GRAPHIC MEMOIR—WHAT’S ON ALISON BECHDEL’S MIND
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, psychoanalyOc 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 arOsts--visual, verbal, musical—belong to a subculture of creaOvity and a tradiOon of creaOvity. Art is not created in a vacuum. Hence arOsts both directly and indirectly cite other arOsts, 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 oXen seen in the light of what she is currently reading. In her first memoir, Fun Home, Bechdel is trying to understand her relaOonship with her father and to his death, and one angle she takes is by looking at the novels he idenOfied with—Fitzgerald and Camus. In her second memoir, Are You My Mother, Bechdel explores her relaOonship 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 narraOves. In Secrets of Superhuman Strength Bechdel focuses more directly on her own self and on the life journeys of earlier incarnaOons of her own creaOve path—looking at English RomanOc poets, and twenOeth 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 psychoanalyOc theory and Zen pracOce. The course will involve weekly wriOng, and two formal papers focused on topics of interest to the student.
About Martin Gliserman
Professor Gliserman is the author of Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Body of the Text (University Press of Florida,1996) and has the following collateral appointments: Editor Emeritus of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture; Faculty and Training Analyst for the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in Manhattan; Faculty, Graduate School of Education (Literary Education "Educational Psychology"). His current project, TeXtRays, focuses on the representation of the body in fiction from Defoe to Arundhati Roy. The project, among other things, is a relational database along with corresponding charts, maps and graphs that articulate the body of the text in a visual manner.