Published Paper Details:

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, examining how both graphic narratives employ the conventions of the medium to document personal and familial histories situated within major twentieth-century upheavals, the Holocaust and the Iranian Revolution respectively. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory and Viktor Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarisation, the paper argues that both authors deploy the graphic novel not as a merely unconventional choice of form, but as a deliberate aesthetic and epistemological strategy. The visual grammar of the medium, anthropomorphic characterisation, minimalist line work, symbolic visual motifs, and the relationship between panel, gutter, and caption enables Spiegelman and Satrapi to negotiate the gap between lived experience and inherited trauma, and to establish forms of testimony and self-authorisation unavailable through conventional prose. The paper further explores how each author constructs a narrative avatar through non-photorealistic self-representation, at once personalising and universalising their accounts of oppression and loss. Dominant visual symbols such as the mouse in Maus and the veil in Persepolis are read as sustained reminders of the regimes against which both narratives bear witness. The paper concludes that the graphic novel form uniquely facilitates the recovery of suppressed or destroyed memory, and that both texts function simultaneously as acts of mourning, political resistance, and archival reconstruction.