as it depicts her light-colored hair and probably blue eye. The two are visually similar, perhaps suggesting a commonality between a veiled Muslim woman and the secular rock star. But the colors are the exact opposite, highlighting their difference. Later, Marji stands in front of the Wilde poster she has just hung up and imitates the singer’s body position. This seeming similarity between the two is again also marked by difference, because Marji’s hair and top are dark while Wilde’s are light. Also, because Marji faces the poster, her stance and Wilde’s are mirror images of each other, a mirror image being the same but also the exact opposite. This chapter might lend itself to a reading of the text that foregrounds Western aesthetics and tastes as universal. However, the connection to Marji’s mirror stance and the image accompanying “The Veil,” subverts this reading by stressing difference and cultural specificity.

Satrapi’s choice of the graphic novel as a medium allows her to continue to challenge the reader to look past their assumptions about Iranian culture. As Naghibi and O’Malley put it, “The ‘cartooniness’ of her drawings encourages the reader to see herself in Marji, to see the self in the other, to erase all differences in a gesture of ‘cultural understanding’” (228-229). This provides a Western reader with a way into the story, even though its content is often alien both to Western culture and to Western constructions of Iranian culture. But erasing cultural differences is not her main aim in using a ‘cartoony’ style, and Naghibi and O’Malley go further to offer the claim that, “by adopting a naïve, childlike drawing style, [and] working in a medium associated primarily with either low-brow or juvenile readers and narratives, she effectively ‘camouflages’ the complex politics of identity and nation Marji’s story raises in the guise of simplicity and universal accessibility” (234). Furthermore, the minimalistic, black and white, drawn images allow for more freedom in terms of representing the regular violence of the text, such as the child soldiers being exploded by landmines. As Satrapi herself says, “I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it.[…]It would not be anything but cynical. That’s why I drew it. People are not ready to read a book about all the misery of the Third World, and I don’t blame them” (qtd. in Botshon and Plastas, 7). Satrapi’s artistic style gives readers the opportunity to investigate their own ideas and assumptions about Iranian culture without being too blatantly critical of them, and also presents a common elements of that culture, violence, in an accessible and safer manner.

When Marji is a teenager, her parents decide to send her to a French school in Austria, and it is in this section that Satrapi challenges Western constructions of Iran the most. Though most students at her Viennese school seem uninterested in becoming her friend, she eventually makes a friend named Julie who then introduces Marji to her own group of friends. When she meets one friend, Momo, Julie says, “This is Marjane. She’s Iranian. She’s known war,” to which Momo replies, “War?!” and “You’ve already seen lots of dead people?” Her new friends are very interested in philosophy, specifically philosophy about death, so her experiences excite them and she is quickly welcomed into the group. While Marji is excited to be accepted, the reader can see that their interest in her is not because of who she is, but rather because “she’s known war,” a phrase they often repeat (166). She is, to them, more of an exotic commodity than a friend. This, unfortunately, is one of the more positive experiences that Marji has in Austria. Many people she meets have assumptions about either her country of origin or her skin color. When she eats straight from the pan in the nun’s home she temporarily stays in, a nun tells her, “It’s true what they say about Iranians. They have no education” (177). When a man hits on her at a bar, she tells him that she is French, because, as she puts it, “At the time, Iran was the epitome of evil and to be Iranian was a heavy burden to bear. It was easier to lie than to assume that burden” (195). An old man on a bus calls her a “dirty foreigner” and tells her to “get out!” (220). And lastly, when she goes to the home of her boyfriend, his mother accuses her of “taking advantage of [her son] and his situation to obtain an Austrian passport,” accuses her of being a “witch,” and screams at her, like the man on the bus, to “get out!” (220). This instance is the most surprising to Marji, because although she had tried to write off what happened on the bus as “just the reaction of a nasty old man,” she is shocked that someone she actually knows would treat her this unkindly (220). In this section, Satrapi asks the Western reader to acknowledge this, then re-evaluate their own relationships with, and treatment of, people from other cultures. Later, back in Iran, Marji notes that “in the West you can collapse in the street and no one will give you a hand,” so, though a Western reader might assume that Western culture would be more ‘civilized’ than that of Iran, these episodes Marji experiences in Europe might indicate a more complex distinction.

For Leservot, Marji’s experience in Europe marks a turning point in his argument about Marji’s constructions of the West in the text. While Marji was previously shown to enjoy reading Western philosophy, such as Marx, and listening to Western music, such as Kim Wilde, Leservot argues that once in Europe, Marji realizes that the version of the West she has constructed for herself, a version unchallenged by reality, is in sharp contrast with her experiences in the actual West. Leservot zooms in on one particular moment, her first Austrian party. She is excited about the party until it comes, and in a full-page panel depicting the scene of the party, she sits alone, wide-eyed and obviously uncomfortable while others lie around smoking, laughing, and kissing. As Satrapi writes in the two captions surrounding the panel, “The party was not what I imagined. In Iran, at parties, everyone would dance and eat. In Vienna, people preferred to lie around and smoke. And then, I was turned off by all these public displays of affection. What do you expect, I came from a traditionalist country” (185). Leservot points out that, “When a regime forbids you from using any western product[…], transgressing these rules mean[s] acquiring western objects on the black market, further reducing western culture to clichéd products of consumption while preventing any real understanding of how people (not objects) interact in western culture” (125). Marji is puzzled by her new surroundings because the Iranian government has made it difficult for Iranians to interact with the West other than through objects. Satrapi encourages the Western reader to take advantage of the fact that they have no such limitations.

When Marji returns to Iran, she has a newfound sense of the West that she brings with her into her art. She wants to attend art school, but first she must pass the National Exam. In the drawing segment, she creates a reworking of Michelangelo’s “La Pietà” in which Mary is replaced by a grieving mother and Jesus is replaced by the body of an Iranian soldier, a ‘martyr.’ She adorns the top of the picture with images of tulips, which she explains in a footnote was because, “It’s said that red tulips grow from the blood of martyrs” (281). This is yet another example of how Satrapi challenges the Western reader. As Naghibi and O’Malley write, “This is a remarkable example of the shifting significations in Satrapi’s texts: the assumptions of recognition and familiarity experienced by a Western reader are constantly undermined by the interjection of culturally specific and unfamiliar references” (230). This drawing, along with the Iranian mythology-themed amusement park she designs later, is an example of how she feels changed by her experiences in the West. This change effects a depression, and she says, “My calamity could be summarized in one sentence: I was nothing. I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn’t even know anymore why I was living” (272). She feels like a mix of different cultures, and her art reflects that. Leservot even argues that she uses this slightly Western-inspired art “to survive mentally and socially in her country as well as to subvert governmental propaganda” (128). Marji’s art combines Western influences, such as Christ and gaudy amusement parks, and Iranian influences, such as tulips and Persian mythology, and so Satrapi challenges the Western view that the West and the East, as ‘othering’ decrees, are exact and complete opposites.

Education is a major and important aspect of Marji’s life in Persepolis, and Satrapi uses this to again challenge Western ideas of Middle Eastern womanhood, namely, that Middle Eastern women are always uneducated. This Western assumption is even directly reproduced in the text in the cruel words from the nun, discussed above, who states that Marji’s table manners have confirmed her assumption that Iranians “have no education” (177). However, in Marji’s life, this could not be further from the truth. As a result of her parents’ philosophical interests, Marji gets absorbed into the world of reading at an early age, as stated above, and this becomes a commonality between every stage of her life. When it is announced on TV that the Ministry of Education will be closing all schools and universities temporarily so that the “decadent” educational system and school texts can be “revised to ensure that our children are not led astray from the true path of Islam,” Marji’s mother erupts with a loud “Oh no!” (73). When her mother later finds out that Marji has skipped school to spend time with her friends, she exclaims, “Now is the time for learning. You have your whole life to have fun! What are you going to be when you grow up? In this country you have to know everything better than anyone else if you’re going to survive!!” (113). Her parents heavily foreground education, and this shapes Marji’s growth as she passes through the equivalent of elementary school in Iran, the equivalent of high school in Austria, and art school upon her return to her home country. The availability of schooling for Marji is, of course, aided by her family’s higher economic status, but this still challenges Western beliefs about women in Islamic countries.

The theme of education takes on a new dimension for the Western reader, in that Satrapi uses the text itself to educate those readers on the realities of Iranian life. When asked about her aims in writing Persepolis, Satrapi answered that “I wanted to put a few things straight.[…]When I arrived in France [her current country of residence], I met many people who expected me to speak Arabic. So many Europeans do not know that difference between Arabs and Iranians. They don’t know anything of our centuries-old culture” (qtd. in Botshon and Plastas, 3). She uses many different opportunities throughout the book to teach the reader about the complexity of that ‘centuries-old culture,’ explaining through the historical background-based introduction, various monologues, family stories, and illustrations that Western discussions of Iran that mostly connect her “old and great civilization” to “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terror,” are “far from the truth” (Introduction). Botshon and Plastas, in their Persepolis teaching notes, identify this aspect of the text as transversalism, a term conceived of by Italian feminists meaning, “the process by which people designated as enemies or others form new understandings of each other” (2). Persepolis allows the Western reader to go about that process and enables them, as one student of the two teachers puts it, “to re-think [their] ideas of people, particularly Iranians,” and to learn that “what we [see] in the media […isn’t] completely true” (Botshon and Plastas 7).

Because of this aspect, Persepolis practically begs to be taught in the modern classroom. Botshon and Plastas find that teaching the book “offers the potential to begin to disrupt U.S. audiences’ one-dimensional image of Iran and Iranian women[…]encourag[ing] students to skirt the wall of intolerance and participate in a more complex conversation about Iranian history, U.S. politics, and the gendered interstices of war” (12). This complexity is precisely what Satrapi is after, and Perin Gurel speaks to this point in her notes on teaching Islam and transnational feminism. Gurel argues that an educator teaching about those two items in tandem “should strive to do three things: historicize feminism, historicize Islam, and highlight the complexities of representation” (67). First, instead of only presenting the historical successes and positive sides of feminism, an educator should also present what the author calls “crises” of Western/white feminism, especially its insistence on the unifying aspect of gender alone, disregarding race and class. Marji learns about her class in regards to womanhood in the vignette about her family maid, which ends with the intriguing phrase, “We were not in the same social class but at least we were in the same bed” (37). This shows Marji dealing with the juxtaposition of her personal connection to, and cultural separation from, her close friend and maid. Secondly, instead of only presenting the negative aspects of being a woman in Islamic countries, an educator should investigate the role women play in contemporary Islamic movements. As discussed above, the way Satrapi presents this role involves much more agency than a Westerner might assume, and makes clear that Iranian women fight for what they believe in. Thirdly, the educator must present the “complexities of representation” of both Islam and feminism. In Satrapi’s text, no two Muslims are the same, no two Iranians are the same, no two Austrians are the same, no two men are the same, no two women are the same; they are all complex renderings of believable people, operating in and out of these greater schemas and still maintaining an individuality. With the help of Satrapi, the Western reader can take in the complicated existences of these well-realized characters, instead of planting them firmly in one religious, ethnic, gendered camp or the other. Gurel claims that “[…]Persepolis is a […] nuanced text that does not give Western colonialism a free pass, even though it powerfully narrates the tragic consequences of extremism in post-revolutionary Iran,” and it is in this liminal space between Western and Iranian views that Satrapi acts as an educator herself, helping Westerners take a look at their previously-held beliefs in a new light.

In a 2005 blog post on the New York Times website, Satrapi describes her first experience visiting the U.S. in 2003 to promote Persepolis. Lack of French support for the war on terror meant that France, Satrapi’s country of residence, “was an unofficial member of the axis of evil. At least that’s what I thought: day in and day out, French TV and newspapers were talking about Americans changing the name of ‘French fries’ to ‘freedom fries,’ about the boycott of French products and Americans emptying expensive bottles of French wine in the street” (Satrapi). As with Americans’ view of Iran, the French view of the U.S. was twisted by the media. And this worked both ways, as Satrapi describes an experience during her own book signing in New York at which a woman asked, “Can you explain to us why the French hate us so much?” (Satrapi). Oversimplified, ‘othering’ understandings of each other’s culture, driven by the media, led to fear and confusion on both sides. Experiencing both places, however, and interacting with the actual people, instead of a construction of them, allowed Satrapi a unique way into the situation, and she was able to see that both assumptions were simplistic. She tells the woman at her reading that it is Bush’s policies, not the American people themselves, that the French had an issue with, and at a New York restaurant she was surprised to see that with her steak she “was served these famous French fries and a glass of Bordeaux” (Satrapi). ‘Othering’ affects all cross-cultural relationships, and Satrapi seeks to combat this reality in Persepolis. She gives people unfamiliar with the realities of Iran, primarily Westerners, an opportunity to think transversally, challenge their cultural assumptions, and educate themselves on the shared humanity of people across the globe.

Annotated Bibliography

Botshon, Lisa, and Melinda Plastas. “Homeland In/Security: A Discussion and Workshop on Teaching Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Feminist Teacher, vol. 20, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–14. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/femteacher.20.1.0001.

While the teaching notes from Perin are centered around teaching transnational feminism and suggesting Persepolis as a possible resource, Botshon and Plastas’ piece is focused on teaching Persepolis itself, and the benefits seen in their classrooms resulting from such a choice. They teach the book for two reasons, the first being the fact that “it provides a creative venue for classroom discussions about nation, citizenship, gender, and war,” and the second being the fact that the book “offers a transversal space in which students can question Western notions about the Middle East” (2). Leading their students towards transversal thinking, in terms of gender and nationality, is their main focus throughout the essay. They first address teaching the book in a post-9/11 classroom and the benefits it holds for such a situation, then move on to discuss the ways in which the book allows their students to discuss the oft-ignored topic of the ways that war is gendered.

Their argument to teach Persepolis in the classroom is absolutely a sound one (though perhaps I could be biased on that front). By combining analysis of particular sections of the book and student responses to said sections, Botshon and Plastas weave an argument guided by ideas and evidence from the classroom. Though touching on some theory, especially when it comes to transverse thinking, the entire argument is grounded by quotes from actual students, making it a very effective argument indeed.

This piece is a great companion to Gurel’s piece on teaching transnational feminism, as it takes the ideas and brings them into the classroom itself. Its nitty-gritty student response details will bring the latter half of my argument, the part about the book’s solution to cultural close-mindedness being education, to life. The article will connect the more theoretical pieces to the very real classroom.

Ghadishah, Arash. “Questions for Marjane Satrapi.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 22 Feb. 2008, abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=4332648&page=1. Accessed 17 Jan. 2018.

In this interview given shortly before the 2008 Academy Awards, at which the film version of Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, Satrapi discusses her reasons for writing her book and her concerns regarding her newfound fame. She focuses on the concept of humanizing her people, and keeping the West from continuing to view Iranians as “abstract concepts,” rather than human beings.

Though it does not carry a single argument, the personal nature of interview allows Satrapi to communicate her point, that of humanizing Iranians, in way that humanizes her as both the little girl in her book and as the adult woman who now writes and directs movies. The explanation of Persepolis’ aim is very clear, and the allusion to Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” statement again places the interview, if indirectly, in the very real political landscape.

The interview, especially her stated aim of humanizing the Iranian people, fits right in with her earlier blog post and the teaching resources especially. It is rare, also, to get a real description of the aim of a written text from the author themselves, and so this interview provides a window into the mind of the artist, illuminating the text.

Gurel, Perin. “Transnational Feminism, Islam, and the Other Woman: How to Teach.” The Radical Teacher, University of Illinois Press, 1 Dec. 2009, www.jstor.org/stable/20710519.

Gurel’s article focuses on teaching transnational feminism in America, especially in regards to Islam. She describes the assumptions and simplistic claims about Islam from both the academic and personal sphere, identifying the fact that Westerners often view women in Islamic countries as powerless victims of their oppressive culture. In fact, Gurel argues, women in such situations who wish to become respected voices in the West must denounce their culture in that way as well. Essentially, Gurel champions transnational feminism and guides educators who wish to teach about women and Islam in a way that does not fall prey to such assumptions.

Gurel suggests that any such educator “should strive to do three things: historicize feminism, historicize Islam, and highlight the complexities of representation” (67). Instead of only presenting the historical successes and positive sides of feminism, an educator should also present what the author calls “crises” of Western/white feminism, both its insistence on the unifying aspect of gender alone, and its inherent connections to imperialism. Instead of only presenting the negative aspects of being a woman in Islamic countries, an educator should investigate the role women play in contemporary Islamic movements. And thirdly, an educator must present all of these differing versions and constantly highlight the complexities of representing Islamic culture in the West.

Gurel’s article is based on teaching, which will provide both good fodder for my unit plan but also provides a solid basis for my investigation into the educative aspects of Persepolis. Most importantly, however, Gurel’s article focuses on Western assumptions about the Muslim world, and, specifically, how to combat those assumptions through education.

Leservot, Typhaine. “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persépolis.’” French Forum, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–130. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41306680.

Leservot’s article begins as a response to Naghibi and O’Malley’s. While he states that their claim that Satrapi challenges the oppositional relationship between East and West is convincing, Leservot believes that they take “Satrapi’s images of the West at face value” (115). His focus is the way in which Persepolis portrays the West, and how those representations, or Iranian Occidentalisms, reflect the political realities of Persepolis’ timeframe in Iranian history. He first gives an overview of the concept of Occidentalism and its historical contexts, then moves to a focused analysis of Satrapi’s text, identifying the different representations of the West in each of the book’s four sections, and analyzing the meaning of each.

Leservot’s argument could not exist without the historical background of Occidentalism that he provides in the first body section. Identifying the sheer variety of definitions that have been applied to Occidentalism makes it clear that while Orientalism has been studied heavily as a result of the lasting, visible effects of colonialism, Occidentalism is much harder to track. It is important, however, that Leservot does not dwell on the theoretical for too long, and his analysis of Occidentalisms in Satrapi’s text is the heart of the argument. This results in an examination of the book as a reflection of its history, rather that a theoretical argument on the exact definition of the term. I believe this choice was the right one, as it is much more manageable and convincing this way.

Leservot’s article saliently provides both a counterpoint to and an extension of Naghibi and O’Malley’s, confirming their hypothesis that Persepolis challenges Western notions of the East (Orientalisms) while also suggesting that the characters in the text, including Marjane, construct similarly incorrect notions of the West. He goes even further, and describes the ‘why’ of each such construction, showing the relationship between Occidentalisms and the oppressively anti-Western regime of post-revolutionary Iran. This interaction between sources would provide a richer understanding of this aspect of the text.

Naghibi, N. & O’Malley, A. “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 1 no. 2, 2005, pp. 223-247. MLA International Bibliography, doi:10.1353/esc.2007.0026. Accessed 4 December 2017.

In their article, “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley focus on the ways in which Persepolis presents both the West and the East, especially in regard to that presentation in the West. The authors list similar works being produced in Iran and by Iranian women, yet state that only two, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Satrapi’s Persepolis, have enjoyed renown. Persepolis’, the authors argue, comes from its constant challenging of Western views of the East, of childhood experience, and of the assumed universality of that experience, thereby ‘Estranging the Familiar’.

Naghibi and O’Malley approach their argument by first addressing the other similar text of renown, Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. The authors state that this text’s renown comes from the way it fits into Western assumptions of Iran. As they put it, “While Persepolis forces the Western reader to work hard to understand the complexities of contemporary Iranian political and social dynamics, Lolita serves up the usual fare of the oppression of Iranian women under a fundamentalist state for the uncritical consumption of Western readers” (224). The authors then move to the ways in which Satrapi challenges the Western reader through her text’s resistance to fit within any single genre, her use of both cartoonish illustration and the graphic novel format, her simple language and color palette, and the content of the text itself. Naghibi and O’Malley effectively argue that Persepolis constantly resists easy consumption by Western readers.

The article’s rich engagement with the East/West divide makes it prime material for both analysis and teaching of Persepolis. Because the authors engage with both form and content in so many different ways, they provide a solid basis for further investigation into most, if not all, aspects of the text, including the memoir form, the history and culture of Iran, the influence of both the form and history of comics on the text, and the experience of childhood. They also center much of what they argue on a concept from Gayatri Spivak that Naghibi and O’Malley paraphrase: “the radical difference of the other is defused by its absorption into the normative center, the West” (226). This idea is a rich way to get students thinking more deeply about the consumption of Eastern media from the position of Western readers.

Satrapi, Marjane. “Defending My Country.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Nov. 2005, satrapi.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/defending-my-country/.

In this short blog entry from 2005, Satrapi describes her first trip to the U.S. in 2003, a portion of her tour promoting Persepolis. She outlines her initial nervousness and assumptions about what she would see, a few specific interactions while on her trip, and a related experience upon her return to France. The blog entry is also illustrated, and Satrapi uses her characteristic artistic style to illustrate her experiences in some places, and to give life to her fears in others.

Satrapi’s main focus is her own experience of assumptions held by members of one culture about another culture. She feels the she must defend Iranian and French culture to Americans, and the variety of American viewpoints to her French colleagues. Much of what she writes about here is framed by the anti-Iran and anti-France foreign policy of George W. Bush, as he had been freshly re-elected the year before the post was published. The post is not a critical one, and makes no specific argument, which makes its argument hard to assess. However, the personal nature of the piece gives us insight into the experience of Satrapi’s multicultural existence into adulthood.

Though not a critical source, Satrapi’s post gives insight into the idea of one culture’s assumptions about another’s, and how those can be combated, or, at least, questioned. Persepolis itself touches on these ideas, but bringing in a later perspective from the author herself would provide a broader investigation of these ideas, both in the world of Persepolis and in the real world. Also, the illustrations, while clearly similar to those in her book, still hold some slight variations that might be useful to analyze.

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