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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Retracing Traumatic Experience In Marjane Satrapi’S Persepolis – The Entanglements Of Collective History And Personal Memory, Sarah R. Menzies
Retracing Traumatic Experience In Marjane Satrapi’S Persepolis – The Entanglements Of Collective History And Personal Memory, Sarah R. Menzies
2019 Undergraduate Awards
The comics medium has frequently been used to articulate the otherwise unspeakable nature of traumatic experience. In works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, we see that the combination of visual and verbal modes of representation can materialize trauma in a way that transcends a solely textual form. In her Persepolis series, Marjane Satrapi details her experience of historical trauma from the perspective of her childhood self. Her simplistic, minimalist drawing style, resembling that of a child, makes visible the atrocities of war in an unrealistic but easily digestible format. Satrapi disrupts master-narratives of Iranian history …
Speaking Through Silence: Communicating Trauma Through Metaphorical Imagery In Una's "Becoming Unbecoming", Nicole Szklarczyk
Speaking Through Silence: Communicating Trauma Through Metaphorical Imagery In Una's "Becoming Unbecoming", Nicole Szklarczyk
2019 Undergraduate Awards
Narratives of trauma have become a leading topic in graphic novels because of the power that graphic narratives have to transcend “dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize trauma theory” (Hillary Chute Graphic Women 3). Through the medium’s combination of verbal and visual components, cartoonists have the opportunity to more clearly represent inexpressible trauma on the page. Una’s graphic memoir Becoming Unbecoming does just this: uses visual structures to communicate ineffable trauma. Una’s accounts of sexual trauma often remain elusive, largely due to the silence attributed to her intra-diegetic narrator. As a result, the silence …