Fun Home (second half)

The entire novel explores the strange relationship between Alison and her father. The second half explores this relationship somewhat differently than the first. The use of literary reference begins from page one with the first mention of Icarus. How does the author’s use of literary reference inform your understanding of the story? Did you like how it ended with Icarus once more?

Furthermore, the second half contains the longer portion of the narrative about Alison’s English classes and their discussions of his favorite books. How does this interaction between “intellectual companions” affect your understanding of their relationship? Think back to the moment when Joan comes to visit and comments on how close she and her father are. Why does the author spend so much time showing how close they could have been?

Emotional distance is a key theme in this narrative. Repression and isolation form the ties of their family relationships. Yet, the use of handwritten texts throughout the story tell us that they were still in contact through this more removed from of communication. The diaries, as well, the passages of highlighted text act as clues to the deeper relationships between family members. How do these “illustrated” texts (that is they are shown in the novel as handwritten letters or highlighted portions of printed text) inform your grasp on the complex family relationships in the novel?

A comics medium is very intimate and personal in this illustration style. Why do you think the author, who so obviously was very read and interested in literature and included immense amounts of literary allusion, choose to illustrate this narrative? How do you think you would have understood the story if it were prose?

Fun Home (105-End)

One of the very first thing that stuck out to me about Fun Home is Bechdel's comic style. She uses a style pretty grounded in realism, never really expressing through marks or abstraction, along with her use of a monochromatic color scheme of a green grey ink wash. This is quite different from our last couple of books with color like King, or American Born Chinese. How does this use of color affect our view of Fun Home? Was a good decision to allow color in a story of coming of age?

Along with that, after watching the YouTube video of her talk about Fun Home, Bechdel mentions her diary entries from inside Fun Home as her first draft of the book. Did you make a similar connection between the book and the diary? Also within the diary how did she begin to experiment with the idea of image and text interacting? How did this effect our perception of her diary and thoughts?

Lastly over all what did you think of the book as a whole? What did you think of the non-linear format? Do you think she accomplished her goals of telling her coming of age story through the  death and memories of her father?

Reading and discussion by graphic artist Alison Bechdel

I found this video and found that it was truly interesting to watch. It is kinda of long, but I hope that by sharing this you find some ideas to think about that maybe we haven't talked about yet in the blogs. (The first ten minutes of the video is an intro by professors.)

Final Paper Instructions

Your final papers, due December 11th via email, should be somewhat more complex and research-heavy than your midterm papers. I also ask that the papers be 10-12 pages.

For this paper, I do not ask you to respond to a prompt, but instead to choose and explore a topic of particular interest to you. That means that you can look at a text or issue addressed in class that you DIDN'T explore in your midterm or transcend the boundaries of the class to focus on comics or issues in comics about which you are passionate.  I am more than happy to respond to ideas for papers and/ or provide you with a series of possible prompts if you like. However, you do have freedom to pursue what you choose.

As for finding research, I'd like you to include approximately three sources to enrich your argument (these might include peer-reviewed articles, books on comics lit or theory, or interviews with authors). I am also happy to help you find appropriate research for your chosen topic. By now, you should all have received your midterms with comments. I am happy to discuss them with you and help you figure out how to integrate my comments into final papers. Overall, I was TRULY impressed by the caliber of your work!

Questions on Fun Home (1-105)

Fun Home is a tragic comic that explores the coming of age story of the author Alison Bechdel and her struggle to come to grips with her sexuality. The novel starts with what must be her first memory of her father. The graphic novel covers many issues within queer theory, self discovery , and self identity. There are a few scenes and elements of the story that stuck out to me that I thought would be good discussion points for this blog.                

                                                                                 

The scene above from page 15 depicts a glimpse at Alison and her father's struggle to conform to the gender roles assigned to their sex. There are many of examples of this throughout the book. Is Alison trying to make a case that all homosexuals prefer roles of the opposite sex? For instance, does a gay man have to have feminine traits, and does a women have to have masculine traits in order to be gay?

The scene above is on page 58. Alison's mother uses the fact that the father was molested when he was young to explain his homosexual tendencies. Is this a valid argument? Why or why not?

Alison includes many boxes to describe things in the environment. Do you find this helpful in your reading? Or is it a distraction? Discuss.

Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of Time magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of alternative publications throughout the country. In Fun Home, Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America. However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant account--both of growing up gay and simply growing up. Bechdel's book asks us to look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great American novel" be something other than a traditional novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms, such as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman and Bechdel?

See below for resources on Bechdel:

Comics Journal interview

All About Women Festival interview

Book with great chapter about Bechdel

Announcement of MacArthus Genuis grant award

Dykes to Watch Out For strip

Musical version of Fun Home

Cvetkovich article on the queer archive in Fun Home

Fun Home (1-105)

Fun Home, Topics For Discussion

1) The Relationship Between Text and Image
 

One of the first things that struck me about Fun Home was how dominant the text was in comparison to the illustration. There’s not really more of it (word-count-wise) than there was in the other stuff we’ve read, but Bechdel’s strong narrative voice really upstages her drawings a lot of the time (not a bad thing).

The relationship between the text (especially the narration) and the images becomes a really important part of Bechdel’s narrative strategy. One aspect of this that I think is particularly interesting is described by the concept of anchorage and relay, coined by Roland Barthes in his 1964 essay, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’. (A pretty good summary can be found here http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/12/21/the-rhetoric-of-the-image-roland-barthes-1977/).

Barthes was looking at pictorial advertisements and analyzing the visual arguments they were making (but I think it’s a pretty clean translation to comics as well). For images, he wrote about the difference between denotative and connotative meanings. For the text, he identified two major roles that it could play: anchorage, which solidified the expected meaning of the associated image; and relay, which added different meanings or challenged the original meaning of the associated image (or vice versa).

Bechdel is using both strategies here with her narration, and I’ve included an example of each below.



Anchorage (Text solidifies the meaning of the image)

Relay (Text challenges the original meaning of the image)

How do you think Bechdel is playing on the relationship between text and image in Fun Home? What does this relationship look like in a ‘traditional’ comic? What are the limits and opportunities of this relationship?

 

2) Allusion and Comics as Literature

The other thing that really stood out to me about Fun Home was the expert use of allusion and reference, mostly to works from the Western literary canon. While obviously Bechdel weaves these references into excellent metaphors and poetic language, it did strike me as a bit strange. She is working the comics medium, so why reference so heavily to a totally different medium? Is she trying to ‘legitimize’ her comics work by making these references? Why not reference previous comics and/or graphic memoirs? Is there even a comics canon worth referencing?