Material Realities in the Basic Writing Classroom: Intersections of Discovery for Young Women Reading Persepolis

Abstract

This essay focuses on how young women students in a first-year, first- quarter basic reading and writing course wrote about their connections to the process of identity development as portrayed in the graphic novel Persepolis 2: The Story of a Re- turn by Marjane Satrapi. While the circumstances of becoming a student in a required university-sanctioned remedial course in an urban Midwestern university differed greatly from Marjane's privileged education at a French lycee in Vienna, these women, not un- like Marjane, dealt with struggles against marginality and invisibility in a bureaucratic and unfamiliar environment. Exploring the correspondences of coming-of-age for both my students and the novel's main character, Marjane, I demonstrate the use of the graphic novel as a means for renegotiating students' agency and identity beyond fixed categories of gender, race, and class, as well as institutional definitions of the basic writer.