Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel and literary scholar Hillary Chute work out terms for a new critical language with which to engage nonfiction comics.
Alison Bechdel
For much of her thirty-year career, Alison Bechdel has skulked on the cultural margins, writing, drawing, and self-syndicating the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. That generational chronicle, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period,” (Ms.) ran regularly in over fifty LGBT publications in North America and the UK. Many award-winning collections of Dykes were published in book form by an independent feminist press and were translated into several languages.
Bechdel gained wider recognition for her work with the publication in 2006 of her groundbreaking graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Fun Home was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, and in a great moment for graphic narrative, was named Best Book of 2006 by Time Magazine. Time called the tightly architected investigation into her closeted bisexual father?s suicide ?a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.?
After setting aside Dykes to Watch Out For in 2008, Bechdel began devoting herself full-time to autobiographical work. A second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt during the course of her Gray Center residency, in May 2012.
In her work, Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres. Dykes to Watch Out For was an explicitly community-based and politically engaged project. But in her deeply intimate memoirs about her father?s life before the gay rights movement and her mother?s life before the women?s movement, she turns a microscopic lens on the internal mechanisms of oppression and liberation.
Bechdel edited Best American Comics 2011. She has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney?s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. Her work is widely anthologized and translated.
Bechdel is the recipient of a 2012-13 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Hillary Chute
Hillary Chute is interested in the ways people address history and understand their lives through cultural invention. Her 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. She is 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.
Her 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. Her 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.
Chute is Associate Editor of a book by Spiegelman called MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), about the making of his terrain-shifting graphic narrative Maus, and has recently written on "Graphic Narrative" for The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, and on historical postmodernism for a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as on the subject of archives and comics for a special issue of e-misférica. She writes on issues of form and history in many different kinds of venues and has published essays and interviews in magazines including The Believer. As a Contributing Editor, Chute worked on the latest edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Contemporary Volume), and founded, in 2009, the MLA's Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives.