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Linares, Santiago Parga. "Proustian curiosity and the archive: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2020): 1–17. Added by: joachim (8/22/20, 5:45 PM) Last edited by: joachim (8/22/20, 5:45 PM) |
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| Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1782448 BibTeX citation key: Linares2020 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "Fun Home", Archive, Autobiography, Bechdel. Alison, Intertextuality, Literature, Proust. Marcel, USA Creators: Linares Collection: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics |
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Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, often described as a ‘proustian’ comic, is made up of a rich tapestry of cultural reference and a collection of archival material. This article attempts to understand the role this collection plays in the book and how it determines its proustian nature. Deleuze’s reading of Proust as an apprenticeship in the decoding of signs serves as a starting point, as both Alison and Marcel are driven by the same desire to understand the people around them, to decipher them as signs. The combination of archival material and cultural reference is the textual embodiment of this proustian curiosity in the comics form. References to books and their authors, queer history and thought, as well as Bechdel’s reproduction of documents, photographs, maps, pages from dictionaries or books, and other materials represent Alison’s attempts to decode the sign that is her father. Both she and Marcel fail in this quest, but Bechdel’s archival impulse translates Marcel’s curiosity into the graphic novel.
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