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!