Fun Home

Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618871711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Are You My Mother?

Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547524366
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

The Diary

Author: Batsheva Ben-Amos
Publisher:
ISBN: 0253046963
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.

An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies

Author: Will Stockton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000647870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly is the first introduction to queer theory written especially for students of literature. Tracking the emergence of queer theory out of gay and lesbian studies, this book pays unique attention to how queer scholars have read some of the most well-known works in the English language. Organized thematically, this book explores queer theoretical treatments of sexual identity, gender and sexual norms and normativity, negativity and utopianism, economics and neoliberalism, and AIDS activism and disability. Each chapter expounds upon foundational works in queer theory by scholars including Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Each chapter also offers readings of primary texts –ranging from the highly canonical, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to more contemporary works of popular fiction, like Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. Along the way, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly demonstrates how queer reading methods work alongside other methods like feminism, historicism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. By modelling queer readings, this book invites literature students to develop queer readings of their own. It also suggests that reading queerly is not simply a matter of reading work written by queer people. Queer reading attunes us to the queerness of even the most straightforward text.

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110279819
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 2220

Book Description
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

The Comics of Alison Bechdel

Author: Janine Utell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496825799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Leah Anderst, Alissa S. Bourbonnais, Tyler Bradway, Natalja Chestopalova, Margaret Galvan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Katie Hogan, Jonathan M. Hollister, Yetta Howard, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Don L. Latham, Vanessa Lauber, Katherine Parker-Hay, Anne N. Thalheimer, Janine Utell, and Susan R. Van Dyne Alison Bechdel is both a driver and beneficiary of the welcoming of comics into the mainstream. Indeed, the seemingly simple binary of outside/inside seems perpetually troubled throughout the career of this important comics artist, known for Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and Dykes to Watch Out For. This volume extends the body of scholarship on her work from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In a definitive collection of original essays, scholars cover the span of Bechdel’s career, placing her groundbreaking early work within the context of her more well-known recent projects. The contributors provide new insights on major themes in Bechdel’s work, such as gender performativity, masculinity, lesbian politics and representation, trauma, life writing, and queer theory. Situating Bechdel among other comics artists, this book charts possible influences on her work, probes the experimental traits of her comics in their representations of kinship and trauma, combs archival materials to gain insight into Bechdel’s creative process, and analyzes her work in community building and space making through the comics form. Ultimately, the volume shows that Bechdel’s work consists of performing a series of selves—serializing the self, as it were—each constructed and refracted across and within her chosen artistic modes and genres.

Broadway Bodies

Author: Ryan Donovan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197551076
Category : Broadway
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
"The Broadway Body I lied about my height on my résumé the entire time I was a dancer, though in truth I don't think the extra inch ever actually made a difference. In the US, 5'6" still reads as short for a man no matter how you slice it. The reason for my deception was that height was often the reason I was disqualified: choreographers often wanted taller male dancers for the ensemble and listed a minimum height requirement (often 5'11" and up) in the casting breakdown. Being disqualified before I could even set foot in the audition because I possessed an unchangeable physical characteristic that often made me unemployable in the industry. I was learning an object lesson in Broadway's body politics-and, of course, had I not been a white cisgender nondisabled man, the barriers to employment would have been compounded even further. I wasn't alone in feeling caught in a catch-22. Not being cast because of your appearance, or "type" in industry lingo, is casting's status quo. The casting process openly discriminates based upon appearance. This truism even made its way into a song cut from A Chorus Line (1975) called "Broadway Boogie Woogie," which comically lists all of the reasons one might not be cast: "I'm much too tall, much too short, much too thin/Much too fat, much too young for the role/I sing too high, sing too low, sing too loud." Funny Girl (1964) put it even more bluntly: "If a Girl Isn't Pretty/Like a Miss Atlantic City/She should dump the stage/And try another route"--

Graphic Subjects

Author: Michael A. Chaney
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299251039
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.

Alison Bechdel

Author: Rachel R. Martin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496819284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Due to the huge success of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award–winning musical adaptation in 2009, Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) has recently become a household name. However, Bechdel, who has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, has been writing and drawing comics since the early 1980s. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) stood out as one of the first to depict lesbians in popular culture and is widely hailed as an essential LGBTQ resource. It is also from this comic strip that the wildly popular Bechdel Test—a test to gauge positive female representation in film—obtained its name. While DTWOF secured Bechdel’s role in the comics world and queer community long before her mainstream success, Bechdel now experiences notoriety that few comics artists ever achieve and that women cartoonists have never attained. Spanning from 1990 to 2017, Alison Bechdel: Conversations collects twelve interviews that illustrate how Bechdel uses her own life, relationships, and contemporary events to expose the world to what she has referred to as the “fringes of acceptability”—the comics genre as well as queer culture and identity. These interviews reveal her intentionality in the use of characters, plots, structure, and cartooning to draw her readers toward disrupting the status quo. Starting with her earliest interviews on public access television and in little-known comics and queer presses, Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel’s career from her days with DTWOF to her popularity with Fun Home and Are You My Mother? This volume includes her “one-off” DTWOF strips from November 2016 and March 2017 (not anthologized anywhere else) and in-depth discussions of her laborious creative process as well as upcoming projects.

The New York Times Book Review

Author: The New York Times
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0593234626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times’s own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the Book Review’s coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.