Readings by Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel, followed by conversation moderated by Hillary Chute.
Graphic Women: Comics, Autobiography, and Mapping Memory:
Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel have created two of the most significant autobiographies of the 21st-century—in comics form. Graphic Women will focus on how two of the most important living cartoonists have presented aspects of their lives in both words and images, for comics autobiographies have changed the field of contemporary narrative. How are lives mapped out in words and images? How does drawing, in addition to writing, capture memory? How do images express the past? Bechdel has said, “I always felt like there was something inherently autobiographical about cartooning,” while Barry has remarked, “I always think of images as lowering the drawbridge where stuff can cross over—memory.” What does this innovative form of comics bring to the presentation of private and public histories?
Lynda Barry:
Lynda has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. She is the inimitable creator behind Ernie Pook's Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy, as well as the books One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway musical and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Her bestselling and acclaimed book, What It Is, won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. Its sequel, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book was published last fall.
Hillary Chute
Hillary Chute is the Neubaeuer Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago and at the forefront of scholarship on graphic narrative and its relationship to more traditionally text-based literature. She is particularly interested in the connections between word and image, fiction and nonfiction that can be found in contemporary comics, a field with roots in the 1970s but also connected to deeper histories of drawn reportage and visual witnessing. Her book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics examines the graphic narrative work of five authors, including Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, arguing that the medium of comics has opened up new spaces for nonfiction narrative—particularly for expressing certain kinds of stories typically relegated to the realm of the private. Chute is associate editor of Art Spiegelman's MetaMaus and has written about comics and culture for venues including The Village Voice and the Believer.
