David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

·         part memoir/part family history/part cultural criticism, all anchored in the fascinating history of a European banking dynasty

·         a hybrid – a mix of the personal, the historical and intellectual history

·         This new hybrid genre is more interested in the personal voice, in crossing boundaries rather than policing them

·         It is his history and what academic history tends to suppress is the personal.

·         a more ‘personal’ kind of book, a book that moves between genres rather than confining itself to the single genre of conventional literary criticism (Daniel Swift)

·         The book follows the story of these objects, and the people who owned them, from fin-de-siècle Paris to pre-war Vienna, into exile in Tunbridge Wells, then to post-war Tokyo and finally to present-day London

·         He is interested in a kind of thick description, mixing the personal, the historical and the cultural

·         pulling it all together are two central narrative devices – the collection and de Waal himself

·         The grasp of the thingness of things. The importance of objects for us all. The connection between their continuity and the discontinuity in our lives. The Japanese objects in de Waal’s book stand for the history of a family, which is itself caught up in a dramatic and fascinating larger history

·         objects and memories are central to this story of loss

·         a history of objects and fragments. Instead of grand systems of thought, we increasingly think about our lives and our past, in particular, in a fragmented way

·         The past is never finished. Sometimes it erupts into the present. Sometimes it has been brought to life and then fades away, as loss

·         They all mix it up: the personal and the critical; the present and the historical; the very specific (the Green Line bus, the flowerpot, the hare with amber eyes) and the very big (a life lived in the twentieth century, bombing and warfare, the fate of the Jews in modern Europe)

This text captures the complexity of such books as The Hare with Amber Eyes, and how complicated it is to classify them correctly because they mix so many aspects of different genres that it is almost not possible. Because of that I sometimes disapprove that everything has to fit into clear-cut categories, especially when some works really transcend that notion.

Edmund de Waal - The Hare with Amber Eyes

Reading Journal – Session 12 – 24/01/2017

Edmund de Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes

In some ways, this book was completely different than what I expected. I have a version with an actual rabbit on the cover, so I expected something from the perspective of a rabbit, to be honest. I’m also not an art person so I didn’t really care for de Waal’s extensive descriptions of Charles’s art collection in the first part of the book. But it was a really interesting topic, to trace his family history via the ownership of this Japanese figurine collection and it addresses a lot of historical events that I had no idea about, especially not from the perspective of a rich Austrian Jew and by taking into account the value of the object during those times.

At points I missed the addressing of the netsuke, once more than fifty pages go by without mention, mostly because that’s what I expected the book to be about as a red threat, but I can certainly understand even de Waal’s confusion about what this book is supposed to be about because it brings together so many different things in an interesting way. And it led me to remember some of my own family history and what they told me about those times.

Link to picture

Rocío G. Davis – A Graphic Self

Reading Journal – Session 11 – 17/01/2017

Rocío G. Davis – A Graphic Self

·         as contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of experiences, these texts become experimental and revisionary narratives, which challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms

·         the increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit the tensions between personal and communal discourse within the text, and signify on a discursive level

·         her memoir explains in particular ways the present self, and reasserts how the past can only be known and understood through narrative – in her case, a multilayered form of narrating

·         the reader accompanies the writer as her self-as-child learns about heritage culture and experiences historical events, fashioning a seemingly artless insider perspective that is, nonetheless, complexly layered

·         the study of comics operates a significant link between textual and visual studies

·         comics as a sophisticated and developed medium, a set of cultural signifying practices in which the intersections of culture, history, ethnicity, and gender can be effectively negotiated by cartoonists and their adult readers

·         the potential of the graphic narrative as a highly dynamic text, as opposed to the more static single-image narrative painting or plain text, determines the dialectic between text and image, providing creators with a wider range of artistic and imaginative possibilities

·         flexibility of the comics to literally represent memory, dreams, possibilities, and engage the idiosyncrasies of the present

·         cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image through cartooning, we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t (McCloud, 1994: 30, emphasis in original)

·         I propose to read Satrapi’s transcultural graphic autobiography as a literary and cultural site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and social transformation

·         Graphic narratives contain more gaps than a traditional autobiography – even those written in as separate stories – and we must therefore read the design and intention behind the textual destabilizations and the cultural implications of such fragmentation

·         Satrapi uses the conventions of Western perception of Iranian culture to criticize it from her transcultural position

·         By giving her memoir Iran’s historical name, she posits the text as a doubled narrative of memory – that of a country and a childhood lost, as well as the intricate connection between the two

·         Marji’s story is one of contradictions, of a child finding herself between cultural, political, religious, linguistic and social demands and impositions

·         “I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it,” she explained. “It would not be anything but cynical. That’s why I drew it. People are not ready to read a book about all the misery of the third world, and I don’t blame them” (Bahrampour, 2003: 1)

I am not a reader of comics or biography, so both are still new and interesting genres to me and after last session with Prof. Packard I am still fascinated by the different opportunities drawings present to tell a story, and especially this story. Everything on the page is intentional, more than with movies or books is something that I have not considered before he said it on Tuesday, as well as the fact that a comic often depicts the absence of an action instead of the action itself. Combining these things with the information from this essay – that Satrapi would have been unable to write a text about her memories without sounding overly cynical, but was able to draw her memories with a humor that would have been absent otherwise – is really telling of the power and opportunity that a graphic memoir possesses. She is able to share her memories and juxtapose the different aspects and influences in her life in a way that seems effortless, humorous, truthful, but never too much. It highlights the good and the bad for Western audiences unfamiliar with this part of Eastern history in an easily accessible way without being either too funny or too horrific.

Marjane Satrapi – Persepolis, The Story of a Childhood

Reading Journal – Session 10 – 10/1/2017

Marjane Satrapi – Persepolis, The Story of a Childhood 

I don’t usually read comics, so this is not a genre I am very familiar with. I’m also not very familiar with the history of the Islamic Revolution, so my background knowledge consists of basically nothing. In a way, I feel like I missed a lot of details about what happened in the bigger picture, but I also feel that maybe it is better that I know so little, so I more or less have the same perspective of the somewhat naïve little girl who tells her story.

In fiction, it is more powerful to have a personal perspective when dealing with historical events. Gone With the Wind employs the love story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler when describing the Civil War, Titanic follows Rose and Jack, making it a more powerful movie than the ones that came before, The Normal Heart is presented from the activist’s perspective fighting during the AIDS crisis to have a greater and more personal impact. Persepolis does that same and it is even more powerful because it is the true personal story of a little girl growing up during the war. The desire to fight for the country, fight for what is right by protesting, telling the truth, but also the desire to listen to music and hang up posters on the wall, go to parties and have a better story to tell about a hero in the family to best someone else.

The comic format never uses unnecessary words, metaphors or countless transitions of prose. But it can say so much with just a few drawn lines and it has a really powerful effect. I was glad that this format was chosen to tell the story of the childhood. It was impactful but it also never lingered too long, it switched between destruction, death, happiness and humor and it felt like a very good representation of what life was like during this time. I enjoyed reading it very much.

Link to picture