Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4182
Adviser: Marianne DeKoven
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2006
Historical graphic narratives are the most striking genre in a new field of literature. I investigate the problems of writing history at a time when the discourses of fiction and nonfiction are in crisis, and new literary and popular genres aim to further the conversation on the vital and multilayered work of narrative. In graphic narrative we see a positive awareness of reproducibility and mass circulation as well as a rigorous, experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention. Because the medium accommodates both of these aspects, the graphic narrative is a crucial popular space for authors to investigate historical trauma and even to reconfigure the concept of history itself
I begin with the convergence of contemporary novels and graphic narratives around issues of narration and representation, followed by a prehistory of the graphic narrative in the twentieth-century. I then devote three chapters to the work of Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, who retrace harrowing histories from Auschwitz, Bosnia, and Palestine. These authors portray torture and massacre in a complex formal mode that does not turn away from or mitigate trauma; in fact they demonstrate how its visual retracing is enabling, ethical, and productive. Next, I turn to a set of texts by women writers who investigate childhood and the body---concerns typically relegated to the silence and invisibility of the private. Marjane Satrapi's account of her youth in Iran, Persepolis, along with work by a range of American authors, exemplifies how graphic narrative envisions an everyday reality of women's lives, which while rooted in the personal, is invested and threaded with collectivity, visualizing beyond prescriptive models of alterity or sexual difference. In every case, graphic narrative shows a traumatic side of history, but all of these authors refuse to present it through the lens of unspeakability or invisibility, rather registering its insistent difficulty through inventive textual practice. This project intervenes in contemporary critical discourse not only by offering a far-reaching analysis of an emergent, innovative narrative form, but also by addressing the current stakes surrounding the right to show and to tell history
