Windows of Cognition: Contemporary French Comics and the Cultural Middlebrow

This chapter deliberates the merits of whether French-language comics may be construed as a salient example of a new cultural middlebrow. It argues that the comics artist introduces new ways of seeing shared worlds, stressing the referential aspects typical of the literary middlebrow, but not of the high-brow, which is characterised by a high degree of self-consciousness. Moreover, where these special cognitive windows open out onto social and political realities that trouble a middlebrow audience, they can offer alternative, sometimes challenging perspectives. These claims are tested through analyses of Marjane Satrapi’s contemporary classic Persepolis and Riad Sattouf’s on-going saga L’Arabe du futur. The chapter concludes with a brief digression into the colourful, metaphysical universe of Joann Sfar’s Le Chat du rabbin.