Event overview
The last seminar in this year’s Auto / Bio / Fiction series turns to (auto)biographical / (auto)biofictional graphic narratives
Maaheen Ahmed, “Representations of children in autobiographical and autofictional graphic novels”
Turning to contemporary alternative publications from North America, France and Belgium, this talk delineates the contours of childish elements in graphic novels to show how they figure as the unsaid in a transatlantic comics history marked by the emergence of the graphic novel: in the zealous ‘growing up’ of comics, the childish and childlike has been reconfigured to acquire a more marginalized, heavily connoted space within comics for adults. In the now acclaimed, but once difficult to publish comics by Lynda Barry, in Dominique Goblet’s partially autobiographical Pretending is Lying or more recently Weng Pixin’s Let’s Not Talk Anymore and Disa Wallander’s Becoming Horses, the childish and childlike are activated to open the spaces and meaning-making potential of the graphic novel in affective ways.
I examine the possibilities of understanding these graphic novels’ incorporation of childlike elements – ranging from the collaging of children’s drawings, the interweaving of imitations thereof, to the representation of children’s spaces, imaginations and logics – from the angles of affective connections, material interventions into the possibilities of communicating and expressing through drawing and the essence of drawing itself (teaching and transmitting it, unlearning it) to the hybrid, word-image spaces of the graphic novels themselves and how the space of the book-object is reconfigured through childlike elements.
Elisabetta Varalda, “Virginia Woolf’s life in images and words”
Over the last few years there has been a considerable increase all over Europe in graphic biographical narratives, which delve into Woolf’s life and push the boundaries of storytelling by using images as well as words.
The graphic biographies examined in this paper alternate between two different modes of engagement, since they not only recreate a life by borrowing facts, details, and events from Woolf’s real life, but they are also intertextually related to her fictional world. They not only depend on minute factual research on Woolf’s life, but also on the authors’ imaginative and creative ability. These narratives, which are now in the literary mainstream, share many characteristics with biofiction, since both undoubtedly have their roots in the practice of life writing but they free themselves from the limitations of traditional life writing and have developed as separate and distinct aesthetic practices.
As Virginia Woolf becomes the protagonist of graphic biographies, the focus of this paper, the artists highlight the palimpsestic nature of life writing through their versions of Woolf’s life story and often succeed in inviting an active participation on the reader’s part and in engaging them in a more emotional connection than prose.
Attendance is free but booking is required to receive a link to attend.
More information on the speakers and the event
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Mar 2024 | 5:30pm - 7:15pm |
Accessibility
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