The seminar will examine the works of Alison Bechdel—her comic strips and her three graphic memoirs. The seminar will begin by learning how to read graphic materials, the better to appreciate and analyze Bechdel’s work. The facet of Bechdel’s graphic memoirs that we will focus on will be the literary, psychoanalytic and spiritual works that she engages on her life’s journey. In this way, we will explore “what’s on Alison Bechdel’s mind.”
All artists—visual, verbal, musical—belong to a subculture of creativity and a tradition of creativity. Art is not created in a vacuum. Hence artists both directly and indirectly cite other artists, thus in jazz musicians play “standards”—tunes and songs taken from someone else’s song—e.g., John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” plays with a song from “The Sound of Music.”
For Bechdel, the flow of her life is often seen in the light of what she is currently reading. In her first memoir, Fun Home, Bechdel is trying to understand her relationship with her father and to his death, and one angle she takes is by looking at the novels he identified with—Fitzgerald and Camus. In her second memoir, Are You My Mother, Bechdel explores her relationship with her mother. Simultaneously, she is in therapy and becomes very interested in figuring her self out, hence becomes very interested in psychoanalysis, and in lesbian narratives. In Secrets of Superhuman Strength Bechdel focuses more directly on her own self and on the life journeys of earlier incarnations of her own creative path—looking at English Romantic poets, and twentieth century writers, e.g., Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
The seminar will explore the general cultural surround that Bechdel and her family live within—from TV shows to classic drama and Broadway shows, from classic novels to psychoanalytic theory and Zen practice. The course will involve weekly writing, and two formal papers focused on topics of interest to the student.