Publication details
Autofiction and autobiographical comics: A narratological perspective
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper draws on narrative theory to look at autobiographical comics and their relation to autofiction and to theories of the self. It examines the different ways in which the formal elements of comics allow graphic memoirs to draw attention to and comment on issues connected with autobiographical and autofictional writing in general, such as self-invention and creation of self-image. The first part of the paper will explore the relationship between the present and past self. Offering both verbal and visual means of focalisation, comics enable complex techniques of conveying distance and closeness between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I, which can help communicate, among other things, the narrator’s (and by extension the autobiographer’s) attitude to the past, self-irony, or the perceived continuity between the present and past self. Possible methods of orchestrating the relationship between the narrator and the protagonist include local fictionality within global nonfiction (cf. Nielsen-Phelan-Walsh 2015; Phelan 2016), which will be the focus of the second part of the paper. As with autofiction, fictionality in graphic memoirs may be used to highlight the constructed nature of all autobiographical narrative and to challenge conventional notions of “truth.” I will relate instances of fictionality in autobiographical comics to Doubrovsky’s view of autofiction as “fiction of strictly real events and facts” and explore the following questions: Could (some) autobiographical comics and Doubrovskyan autofiction be seen as using fictionality on the level of discourse rather than story? Does fictionality in comics help express the sense of self as fragmentary, instable, and difficult to grasp, as is often the case with autofiction? Examples include Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Need More Love, Liz Prince’s Tomboy, Czech author Toy Box’s My Book Winnetou, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. |