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Maus vs. Persepolis Persuasive Essay - Coggle Diagram
Maus vs. Persepolis Persuasive Essay
Universality: Is this book appropriate for all audiences? What audiences is it not appropriate for?
MAUS
Inappropriate for some Jewish, Polish audiences
Jewish people are depicted as mice, and Polish people as pigs. This conforms to how the Nazi's used to refer to them, and could be seen as the book supporting Nazi actions
Inappropriate for younger kids
curse words
profanities: god damn, hell, god, christ
page 159: Vladek tells Artie that he burned Anja's diary and Artie responds, "God damn you! You–you murderer! How the hell could you do such a thing?"
gore and abjection (macabre)
page 83: the hung Jews
page 108: the kids who misbehaved were bashed against walls until they stopped crying
dark topics
nudity
page 100: Artie's mother is found dead in the bathtub. This is an example of macabre, dark topics, and nudity. This adds to the weight of the story but also takes away from the universality, and lessens the range of audiences this book is appropriate for.
page 100: Spiegleman describes the situation quite graphically, despite the already dark visuals. He says that his father "found her in the bathtub when he got home from work... her wrists slashed and an empty bottle of pills near-bye..."
ellipses
show not tell
implies that she overdosed
PERSEPOLIS
torture
page 51: siamak and mohsen were tortured in prison. mohsen said "They whipped me with thick electric cables so much that this looks anything but a foot," And then described his friend Ahmadi's torture, saying that "he suffereed the worst torture", and "they burned him with an iron"
profanities: f-word, shit, whore
page 93: Marji is in the market with Mali and her kids, they overhear two women talking about how the refugee "women are prostituting themselves", and they referred to them as "sluts" and said "southern women are all whores".
inappropriate for younger audiences who require more censored language and visuals
sexual assault and rape
145: "you know that it's against the law to kill a virgin... so a guardian of the revolution marries her... and takes her virginity before executing her. Do you understand what that means?"
Purpose: Which book has a more unique purpose? Which one serves the purpose of teaching students about graphic techniques in comics better?
MAUS
portrays specific point of view of holocaust: the persepctive of a polish jewish family
shows complexities of trauma
shows effects of holocaust on first generation survivors as well as generational trauma on following generations
Does not use as many graphic techniques as Persepolis
graphic techniques
provides audience with unique view of the issue through the use of anthropomorphism
CON: this dehumanizes the jewish, polish and nazis who were portrayed as animals
PRO: this distances humans from the issue and forces them to look at the issue from an objective perspective
effect on the audience
PERSEPOLIS
portrays impact on a child during Iranian Revolution
doesn't show the after effects of the Iranian Revolution (the story is told in a stream of conciousness style, so Satrapi only writes what's occurring in the moment and doesn't foreshadow any future occurrences)
provides audience with knowledge about a lesser known issue
more unique than Maus because there are many books on the holocaust, but very few on the Iranian Revolution
graphic techniques
uses lots of graphic techniques (will be more beneficial for meadowridge students to learn graphic techniques from this)
effect on the audience
Historical Value: How does the different storytelling styles in the two books contribute to their historical value?
MAUS
storytelling style:
conversational
told from memory
Maus is not solely written from Vladek's own experiences. He also draws on new information he's learned about the war after it passed. This is beneficial because it provides a greater view of the issue as a whole and not just the snapshot that Vladek's point of view was showing.
An issue with Spiegleman writing from his father's memory is the reliability of memory. Memory can tarnish with age and with PTSD, so how accurate is Vladek's story?
The historical value of Maus is hindered by the question of reliability of memory as memory is the basis for the entire story.
The narration of Maus is more unreliable than Persepolis because in Maus there are two points of error–Spiegleman and his father–whereas in Persepolis there is only one point of error–Satrapi.
PERSEPOLIS
storytelling style:
colloquial
stream of conciousness
Persepolis is written as Satrapi experiences, it is not written from memory. This means that all the information the audience recieves is through Satrapi's eyes as a child, which means the audience may not be getting the full picture.
Again, there is the possibility that the story-telling style hinders the accuracy of the story. As the story is told through the eyes of a child, there is the risk of tunnel vision and the risk that the naive lens Satrapi portrays the story through will not fully transfer the horrors of war to the reader.
Because of the naive narration, the revolution could have been made more trivial than it was.
key terms
Representation
Timelessness
Impact
Exam prep
‘richness’
Literary merit
Artistic merit