Fun Home is a rereading of a family history characterized by false appearances, composed many years after the suicide, or accidental death, of the author’s father; as is not uncommon in memoirs, it ...relies heavily on archives, but the use to which they are put in this graphic novel is quite singular. This paper analyzes Alison Bechdel’s peculiar autobiographical mode through a focus on a few of the photos in Fun Home , all of which have been redrawn by the cartoonist, whose hand holding them is often also drawn, so that, far from merely testifying to the veracity of the narrated events, as the author insists, they greatly contribute to the complexity of the graphic and narrative composition, combining syntagmatic and paradigmatic gestures (montage and juxtaposition, superimposition and substitution) that endow this attempt to recover the figure of the father, and the father-daughter lineage, with a powerful poetic expressiveness.
In recent history, Alison Bechdel put the graphic memoir on the map. Her 2006 bestseller Fun Home introduced millions to the graphic format, earned development into a Tony Award-winning Broadway ...show, and spawned what will no doubt be generations of future writers determined to create their own graphic work. But not everyone has Bechdel's bilateral genius. Comic books, that genre'd cousin of graphic memoir, may present a different type of collaboration. To create them, publishers have paired countless writers and illustrators for generations, helping them tap the best of each other's talents. Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Coraline, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, among others, breathed new life into The Sandman series and continues to write graphic novels today in partnership with artists. Other high-profile writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have even been drawn (no pun intended) to the genre. Following his best-selling memoir, Between the World and Me, Coates now contributes to the Black Panther series for Marvel Comics.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISON BECHDEL BECHDEL, ALISON; Chute, Hillary
Modern fiction studies,
12/2006, Letnik:
52, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Fun Home takes on as thematic and narrative filters Albert Camus' A Happy Death (the book Bruce Bechdel was reading when he died), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James's Washington ...Square and The Portrait of a Lady, Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Colette's Earthly Paradise, among other literary references and allusions. ...the whole story was spawned by a snapshot I found of our old babysitter lying on a hotel bed in his Jockey shorts. ...it expedited matters, because I could draw more quickly, once I had these images. At first I was resistant to the idea to using color at all, because one whole theme of the book is how my dad was such a crazy color freak and how I became a cartoonist because it was a black and white world where I didn't ever have to think about color.
Alison Bechdel's recent graphic memoirs generate new strategies for negotiating feminist and queer literary theory's troubled relationship to metaphors of disability. Presenting a set of continuities ...between Alison's embodied experience of OCD and her adult drawing and writing techniques, Fun Home (2006) performs an intriguing revision of feminism's “madwoman in the attic.” In this way, the memoir stages a contemporary crip innovation in feminist literary form. Are You My Mother? (2012) extends this intervention by aestheticizing depression and its complex relationship to chronicity and care. Replacing the fantasy of artistic self-sufficiency with a model of creative interdependence, Bechdel thus opens spaces for theorizing new forms of feminist and crip collaboration.
Alison Bechdel's award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, has been widely recognized for its literary sophistication. Themes familiar in the memoir genre—the author's intellectual ...and sexual development and her relationship with her father—are invariably filtered through her adventures in reading. This essay presents the different modes of reading Alison's encounters: reading for identification, reading for parallels and symbolic meanings, reading for the sensual pleasure of language. Bechdel arrives ultimately at her own understanding of reading as an ongoing struggle. Bechdel teaches her readers to be attentive, in particular, to the often-overlooked materiality of reading: the book as object and the page in its spatial layout, language as sensuous sound and rhythm, and the experience of both writers and readers as embodied participants in the process.
This essay examines figures of archives in Alison's Bechdel's 2006 memoir Fun Home--the museum-like family house, the father's home library, Alison's childhood diary, and the public libraries she ...frequented as a young adult--as occasions for reimagining the queer potentiality of historical narrative. While the memoir begins with a schematic distinction between fact and falsehood, nature and artifice, later chapters revise that view, in part by identifying within the queer archive the counterhistorical impulse Derrida calls archive fever. Informed by that ceaseless drive, Fun Home provides an opportunity to investigate the archive's relation to identity and history. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the coming-out/coming of age story of young Alison in an ..."artistic, autistic" family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel's graphing of subjectivity at multiple interfaces, and examines her use of ambiguous "evidence" for a father-daughter coming-out story that is both indictment and posthumous homage.
Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel,
(2006), intricately weaves together the author's coming-out story with her family's history, particularly the story of her father's closeted queer ...sexuality and possible suicide. In its exploration of family history, queer desires, and larger American historical events, Bechdel's novel deals with themes of trauma, memory, and historical narrative. The novel has been embraced for the queer way in which it approaches her family archive — it refuses to settle on one understanding of the truth of Bechdel's father, his sexuality, and the author's relationship to him, and instead insists on piecing together the past from a variety of angles. This article focuses on how the queer qualities of contingency and partiality that
produces around sexuality and the Bechdel family's history is an effect of the author's use of the visual possibilities of the graphic genre. Mapping Bechdel's coming-of-age story as a narrative about coming to see, this article traces the importance of vision in young Alison's gender identity, her relationship to her father, and her ability to posthumously “see” her father through family photographs. This article thus draws out the ways in which Bechdel represents the visual field as a source of both restriction and queer pleasure, the family as a site of both normalizing and queer looks, and the inevitable partiality of what she is able to see.
Hard to Say is an installation comprised of four artist’s books that are displayed in a fabricated living room environment that includes wood laminate floors, comfortable chairs, a coffee table, a ...rug, end tables, and warm lamplight. All elements of the installation were either bought second-hand or borrowed from local friends. The exhibition is named after the primary work in the show entitled Hard to Say, an illustrated memoir. The memoir illustrates the author’s personal history through eight separate sections that utilize handwritten text, photographs, and hand drawn elements. These elements were combined digitally and printed in an edition of twelve full-color hardback books. In addition, the installation featured an edition of 50 comic book style zines, a legal pad inspired participatory book of paper airplane instructions, and a hand assembled photo album of photos from the artist’s childhood.
Using the concept of "communities of practice," this essay recounts the impact of foregrounding representations of community in teaching Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. I argue that the work of ...collectively reading this text, which itself offers a nuanced perspective on being and belonging, fostered a classroom community self-conscious about its own expectations for membership. Our process reinforced the constant interpretive encounter in graphic narratives between writing and image, facilitating in our class a critique of dominant modes of discourse and fostering a reading practice that helped us probe the limits of communal identity. This was not a process of affiliation with Bechdel's persona, but a dialectic within the classroom of recognition and difference that ultimately binds communities of practice together. Moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to a communal reading, our engagement with the text enabled members of the class to have both literary critical insights and deeply personal discoveries about the communities to which we willingly belong or into which we are placed. Ultimately, this essay recommends the generic affordances of the graphic narrative for this work, suggesting how communities of literary practice need to focus on texts that open modes of affiliation and recognition for diverse student populations.
