Fun Home

A memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father--a funeral home director, high school English teacher, and closeted homosexual.

Books about Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has quickly joined the ranks of celebrated literary graphic novels. Set in part at a family-run funeral home, the book explores Alison’s complicated relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. Amid the tensions of her home life, Alison discovers her own lesbian sexuality and her talent for drawing. The coming-of-age story and graphic format appeal to students. However, the book’s nonlinear structure; intertextuality with modernist novels, Greek myths, and other works; and frank representations of sexuality and death present challenges in the classroom. This volume offers strategies for teaching Fun Home in a variety of courses, including literature, women’s and gender studies, art, and education. Part 1, “Materials,†outlines the text’s literary, historical, and theoretical allusions. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,†emphasize the work’s genres, including autobiography and graphic narrative, as well as its psychological dimensions, including trauma, disability, and queer identity. The essays give options for reading Fun Home along with Bechdel’s letters and drafts; her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For; the Broadway musical adaptation of the book; and other stories of LGBTQ lives.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2020 im Fachbereich Germanistik - Neuere Deutsche Literatur, Note: 1,7, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Kindheitserinnerungen und dem Coming-out in Bechdels grafischem Roman. Die konkrete Frage lautet hierzu, inwieweit die dargestellten Kindheitserinnerungen der Erzählinstanz den Verlauf ihres Coming-out als Studentin beeinflussen. Um die Verknüpfungen herzustellen, schaue ich mir im theoretischen Teil zunächst an, wie Erinnerungen in einem Roman erzählt werden. Dazu bietet der Erinnerungsroman hilfreiche Merkmale, die im analytischen Teil der Arbeit aufgegriffen werden. Danach stelle ich die Graphic Novel vor, da ihre besondere Darstellungsform vor allem für die Queer Studies wichtig sind, wie Bechdel mit "Fun Home" beweist. Auf den theoretischen Teil folgt nun die textgebundene Analyse im vierten Kapitel, in der es darum geht, auf welche Weise Alison ihre Erinnerungen darstellt. Dabei spielt ihr Vater eine wichtige Rolle, dessen heteronormatives Erscheinungsbild von ihr aufgedröselt und neu konstruiert wird. In ihren Kindheitserinnerungen ist Alison häufig zwischen fiktiver und realer Welt gefangen, dass sich auch in ihren Memoiren zeigt. Das fünfte Kapitel beinhaltet die textliche Analyse ihres Coming-out und wie dabei ihre Kindheitserinnerungen mitwirken.

"When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires. Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes."--

Alison Bechdel's celebrated graphic memoir, lovingly adapted into a riveting new musical.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Erfurt (Philosopische Fakultät), course: Literature in Images: Graphic Novels, language: English, abstract: This work analyzes the perception of authencity in "Fun Home". Alison Bechdel’s "Fun Home" from 2007 is a graphic memoir that tries to create a sense of truthfulness to the reality of the author’s memories by employing various means. This paper examines the techniques Bechdel uses for the creation of what may look for the reader like authenticity. By using for example Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact the text closely analyzes the presentation of text and image concerning the protagonist Alison and the narrating voice as well as the role of photographs in the text. By investigating the protagonists self-portrayal through text and images this paper tries to point out the successfulness of appearing truth of the story as well as distinguish in which instance a disruption of before identified means in form of fictionalization can be found in the text and how this influences the perception of its authenticity. The second part of the paper then focuses on photography as another means to invoke a perception of truthfulness in the

"Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel."

Comics featuring LGBTQ children have the burden of challenging cis/heteronormative versions of childhood. Such examples of childhood, according to author Katherine Bond Stockton, are false and restrict children to a vision of innocence that leaves no room for queer children to experience their own versions of childhood. Furthermore, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community has taken a "progressive"-based approach to time, assuming that newer generations have avoided the trauma of the past because ideas about sexual orientation and gender have advanced with time. Newer generations of the LGBTQ community forget that many have struggled for change to occur, instead choosing to forget the wounds of the past. By analyzing two comic works--Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home and Sophie Labelle's web comic series Assigned Male--I argue that we must let go of our suspicion towards LGBTQ child characters and open ourselves up to what can be learned from them. I also argue that both the past (with its wounds and trauma) and the future must be accepted into the present in order to give children the childhood they desire, rather than the childhood we recall. Both Fun Home and Assigned Male demonstrate that childhood is far from

Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.