ENG101.12. Spring 2015. Emory University.
I have finally finished my mapping of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Compared to Tracing Persepolis, this project was more arduous and perhaps even more time-intensive. I am not a very analytical thinker and instead think about things in a black and white manner. As such, I struggled to form a detailed analysis like this one. To check out my map and examination of the text, click here. To take a look at the project guidelines, click here. I hope you enjoy my project!
This project was by far the most difficult project that I have done so far. I had to read through Fun Home again, and mark the important points and do a lot of reading between the lines (or panels). However, the most difficult part of the project was to find a simple yet meaningful way to organize and map out the pattern that I have found in the book. Here is the link to the assignment prompt.
In Fun Home, the most important patterns that stuck out to me was how important her dad’s actions were in her life even though she did not realize it in her youth. As she constructs the memoir, she focuses on how she think that his death was a result of her coming out. By constructing the album, Bechdel captures the objective reality of Allison while playing with the memories in the book. Allison is yearning to connect with her father. so hints at certain mannerisms, which starkly differ from her actions in order to convey a cycle.
For example, on page 15, At a young age she notices how different her and her father were. He liked her to wear dresses, while she preferred trousers. He liked to keep things tidy and she was messy. She recalls herself as being the “Spartan to her father’s Athenian”.
While later on in the book, on page 117, she reflects the idea of her father’s death being her beginning. Moreover, she clarifies that “the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my [her] truth.” She is able to locate her personal narrative in history, as she notices the life of her father. My abstract model successfully conveys how her personal narrative comes alive throughout her focus on her dad’s life. Although this assignment was extremely difficult, it was well worth it for my understanding of the book. Enjoy!
Citations:
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
I published my Mapping Fun Home assignment here! This was the definitely the hardest assignment we’ve been assigned thus far in this class. It was really hard to come up with a way to organize the graphic novel and put it all together into a model that would contribute to analyzing Fun Home. I chose to make my model more simple and to use it as a way to focus on the main patterns I saw. I wanted to be able to tie in the model to use it as a “guide” for my analysis.
I have published my map and analysis of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. This was the most difficult assignment that we have had thus far. The biggest challenge of the assignment was deciding how to start. The map that I chose to use would be the largest determiner in how well the assignment was done. This put a lot of pressure on this choice. If you would like to see the assignment for yourself click here. If you would like to see other assignments similar to this or the original prompt click here.
,Greer Howard
Remember, come to class tomorrow ready to talk for one minute about your plans for the mapping Fun Home project–have a draft of your elevator pitch ready to go. You will also need to be ready to listen to your classmates as they pitch their projects and to offer feedback to them. Please make sure to get to class on time, so that we can start and get in 8 rounds of dialog.
Bring your copy of Fun Home with you to class, along with any notes or sketches that you’ve made.
Half the class will remain stationary while the other half will rotate seats every 6 minutes. At the start of each session, you and your partner will take turns talking for one minute about your plans. Listen carefully and take notes as your partner talks. Once you have each described the project you have in mind, you’ll have 4 minutes to give each other feedback and suggestions. When I call time, those of you who are rotating will each move one seat over and then and the process will repeat.
In the 50 minutes of class, we should be able to get in 8 rounds of 6-minute dialogs. You’ll have spoken one-on-one with half of the class about the projects, so by the end of the day Friday, you should have a broad overview of what your classmates are thinking about and you should have gotten a range of different responses and suggestions about what you are thinking about. Hopefully, you will leave class on Friday with a sense of empowerment as you come down the stretch on finishing the assignment.
(image credit: “blip_4: Speed Dating Jelly Babies” by Flickr user Michael Crane)
“First Chapters” by Stefanie Posavec. Qtd in “Distant Reading” by Scott Esposito. The Point 9: 2015, 183-93.
The featured image above is a map of the first chapter of The Great Gatsby, created by Stefanie Posavec as part of a series called First Chapters, in which she took the first chapters of a series of literary works and counted how many words were in each sentence, mapping the lengths of the sentences according to a very simple set of rules (see “First chapters“, to the right).
She has also mapped the first chapters of Cannery Row, A Room of One’s Own, Beloved, On the Road, and many more.
The analytical process is really simple and the tools necessary are so easy–any software that can plot a line of a certain length would work. And if you wanted to add another layer of complexity to the process, you could easily make lines different colors or use different line types (wavy lines, dotted lines, jagged lines, big thick lines, etc) to convey something about the sentences besides just length, say tone or style.
These mapping techniques would not work wholesale for the Fun Home projects that you all are working on; you probably wouldn’t get very far with mapping out sentence lengths given the visual nature of the graphic novel. However, can you think about ways that you might do something similar with graphic novels?
You might also check out some of the other types of literary maps that Posavec has produced. She created an iPhone app for Stephen Fry’s book that uses tags and a circular data visualization in order to allow readers to move in a nonlinear fashion through the book. She also created a data visualization of the lyrics of an OK Go album, which became the album’s cover and other artwork. She’s got lots of other similar cool work, which might spark ideas for you.
Detail from “(En)Tangled Word Bank by Stefanie Posavec and Greg McInerny.
The image to the left shows one of the series of data visualizations that Posavec and Greg McInery created epresenting the six editions of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The shapes represent every chapter of this edition of the book, and the color indicates whether that paragraph remained in the next edition of the book.