Autobiographix: Autographic Life Narratives in American Studies

Workshop H: seminar room P102 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Christina Meyer (Osnabrück) / Martin Klepper (Berlin) / Astrid Böger (Hamburg)

 

1. Jochen Ecke (JGU Mainz), "Grant Morrison’s 'Fiction Suits': Comics Autobiography as Genre Fiction / Genre Fiction as Comics Autobiography"

2. Sharif Bitar (Oldenburg), "'I'd gladly be pulling the trigger myself': Frank Miller in Holy Terror"

3. Tim Lanzendörfer (JGU Mainz), "Icons and Iconicity in Ho-Che Anderson’s King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr."

4. Mary Rose Montemayor-Hielscher (JGU Mainz), "'As my skin is brown, so my kuto are brownish'": Visualizing Ethnicity in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!"

5. Lukas Etter (Bern), "The Many Wedges of Alison Bechdel"

6. Eva Boesenberg (HU Berlin), "Family Business: Death in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home"

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Contact:

Jochen Ecke
jochen_ecke@hotmail.com

Sharif Bitar
sharif.bitar@uni-oldenburg.de

Tim Lanzendörfer
lanzendo@uni-mainz.de

Mary Rose Montemayor-Hielscher
m.montemayor@imb-mainz.de

Lukas Etter
etter@iash.unibe.ch

Eva Boesenberg
eva.boesenberg@cms.hu-berlin.de

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Graphic life writing is of key interest for American Studies. Graphic novels, autobiographical comics, and other forms of graphic life writing combine the strong American tradition of personal narrative (Edwards) and autobiography (Franklin) with the equally strong visual impetus in American culture roughly since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The autobiographical content may motivate but also check and condition the visual expression of the artist, while at the same time the visual representation can trigger but also double-cross the autobiographical imagination: "the pictorial presence of the autobiographical subject of comics both fortifies and unravels autobiography's founding generic claims" (Michael Chaney, Graphic Subjects). In a certain way, autobiographix (or autobiographics, as Leigh Gilmore would have it) highlight (and heighten) the generic and theoretical problems of life writing: the question of mimesis, authenticity, and truth; the question of the relation between protagonist, narrator/artist and author (thought of as one according to the ‘autobiographical pact’ of Lejeune); related to this: questions of authorship and copyright; the question of temporal structure (memory, trauma, forgetfulness); the question of representation (visibility/invisibility) and troping (masking/unmasking); the question of intermediality/ intertextuality; and, finally, the question of commercial and popular media vis-à-vis art: "Comics lead the way in thinking about the cross-discursive practices of autographics […]. [They] are at the leading edge in shaping the autographical turn in criticism to date" (Gillian Whitlock).

As Anna Poletti and Gillian Whitlock have suggested, "critics of life narrative are now called upon to develop more advanced visual and cultural literacies to interpret the intersections of various modes and media and the complex embodiments of avatar, autobiographer, and reader/viewer gathered under the sign of autographics." Our workshop consequently aims at sharpening our literacies by studying already established as well as less well-known autobiographical graphic novels, diaries and personal narratives.

We seek papers that bring life writing scholarship to comics studies, and that combine approaches of autobiographical criticism with an interest in the aesthetics, politics, ethics, technologies, and the contexts of graphic novels, graphic memoirs, graphic diaries, and other forms of graphic narrative. We believe that these intersections produce exciting new angles for critical inquiry in the field of American Studies. Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Graphic novels, mangas, and life writing studies
• History, memory, and identity in graphic storytelling (e.g. Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, or Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Kyle Baker’s Ned Turner, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home)
• Violence, trauma, the body, and healing in/through autobiographical graphic novels (e.g. Rosalind P. Penfold’s Draggonslipper, David Small’s Stitches)
• Trauma narratives and graphic seriality
• Diasporic selves in graphic narratives (e.g. Four Immigrants Manga by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, 1931)
• Translating the self into graphic narratives
• Autobiographical graphic narratives’ cross-cultural dialogues (Marjan Satrapi)
• Feminist graphic narratives (e.g. Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb)
• Politics of self-representation
• War, trauma, and conflicts in autobiographical graphic narratives (e.g. Eisner, Collier)
• Confessional comics and graphic war-time testimonies (e.g. Sacco)
• Graphic memoirs and questions of authorship
• Stylized self-portraiture in graphic novels (e.g. Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb)
• Varieties of graphic diaries (e.g., James Kochalka’s American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries, Gabrielle Bell’s diary comics)
• Autobiographical comix (e.g. Julie Doucet’s autobiographical Dirty Plottes series, or Jim Valentino)
• Childhood trauma, family stories, and autobiographic comics and graphic narratives (e.g. Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life, David Small’s Stitches, David B’s Epileptic, Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home)