If you have questions or suggestions for this guide, please contact
Sue Erickson, Library Director, x3220, serickson@vwu.edu
For scholarly information on Iran, Hofheimer Library has many databases housed on our Research Guides page.
There you can perform a general or subject specific search. You may want to look into the History databases, International Studies resources, Political Science databases, and Religious Studies databases for supportive information on your topic.
The object of this site is to provide a brief and accurate portrayal of Iranian culture.
Iran Chamber Society endeavors to create a global awareness about Iranian society.
"Graphic novel is a term used to describe a long comic in book form containing a fictional or non-fictional narrative with a thematic unity. Since 1986 graphic novels have become increasingly popular. They are mainly about 50 pages in length, in full colour, and with card covers. Technically, for story-telling purposes, graphic novels depend on the characteristics of a traditional comic: they utilize a weave of text and image rather than a process of simply illustrating the text. However, the relationship of the graphic novel to the comic is that of the prose novel to the short story....Pioneering graphic novelists in this period included American Will Eisner, best known for his A Contract With God (1978), a series of semi-autobiographical vignettes about life in 1930s New York (the first book to be marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, thus establishing the term); Canadian Dave Sim, whose Cerebus the Aardvark, collected into albums from 1985, was both a parody of Conan the Barbarian and a complex satire; and British Bryan Talbot, whose The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, collected between 1982 and 1988, was a sophisticated science fiction odyssey... In 1986–7, three outstanding titles were responsible for introducing the concept of the graphic novel to a much wider audience: Maus (1986), by Art Spiegelman, about the Nazi Holocaust, told in anthropomorphic terms—with Jews as mice, and Nazis as cats; The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller, a radical reworking of Batman mythology; and Watchmen (1987), by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, another adult revisionist superhero story." ("Graphic novel" The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English. Jenny Stringer. Oxford University Press 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.)
Teaching the Graphic Novel by 
This Book Contains Graphic Language by 1) Does the visual aspect of the graphic novel add to the story? If so, how? Why do you think the author chose to write a memoir in the form of a graphic novel? Would a traditional memoir tell the story just as well, or better?
2) The author, Marjane Satrapi, has said her goal in writing the book was to make average Iranians seem more human for the rest of the world, rather than be seen as “the axis of evil.” Has your reading of Persepolis influenced or changed your perception or views of Iran?
3) How would you describe Satrapi? In what ways, as both a child and a teenager, is she the same as children and teenagers everywhere? In what ways is she different? How does her family influence her and her realtionship with the changing Iranian society?
4) Persepolis focuses, in part, on a dictatorial regime that harshly censored and suppressed it citizens. Ironically, the book was recently banned from Chicago Public Schools. What do you think about this?
