Framing the “Minor” in Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis

The treatment of ‘‘minor literature(s)’’ and ‘‘minor genres,’’ although certainly not new to the field of contemporary French and Francophone studies, might be in the midst of experiencing a resurgence of interest in the profession as evidenced by the number of related panel topics at the 2009 and 2011 Modern Language Association Annual Meetings across a number of disciplines and genrebased literary and film studies discussion groups. One may even venture so far as to say that there is perhaps a growing interest in (or at least a return to some of the key) issues surrounding so-called ‘‘minor’’ literatures and ‘‘minor’’ genres. Having never disappeared from the field entirely—as the volumes of latetwentieth-century and twenty-first-century scholarship on (auto)biography and lifewriting, women’s literature, queer theory and sexuality studies, and multicultural and ethnicity discourse all reveal in varying ways—the issue of the ‘‘minor’’ has recently found a new ‘‘home,’’ so to speak, in the domain of transnational studies; where scholars often use it as a point of departure in their investigations of the construct of global/local and formulations of ‘‘otherness’’ and marginality in a variety of cultural productions. It is within this transnational vein of critical methodology that the question of ‘‘minor’’ takes on a new light when we think of the impact that graphic novels and animation in general, and Marjane Satrapi’s graphic narratives in particular, have on cultural production and theoretical discussion. With the increasing recognition among scholars of the so-called ‘‘literary’’ and ‘‘aesthetic’’ contributions made by graphic novels and comics (in other words, sequential art) as well as animation, these traditionally-considered