Created in the shadow of a father who "used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not" (2006a, 16), however, Fun Home bears witness not only to ...Bruce Bechdel's trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist's effort to claim the authority to represent their story.1 Bechdel's comic style may at first seem almost "invisible" behind her exploration of other mediums, particularly photography and literature.2 Photographs and texts are critical to her effort to uncover her family's history, and she relies on them extensively in structuring Fun Home.
Ten titles have been published to date, many of them memoirs, including Peter Dunlap-Shohl's My Degeneration: A Journey Though Parkinson's (2015) and Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 ...(2017), the reflections of nurse and comics creator M.K. Czerwiec, who is also a founding editor of the series. Allman says that while the primary readership consists of graphic novel fans, even customers who aren't necessarily looking for comics have been receptive. Since the breakout of the prose title The Emperor of All Maladies , she's seen readers asking for "more like it," no matter the format. Forthcoming series releases include the anthology Graphic Reproduction (May), which looks at conception, birth, and reproductive rights, and features contributions by cartoonists including Alison Bechdel ( Fun Home ) and Carol Tyler ( Soldier's Heart ).
Placing Alison Bechdel's Fun Home alongside other graphic narratives, most notably Art Spiegelman's Maus (1993) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003), that explore intergenerational trauma and the ...role of the child as witness, seems both obvious and potentially inappropriate, even presumptuous.
Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- Pol. text, eng. summary- Tekst pol., streszcz. ang.- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the ...Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
Every Book Its Reader Hollands, Neil
The Booklist,
03/2018, Letnik:
114, Številka:
13
Trade Publication Article
WHAT WOMEN WANT FROM WOMEN IN FICTION I've always been curious as to whether women feel represented by their portrayal as characters. Since "Hey, Lucy, I've got some mansplaining to do" would not be ...a popular start to my column, I sought help via social media and email from my female friends for their thoughts on the subject. Years of reading books and watching movies that lacked meaningful female presence sent Fun Home graphic novelist Alison Bechdel on a similar quest, so she introduced a yardstick that has become known as the Bechdel test. Especially important is that female characters have their own narrative arcs and don't just exist to motivate men's love interests, as a fantasy solution to a broken man's problems, or as the victim of the violence that spurs him into action. "Especially important is that female characters have their own narrative arcs and don't just exist to motivate men's love interests, as a fantasy solution to a broken man's problems, or as the victim of the violence that spurs him into action."
Not so fun home Ogle, Connie
McClatchy - Tribune Business News,
09/2006
Newsletter
Alison Bechdel, speaking from her home in Burlington, Vt., and appearing Thursday at Books & Books, Miami Beach, has clearly touched readers. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95) ...is a riveting visual and verbal guide to a repressed household in Lock Haven, Pa., where Bechdel, now 46, grew up with two brothers and English-teacher parents. Her father, "an alchemist of appearance, a Daedalus of decor," devoted himself to restoring their Gothic-revival house. He was equally passionate about James Joyce, gardening and design. He was also gay, Bechdel learned shortly after coming out to her parents, a deeply closeted man who had affairs, even with the family's teenage babysitter. He was possibly suicidal. Clearing brush one day, he was struck and killed by a Sunbeam bread truck, dying, like his literary hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, at 44. It is exactly that bittersweet longing for connection that suffuses Fun Home, which floats between Bechdel's melancholic sense of estrangement and mordant humor ('If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust"). The book, gorgeously drawn, is a wonderland, brimming with references to Greek mythology, Colette, Ulysses and other literary marvels. Bechdel, who has drawn the hilarious, politically charged comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For since 1983, reproduces her parents' letters -- "I'd be a terrible forger" -- and her childhood diary entries. Against the backdrop of the 1970s, the book also focuses on Bechdel's childhood obsessive/compulsive disorder and her apprehensive, then giddy discovery that she was a lesbian, something she later used to bond with her elusive dad.
Story behind the Story Flagg, Gordon
The Booklist,
03/2007, Letnik:
103, Številka:
14
Trade Publication Article
She added that Fun Home's success coincides with the current "memoir craze," offering subject matter that a general audience might be able to identify with more readily than it would with lesbians' ...romantic and political concerns. "It's a father-daughter story.
