ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading of Persepolis with the intention of demonstrating how teachers and students can attend to the presence of cultural models in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel as they are expressed through its multimodal design. It argues that when teachers position students to attend closely to the presence of cultural models. Satrapi published Persepolis 1 approximately a decade after Maus, Art Spiegelman’s moving account of his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors, won a Pulitzer Prize, making it the first graphic novel to receive this prestigious award. At a time when graphic novels were only just beginning to receive attention from cultural critics, Persepolis 1 was an indirect beneficiary of Maus’s critical success. Cultural models have the potential to produce tensions and misunderstandings. If Persepolis 1 positions Western readers to identify ideologically with the text’s progressive characters, the collection as a whole manages to resist a humanist interpretation that emphasizes essential sameness.
