Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of Time magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of alternative publications throughout the country. In Fun Home, Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America. However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant account--both of growing up as a lesbian and simply growing up. Bechdel's book asks us to look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great American novel" be something other than a novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms?

Charles Burns and Black Hole

Charles Burns inaugurates our move into studying graphic novels as a force in contemporary American literature. Burns was an early innovator in the comics genre. He first came to prominence through his contributions to graphic novelist Art Spiegelman's influential comics journal, Raw. Burns also contributed some of his earliest concoctions to the alternative music 'zine, Sub Pop. In addition to publishing a number of short stories and graphic works, Burns has contributed artwork to the Iggy Pop album Brick by Brick, crafted illustrations for a number of periodicals (such as The Believer and The New Yorker), and drafted the visuals for choreographer Mark Morris' re-writing of The Nutcracker. Having met and befriended Simpsons creator Matt Groening at Evergreen State College, Burns is also the tongue-in-cheek inspiration for C. Montgomery Burns.

Raised primarily in the Seattle area, Charles Burns returns to the Pacific Northwest for his serial, Black Hole. Black Hole began appearing as a comic book in 1995, but wasn't entirely completed and published in a one volume book format until 2005. Combining impressive skills as a visual artist with a keen ear for story, Burns' surreal Black Hole combines surrealistic images with a story about the metaphorical plague of teenager-dom.

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, and the Controversy about Autobiography

For our next class, we'll be reading James Frey's controversial addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Published in 2003, Frey's memoir went on to be one of the most celebrated books of the year, was translated into 31 languages, and, eventually, became one of Oprah's book club picks. Accusations about Frey fictionalizing details of his story came to light in 2006--primarily from the website The Smoking Gun, which provided extensive proof of Frey's many lies and prevarications.

Frey's work, despite its thorny reception, provides an ideal vehicle to talking about the links between memoir and fiction, the construction of the autobiographical 'I,' the public's voyeuristic interest in addiction chronicles.

Dave Eggers and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

My apologies for this posting appearing late in the game; I thought I had posted a Dave Eggers introduction earlier in the week, but found that Blogger had eaten my homework (or something of the sort).

Dave Eggers was born in Boston in 1970, and spent his early years living in an upper middle class suburb outside of Chicago. As A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius details, Eggers was thrust into a premature adulthood by the early death of both of his parents, leaving him with responsibility for his much younger brother Toph. Viewed as the consummate Generation X author, Eggers is known for his satirical magazine Might, as well as the popular (and still extant) publication, McSweeney's. In addition to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has also published the novels You Shall Know Our Velocity and What is the What, in addition to the short story collection How We Are Hungry.

Alternately celebrated and denigrated for its self-consciousness and high-ironic style (the latter of which Eggers disputes vehemently) upon publication, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains polarizing a number of years after it appeared. In the context of our class, AHWOSG ushers in our discussion about the increasingly thin line between memoir and fiction in late twentieth/ early twenty-first century America at the time that it asks questions about the relationship between postmodernism and affect, sentimentality and techniques of formal distanciation, and the rise of the memoir as a genre that is often seen to supercede the novel (in popularity, if not always in critical praise). What do we make of the phenomenon surrounding the pubilcation of this work? What about McSweeney's, 826 Valencia, the superhero store in Brooklyn, and the Believer--disparate endeavors that have all come to rest under the Eggers brand?