Session IV: Transgressions and Globality in Film and Graphic Literature

Anthony Adah (Minnesota State University, Moorhead MN): "Trembling Under the Veil: Narrating the Subversive Body in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis."

To a large extent, Marjane Satrapi graphic novel, Persepolis, succeeds because of the creative visual orchestration of the body. Reduced to a shapeless mass, configured in expressionistic distorted forms, lacerated and tattooed with whips of torturers, broken, or funky-fied to capture an innocent but naïve presumption of American “free” society, the body, in the graphic novel, is the site of both subjection and resistance. While a corporeal aesthetics provides a rich analytical framework for analyzing the graphic novel, this paper examines its translation to screen through a close analysis of the mise-en-scène properties in Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007).

Erica Steakley (The Catholic University of America, Sherman Oaks CA): "Psychic Violence and Textual Violation in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men"

One of the things Cormac McCarthy does best is find ways to compel and repel readers simultaneously. He presents us with intractable, inaccessible villains and condemns us to watch helplessly as these characters play out their ordained roles with such single-minded force that we cannot look away. One such villain is Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, and this paper focuses on a single scene of the novel, examining how Chigurh is able to terrorize and violate his victims without laying a single finger on them, should he so choose.

The passage under consideration, a long section from Chapter II, is our first extended look at Chigurh, whose entrance into the novel takes place over three pages of Chapter I, in which he chokes a sheriff’s deputy to death with the chain of his handcuffs, steals the deputy’s car, pulls over a car on the highway, and then kills the driver with a bolt gun used for cattle. When he writes Chigurh, McCarthy meticulously strips his prose of every possible pause or escape route, sending us marching through the scene from beginning to end, with one hand up, horror-movie style, for finger-peeking at the really bad bits. This is a one-way, no-stops trip for Chigurh, his victim, and us. The scene drips with the imminent threat of physical violence, but stops short of it, instead shattering the nerves of an unfortunate West Texas gas station owner with a verbal violation that very nearly leaves us wishing he had simply put the man out of his misery.