GRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES

Autobiographical and biographical graphic narratives are perhaps the best known and most widely read graphic literary texts. Their combination of word and hand-drawn images afford creators a wide variety of formal and stylistic devices for depicting emergent identity, historical experience, trauma, memory and post-memory, among other themes. At the same time, the inherent subjectivity of the hand-drawn images, as well as the limitations of memory and post-memory, raise important questions about the authority and authenticity of these narratives. By closing analyzing some of the most prominent examples of autobiographical and biographical graphic narratives, students in this class will consider how creators have used the medium and the strategies they used to address its limitations when depicting lived, historical experiences. Our discussion of these autobiographical and biographical narratives will be supplemented by readings in the related academic scholarship, as well as by materials that the creators drew upon in the production of their graphic narratives. The reading list of graphic narratives will consist of Maus, Fun Home, March, One Hundred Demons, The Complete Persepolis and Vietnamerica.