Hello again ASTU!

We have almost wrapped up our first year at UBC and this will be the last blog post of this year!

As part of the last readings we are doing for this semester in ASTU, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee was a very different and difficult to digest piece of reading, and there were many layers and themes to unpack. As readers, mature topics and disturbing content are a commonality in literature. Earlier in the semester, we dove into Maus, which its plotline surrounded the events of the Holocaust, and Mrs. Dalloway, that handled sensitive issues such as PTSD and suicide. However, the air of taboo surrounding sex is still prevalent in common discussion and often seen as an inappropriate subject to approach. Although there were sexual elements and themes in previous literature we have examined, none had been as explicit, as the themes in Disgrace can be seen as directly unsettling to many people, even though as readers, we have almost become desensitized to these topics in literature.

We are introduced to the main character, David Lurie, a professor at Cape Technical University. A picture is painted for Lurie as an older man, Coetzee gives an almost unprompted introduction to Lurie, as the topic of sex is put on the forefront of the main character. Into the first page, Lurie’s character is established well enough to understand his relationship towards sex, and by extent, towards women. He has “solved the problem of sex rather well”, by purchasing from a sex worker named Soraya (Coetzee 1). That in itself can be seen as ‘disgraceful’ and a taboo thing to do, although it may seem like a common ordeal. Men like Lurie are often seen as characters that are naturally dominant and traditionally natural for a woman to give way to his needs.

Almost each seemingly questionable act that Lurie commits himself to do, he allows himself to find excuses or justifications for them, even if it seems that he casts doubts. This can be first seen as Lurie was reflecting on his relationship with Soraya, and “Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve.” (2) He then decides to court another woman, a secretary in his work field. He found her distasteful afterwards and promptly cuts off contact. To further this stream of problematic acts, Lurie initiates an affair with one of his own students named Melanie. He rationalizes and normalizes his behaviour as he courts numerous of women, ultimately finding sex the object of his admiration or interest.

To point out the obvious, it is commonly seen as inappropriate to instigate intimate relationships between someone in a position of power and an individual under their tutelage or otherwise working relationship, as it can be a lead to abuse of power and that society has largely deemed it immoral and inappropriate. In other words, also taboo and in some cases against the law and this applies to everyone, regardless of gender. In Lurie’s scenario, it can be interpreted that this affair was a coerced and almost forced relationship, as Melanie is often finding ways to avoid prolonged interactions. She actively tries to find escape routes, such as a flatmate in the house or busy for rehearsals. Despite this, Lurie had forcibly made his way into her life, going as far as recording her personal information through her student records, not unlike how he took Soraya’s information without consent. He continues to push those boundaries by taking sex from Melanie, never truly forcing, but never welcomed either, and consent is dubious.

There is also a recurring theme of double standards in terms of gender expectations, especially in Lurie’s perspective. This is obviously seen in his conversations and musings with the women he interacts with; Melanie when he insists that a woman’s beauty needs to be shared and with his daughter Lucy, when he finds her an undesirable character because she refuses men and does not meet his standards on beauty.

David Lurie had been immediately understood to be an ‘unlikeable’ character. Readers are often able to understand that his behaviour is generally unacceptable in our society and should be condemned. Although the university publicly shamed his actions and set disciplinary actions, Lurie was removed from his position of teaching and sent out, he was not pressed with charges or subject to definite punishments. He does not take fault in his actions and believes that there is nothing wrong with his character in regards to the scandal, besides that it is society’s judgment that condemned him. However, Coetzee did not feed this idea directly through the text, and we are left to infer and create this opinion.

By depicting David Laurie as a ‘disgraced’ Coetzee is able to describe the unfathomable situation that women are often subjected to. Readers are able to look at what occurs on a daily basis, not only in South Africa but everywhere in the world. New studies and surveys have found that approximately 80% of women have been victims of sexual assault or harassment, or assault in their lifetime. While statistics and sheer facts may be unable to bring to light these issues to desensitized individuals, Coetzee’s Disgrace can be seen as a method to sensitize the double standard and issues to sex and manipulation of women. It is in fact still a disturbing topic that should be scrutinized and criticized.

Thank you for reading!

Hello again ASTU!

I hope everyone had a good and productive reading break!

As a class, we dedicated a lot of time on the concept of comic books as a platform for increasingly more serious and somber themes and stories. In a previous blog post I wrote in the first term, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi was a graphic novel that centered around contemporary social issues, most significantly about the Iranian Revolution. This story featured a unique perspective of a young girl and it utilized symbols to represent larger themes such as religion and childlike innocence in a time of violence. In the second semester, we explored another graphic novel Maus authored by Art Spiegelman. The storyline focused in on the author himself interviewing his father to understand and surface his memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Graphic novels and comics have not always been a mainstream way of recording and telling of somber events, but it has made its way in doing so by unique artistic styles and even as a way to present a personal story.

From my own experience with reading comics when I was in high school, they were mostly for light reading and to enjoy an adventurous story. A particular series that I fondly remember was called Amulet, a story with magic and fantasy action, pictures fully coloured in and a straightforward plotline. Traditionally, comic books are thought to be meant for fun stories and for a young audience. Maus was notably one of the first works that changed the notions of graphic novels and comics as a form of media.

There are many dramatic contrasts in the art style that Spiegelman depicts and the style that Satrapi uses in her own story. In Persepolis, the storyline correlates almost directly to the cartoon-like style, as a childlike perspective may relate to more cartoon and simple drawings. On the other hand, Spiegelman illustrates detailed drawings but also uses a minimalist, iconic style like simple beads for eyes and nose. There is also a high contrast between the black and white, with shading that adds the detailed depth to the panels, almost a lifelike appearance compared to a 2-D image.

However, in their similarities, both authors depict themselves in their graphic novels with their own story and personal experiences. Satrapi projects herself into a child version of herself experiencing the Iranian revolution, while Spiegelman also puts himself in the story, although he is not the center of the main plotline. The comic platform allows for the use of images to show expressions of the characters, it often allows the audience to feel more intimate with the story. The freedom to create images is also a platform for symbols. This is most obvious with Spiegelman’s depiction of the Germans as cats, and the Jewish characters as mice in the story, playing on the cat and mice animal relationship of predator and prey.

Both Spiegelman and Satrapi authored graphic novels that present dramatically different stories of traumas caused by historic social issues. With the usage of images in a graphic novel style, it requires deeper analysis of icons and symbols are drawn that represent a deeper layer of understanding. Personally, I enjoyed learning the historical context in the story, but the direction that Spiegelman took to presenting it made me as a reader think about why the Jewish were drawn as mice, and the Polish as pigs, and this was only possible through the use of the graphic novel as the platform of choice.

Thank you for reading!

Hello again ASTU!

I hope everyone has had a great start to the new year and ready to face the second semester. There have been a few changes to our ASTU classroom that have been quite a contrast to the previous semester, especially in terms of how we explore literature. In class over the course of the first week of the semester, we discussed different works authored by famous American psychologists, Sigmund Freud, William James, and Silvan Tomkins. After exploring and delving into their research together, we applied their theories onto fiction works, including a short story in Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, and most recently, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

I particularly found Mrs. Dalloway a difficult novel to delve into, until about 50 pages into the book that the characters started to stick to me as a reader, and I begin to be able to follow the different characters’ voices that mingle closely to each other. This novel follows a woman, Clarissa Dalloway, and her thoughts while she is planning for a party at the same time, many different characters who are acquaintances or friends of Mrs. Dalloway are also introduced, but in a peculiar fashion, mainly in the literary device and style that Woolf employs.

As we analyzed the text within Woolf’s work in the following classes, many factors contributed to the level of difficulty of it, but most remarkable is her usage of the free indirect speech style. Until learning of free indirect speech that Woolf used in her work, the typical novel that I experienced was a third person, omniscient narrative. Free indirect speech is also a style of third person narrative, but it also continuously weaves in and out of the character’s consciousness. There is an absence of reporting words and phrases such as “He says that he was in love,” or “she said it was true”. Instead, free indirect speech may follow the lines of “He thought about it for a moment. Was it really love?” Although this may be a simple example of this, Woolf utilized this style in a fluid, although complex way to project the characters to the reader in a more personal way. “But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there – the Queen going shopping?” (12). In the second sentence, as a reader, I was given the sense that I am asking this question, although Lucrezia is asking this question to herself in her own mind.

Virginia Woolf is often described as an influential modernist writer, with her work trended the use of ‘stream of consciousness’ in literature. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, this narrative device works together with the free indirect speech by writing the character’s thoughts This concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’ is directly correlated with psychologist William James who discussed it in depth.  Interestingly, this theory could be related to Woolf’s usage of punctuation throughout her text. It was initially a confusing feature for myself as a reader, such as dashes, semi-colons, and parentheses across the text, and paired with sometimes paragraph-length sentences. An example of this can be seen when Woolf narrates Clarissa Dalloway’s inner monologue about her friend and past romantic interest, Peter, “And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with…” Clarissa reminiscences on this scene like a ‘flowing river’ as her thoughts come one after the other.

There is also a lack of clear separations between character perspectives, or even chapters, which can imply the state of the ‘stream of consciousness’ that Woolf integrates into her work. The thoughts and emotions that each character experiences are a constant stream that does not follow the typical sentence structure of one complete thought, rather, a series of ideas and emotions.

Mrs. Dalloway is a very unique novel, in particular to its style of free indirect speech and punctuation usages. As we discussed in our ASTU class, Virginia Woolf was thought to be the pioneer for this type of modernist literature that has arguably inspired it to become mainstream. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the unique perspectives and interconnectedness of the characters in an otherwise seemingly ordinary scenario of a middle-class woman throwing a party. I look forward to exploring more of Virginia Woolf!

Thank you for reading!

Hello again ASTU!

When discussing the topic of 9/11, I hesitate to speak too deeply into my own understanding of its consequences because of the long-term and biased exposure of its subsequent memorials and the like I have had. In the pieces of literature that we have explored and discussed as a class, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid was the first novel that we looked at as a class. In this story, Changez recounts his romanticized relationship with the United States during the era before and after the attacks of 9/11 but doing so in a seemingly casual way with a complete stranger. Through this book, I was exposed to the ‘counter-narrative’ that Hamid offers in his unique novel.

I was born too young to comprehend the culture of fear that first arose since that particular event of terror, what I can understand is only a version of the story, told through the news or through the teachings in school. The strongest moments that I remember it being conveyed as a tragedy to me were particularly only during the anniversaries of 9/11 that were all subsequently used to memorialize the attack. Around this time, students everywhere in North America would spend their class time watching a documentary or video that played clips of the planes and explosions, and interviews of the victims’ families. In these retellings, it was repetitively in the same ‘master narrative’ that we commonly see it as; a terror attack on the civilized Western world and the hub of New York City from Islam extremists.

This novel, or novella, can be described as a dramatic monologue where the protagonist, Changez is the only character that the author has scripted to speak in the book. Changez speaks to himself, like a monologue, but the reader is also a character who acts as the listener for Changez’ ‘self’ conversation. From this particular style, I was briefly reminded to the likeness of a theatre play or drama that features many dramatic monologues, like Shakespearean plays. The protagonist would speak to themselves, conveying the story to the reader, who is synonymous to the American character in this story. “I observe, sir, that there continues to be something about our waiter that puts you ill at ease.” (108)
In this writing style, the story was not only conveyed to me that encourages sympathy for Changez and his experience, but it forces the reader to take on the perspective of the American character who undoubtedly has suspicions against Changez and the environment that they are in. To further discontentment, Changez tells of his true emotions during the aftermath of the 9/11, as his “[…]initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.” (72) As the reader, I felt conflicted myself, just as Changez felt conflicted about his identity and belonging in America. Was Changez simply a young man who felt betrayed by the country he loved or was he an evil man to be now seen as an enemy?

There are symbolic names that are very significant in Changez’ life, specifically in the names of his lover and the company that he was employed with. Why did the author choose the name Erica, that had such a spelling resemblance to America, and Underwood Samson that held the initials identical to the United States? I noticed the resemblance between the names and the America/United States near the end of the novel as Changez made a final decision to return home to Pakistan. Both the woman he was in love with and the company represented the bittersweet relationship with himself and the country he had shaped his young adult life in. During his time with Erica, it started out as the perfect romantic scenario, before it surely devolves into something that no longer desires for the ‘immigrant dream’ that Changez embodied. This was similar to his relationship with the company that he established himself with before the shifting attitudes as a result of 9/11 ultimately factored to his undesirable status in America.

This novel speaks to the normally underlying tones of the ‘culture of fear’ that surrounds modern, post 9/11 America, and does so from the counter-narrative of the story as one the Western society does not hear. From my own experience with the near religious dedication to memorials and remembrance to ‘fight the enemy’ in the wake of 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist provided an alternate perspective for me that proves that in the understanding of both master and counter-narratives, the line between good and evil is still indefinitely blurred.

Thank you for reading, until next time.

Hello again, ASTU 100!

Coming into UBC as a first-year student, my expectations for an English class definitely changed from the perspective of a high school student. The typical expectations were summed up with novels, critical analyses, and common themes with English literature, such as identity or global citizenship, so I was surprised that Dr. Luger assigned the ASTU class with Persepolis. Persepolis, a “graphic memoir” created by Marjane Satrapi, is a telling of her own childhood through the lens of Marji, a young girl who grew up in Iran during a time of incredible political unrest.

I grew up with reading comic books, mostly from my childhood libraries, ranging from adventure stories with themes of friendship to popular Japanese action mangas. I was not aware that graphic books were published with the intention of campaigning for strong political messages. However, Persepolis surrounds many political and social justice themes, such as the oppression of women through the mandatory dress standards and the inhumane torture during a revolution and the human cost of war and revolution. Despite these mature themes, Satrapi is able to communicate these controversial subjects through a child’s understanding and interpretation of her memory and she was able to do this through the format of the “graphic memoir”.
As I was reading Persepolis, I initially thought that it may have been easier to complete than a standard book or article, but I realized that it required a deeper analysis because of many symbolic meanings in its context such as the colour scheme, the artistic style, or how Satrapi chose to draw a particular panel. This raises a question for me to ponder: What differences does it make in creating a graphic book, compared to writing a standard book?

In the form of a graphic book, Satrapi constructs and emphasizes her storytelling with the focus of “The Story of a Childhood”. From the beginning of the book, Marji introduces herself and the background of her story, the Islamic Revolution. From there, the sequences of events are always shown through her own interpretation and memories of when she was a child living with the influence of her parents who were political activists. The childhood as a perspective becomes the focus of how the graphics are structured and drawn, most evidently seen within Satrapi’s choice of art style itself, showing simplistic and cartoonish characters, and how certain events are underlyingly censored.

Violent scenes that were represented from Marji’s perspective of inhumane treatment from the religious Fundamentalists towards rebels and dissenters were toned down to fit with a child’s perspective. Any panel that was meant to depict violence was censored, reasoning that a young girl simply could not comprehend the graphic violence within the limits of a childish imagination. This was obviously shown when Marji and her parents were visited by two old friends, who were political prisoners because of their revolutionary ideals. They recounted their story of the torturing they and their colleagues suffered, in which Satrapi drew said scenes, cartoon figures with whip marks and cut up corpses, proving to be very graphic if the art style was any more realistic.

Many popular comic books are often drawn with a sense of realism attached to the characters and art style, especially within superhero comics, perhaps appealing to a more mature audience. However, the modern superhero and adventure comics are often drawn with colours, adding to the appeal of attractive artwork. The lack of distracting, but fun colours in Persepolis is a contrast to its cartoonish art style, and it highlights the actual depth of the political meaning with the plain black and white text and images.

Images (or the lack of images) can often convey emotions that simply cannot be represented with words, no matter how articulate the description may be. The intensity of traumatic experiences and emotions are difficult to convey to its true complexity, and as images are more simplistic, the more difficult it is seen in trying to recall the authenticity of the moment. In a powerful scene, Satrapi recalls when bombs had been dropped in Marji’s home neighbourhood, witnessing the aftermath with the death of her friend. Satrapi chooses to leave a panel pitch black, in response to the lack of words or images that can truly describe what Marji and the author both feel in the context of that moment.

 

The movie Persepolis that was adapted from the book was made in 2007, which followed very closely to the Satrapi’s art style and sequence of events. In the animation, it was originally voiced in French and subtitled and dubbed in English, just as the graphic book version has been translated into many other languages as well. What made Satrapi (who also directed the film) choose to play the film in the same style as her book, rather than using real actors?

To keep the authenticity of the original recollections Satrapi explored with her childhood, she used a number of techniques to emphasize the perspective she had and the intensity of emotions in her story such as a childlike art style, and the use of censorship. I believe that in using the “graphic memoir” as a way to script an autobiography, it retains the sense of originality that holds true to the genre of autobiographies and memoirs.

Thank you for reading! Until next time!

 

-Jessie Y.

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