Approaches to teaching Bechdel's Fun home

cover image

Where to find it

Information & Library Science Library

Call Number
PN6727.B3757 F863 2018
Status
Available

Authors, etc.

Names:

Summary

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.

Contents

Biographical and historical time line for Alison Bechdel / Sarah Buchmeier -- The instructor's library / Judith Kegan Gardiner -- Literary allusions in Fun home / Quentin Miller -- Theoretical allusions in Fun home / Valerie Rohy -- Interior and exterior design in Fun home / Rasmus R. Simonsen -- Reading Fun home historically : LGBTQ history and print culture / Julie R. Enszer -- "Our selves were all we had" : parsing the autobiographical in Fun home / Julia Watson -- Teaching Fun home, teaching modernism / Ariela Freedman -- Entering the archives : reading Fun home backward /Susan Van Dyne -- Self and identity : a group assignment on intertextuality in Fun home / Soo La Kim -- Interethnic space in Fun home and Dykes to watch out for / Joanne Ruvoli -- Imitating Bechdels in banned books and novel ideas : an exercise in rhetorical unmastery / Eric Detweiler -- Fun home on stage and in the classroom / Sue-Ellen Case -- Teaching Fun home as a graphic narrative : narrative and visual frames in Fun home / Daniel Mark Fogel -- Why call them graphic novels if they're true? Classifying Fun home's mirrors /Michael A. Chaney -- Don't read this : Fun home as contemporary visual culture / Alexis L. Boylan -- Photo graft : revision, reclamation, and the graphic photo / David Bahr -- Sexuality and psychology in Fun home -- Is it okay to laugh? Bechdel and the triumph of gallows humor / Audrey Bilger -- "Ring of keys" : butch lesbianism, queer theory and the lessons of Fun home / Dana Heller -- Her father's closet : Bruce Bechdel in Fun home / Monica B. Pearl -- Witnessing queer identities : teaching Fun home and contemporary memoirs / Jennifer Lemberg -- Rural space as queer space : a queer-ecology reading of Fun home / Debra J. Rosenthal and Lydia Munnell -- Teaching traumatic narrative in the English classroom : psychoanalysis in Fun home and Are you my mother? / Erica D. Galioto -- Teaching Fun home as a disability memoir / Cynthia Barounis -- Teaching Fun home online : complicating Bechdel's memoir through slippage and queer temporalities / Ellen Gil-Gómez -- Representing queer identity : a blogging exercise / Christine L. Quinan -- Teaching Fun home to instill reading resilience in first-year literature students / Judith Seaboyer and Jessica Gildersleeve -- Fun home as young adult literature and the ethics of mentoring teacher candidates / Donna L. Pasternak.

Other details