ALISON BECHDEL & HILLARY CHUTE
MELLON FELLOWSHIP 2011-12
LINES OF TRANSMISSION: COMICS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This collaboration seeks to work out terms for a critical language with which to engage nonfiction comics—an exciting new area of public and scholarly interest.
COMICS: PHILOSOPHY & PRACTICE CONFERENCE, MAY 18-20 2012
Alison Bechdel began keeping a journal at the age of ten, and has been assiduously archiving her own life and times with words and pictures ever since. For twenty-five years she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a generational chronicle considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” (Ms.). She is also the author of the best-selling Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which won an Eisner Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Time Magazine named Fun Home the number one Best Book of 2006, calling the memoir about her father, “A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For have been translated into many languages. Bechdel has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta, among other places. Bechdel lives near Burlington, Vermont.
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, Department of English
I am interested in the ways people address history and understand their lives through cultural invention. My current teaching and research interests lie in contemporary American literature, specifically in how public and private histories take shape in the form of innovative narrative work. I am particularly interested in the relationships between word and image, fiction and nonfiction that we see in contemporary comics, a field with roots in the 1970s that is also connected to deeper histories of drawn reportage and visual witnessing.
My book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, which examines the graphic narrative work of five authors, including Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, argues that the medium of comics has opened up new spaces for nonfiction narrative—particularly for expressing certain kinds of stories typically relegated to the realm of the private. My next book, on comics as documentary, will look at the post-World War II environment in which Art Spiegelman in America and Keiji Nakazawa in Japan concurrently developed comics as a form for addressing the fallout of war, as well as exploring current graphic reportage by figures such as Joe Sacco on the Balkans and the Middle East. I am Associate Editor of a book by Spiegelman called MetaMaus (Pantheon), about the making of his terrain-shifting graphic novel Maus, and am writing on "Comic Books and Graphic Novels" (with Marianne DeKoven) for The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction and on "Graphic Narrative" for The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. I write on issues of form and history in many different kinds of venues and have published essays and interviews in magazines including The Believer. As a Contributing Editor, I worked on the latest edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Contemporary Volume), and I founded, in 2009, the MLA's Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives.
I am a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and faculty co-sponsor of the American Literatures and Cultures workshop.