David M. Ball
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039058
- eISBN:
- 9781621039907
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039058.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter examines self-representation in comics, with emphasis on the intertextuality of Alison Bechdel’s created self as well as the conflation of allusion and confession in her 2006 graphic ...
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This chapter examines self-representation in comics, with emphasis on the intertextuality of Alison Bechdel’s created self as well as the conflation of allusion and confession in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home. Known for its depictions of homosexuality and an artist’s coming of age and coming out, Fun Home highlights the intersections of comics, art history, and literature. By participating in a tradition of contemporary lesbian memoir, Fun Home extends an American literary confessional genealogy dating back to Puritan conversion and African-American captivity narratives. This chapter analyzes the literary allusions in Fun Home, particularly its use of allusive confessions that straddle the personal and the public, the lived and the literary.Less
This chapter examines self-representation in comics, with emphasis on the intertextuality of Alison Bechdel’s created self as well as the conflation of allusion and confession in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home. Known for its depictions of homosexuality and an artist’s coming of age and coming out, Fun Home highlights the intersections of comics, art history, and literature. By participating in a tradition of contemporary lesbian memoir, Fun Home extends an American literary confessional genealogy dating back to Puritan conversion and African-American captivity narratives. This chapter analyzes the literary allusions in Fun Home, particularly its use of allusive confessions that straddle the personal and the public, the lived and the literary.
Ian MacRae
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496813275
- eISBN:
- 9781496813312
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496813275.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter focuses on Alison Bechdel—now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and one of the most famous lesbian artists in America. The adaptation of her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, debuted as a ...
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This chapter focuses on Alison Bechdel—now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and one of the most famous lesbian artists in America. The adaptation of her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, debuted as a musical on Broadway in New York in April 2015, and won five Tony Awards in June of that same year. Subtitled “a family tragicomic,” this is an autobiographical text. It tells Alison's story of growing up and coming out, and of her relationship with her family, and above all with her father, a queer man who may have committed suicide, and who apparently lived a closeted, unhappy existence.Less
This chapter focuses on Alison Bechdel—now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and one of the most famous lesbian artists in America. The adaptation of her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, debuted as a musical on Broadway in New York in April 2015, and won five Tony Awards in June of that same year. Subtitled “a family tragicomic,” this is an autobiographical text. It tells Alison's story of growing up and coming out, and of her relationship with her family, and above all with her father, a queer man who may have committed suicide, and who apparently lived a closeted, unhappy existence.
Lisa Saltzman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226242033
- eISBN:
- 9780226242170
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226242170.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Fugitive and fictive testimony though a photograph may be, photographs, or images of photographs have come to play a critical role in the particular form of the graphic narrative that is the graphic ...
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Fugitive and fictive testimony though a photograph may be, photographs, or images of photographs have come to play a critical role in the particular form of the graphic narrative that is the graphic memoir. At once personal memento and material witness, at once familial relic and visible evidence, the photographic snapshots “drawn and quartered” on the pages of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir offer a vestigial glimpse of all that photography still means within the affective economy of the historical work that is remembrance. Rendered and, at the same time, withheld, the reproduced and drawn photographs of her graphic memoir intimate the history and inheritance of the “pencil of nature” that was William Henry Fox Talbot’s photography, staking a claim to its evidential status even as they challenge its forms and its terms. Moreover, in ways that exceed the largely playful retrospective link forged between the contemporary practice of taking pencil in hand to draw photographically and Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s album, like Bechdel’s memoir, holds within it photographs, portraits of a sort, that may bear equivocal witness to something as ineffable as desire.Less
Fugitive and fictive testimony though a photograph may be, photographs, or images of photographs have come to play a critical role in the particular form of the graphic narrative that is the graphic memoir. At once personal memento and material witness, at once familial relic and visible evidence, the photographic snapshots “drawn and quartered” on the pages of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir offer a vestigial glimpse of all that photography still means within the affective economy of the historical work that is remembrance. Rendered and, at the same time, withheld, the reproduced and drawn photographs of her graphic memoir intimate the history and inheritance of the “pencil of nature” that was William Henry Fox Talbot’s photography, staking a claim to its evidential status even as they challenge its forms and its terms. Moreover, in ways that exceed the largely playful retrospective link forged between the contemporary practice of taking pencil in hand to draw photographically and Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s album, like Bechdel’s memoir, holds within it photographs, portraits of a sort, that may bear equivocal witness to something as ineffable as desire.
Yaël Schlick
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039058
- eISBN:
- 9781621039907
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039058.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter compares two different modes of deploying intertextuality in autobiographical writing by analyzing the relationship between textuality and experience in Alison Bechdel’s comic ...
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This chapter compares two different modes of deploying intertextuality in autobiographical writing by analyzing the relationship between textuality and experience in Alison Bechdel’s comic autobiography Fun Home and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!. It first considers the tensions in Bechdel’s sophisticated use of intertextuality, focusing on her awareness of the way her chosen intertexts work imperfectly as a means of describing and understanding her own experiences. It then offers a reading of One! Hundred! Demons! and Barry’s technique in depicting suicide, as well as her notion of texts as magic lanterns. It also explores Barry’s use of intertextuality as a means of interpolating the reader, of modeling textual engagement and turning readers into writers.Less
This chapter compares two different modes of deploying intertextuality in autobiographical writing by analyzing the relationship between textuality and experience in Alison Bechdel’s comic autobiography Fun Home and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!. It first considers the tensions in Bechdel’s sophisticated use of intertextuality, focusing on her awareness of the way her chosen intertexts work imperfectly as a means of describing and understanding her own experiences. It then offers a reading of One! Hundred! Demons! and Barry’s technique in depicting suicide, as well as her notion of texts as magic lanterns. It also explores Barry’s use of intertextuality as a means of interpolating the reader, of modeling textual engagement and turning readers into writers.
Jeff McLaughlin (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496813275
- eISBN:
- 9781496813312
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496813275.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast ...
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In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each chapter ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding. The chapters examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One chapter discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another chapter reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human. Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each author, graphic novelist, and artist are all doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.Less
In a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, this book addresses two questions: which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each chapter ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding. The chapters examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One chapter discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another chapter reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human. Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each author, graphic novelist, and artist are all doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.
Jane Tolmie (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039058
- eISBN:
- 9781621039907
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039058.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of ...
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Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics. This book is about autobiography, semi-autobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. The book engages with well-known figures such as Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet. Negotiations between artist/writer/body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity, and are read and perceived, requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics’ viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph, the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh, or the corporeal world, and they do so with fascinating results.Less
Autobiography has seen enormous expansions and challenges over the past decades. One of these expansions has been in comics, and it is an expansion that pushes back against any postmodern notion of the death of the author/subject, while also demanding new approaches from critics. This book is about autobiography, semi-autobiography, fictionalized autobiography, memory, and self-narration in sequential art, or comics. The book engages with well-known figures such as Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel; with cult-status figures such as Martin Vaughn James; and with lesser-known works by artists such as Frédéric Boilet. Negotiations between artist/writer/body and drawn/written/text raise questions of how comics construct identity, and are read and perceived, requiring a critical turn towards theorizing the comics’ viewer. At stake in comic memoir and semi-autobiography is embodiment. Remembering a scene with the intent of rendering it in sequential art requires nonlinear thinking and engagement with physicality. Who was in the room and where? What was worn? Who spoke first? What images dominated the encounter? Did anybody smile? Man or mouse? Unhinged from the summary paragraph, the comics artist must confront the fact of the flesh, or the corporeal world, and they do so with fascinating results.
