Approaches to Teaching Bechdel’s Fun Home
Afterword by Alison Bechdel
- Editor: Judith Kegan Gardiner
- Pages: 216
- Published: 2018
- ISBN: 9781603293594 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603293587 (Hardcover)
“A valuable, thoughtful, and broadly engaged set of essays that will inform the teaching of Fun Home across a number of levels: late high school, undergraduate, and graduate.”
—Jane Tolmie, Queen’s University
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, frank representations of sexuality and death, and intertextuality with modernist novels, Greek myths, and other works 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 LGBQT lives.
David Bahr
Cynthia Barounis
Audrey Bilger
Alexis L. Boylan
Sarah Buchmeier
Sue-Ellen Case
Michael A. Chaney
Eric Detweiler
Julie R. Enszer
Daniel Mark Fogel
Ariela Freedman
Erica D. Galioto
Jessica Gildersleeve
Ellen Gil-Gómez
Dana Heller
Soo La Kim
Jennifer Lemberg
D. Quentin Miller
Lydia Munnell
Donna L. Pasternak
Monica B. Pearl
Christine L. Quinan
Valerie Rohy
Debra J. Rosenthal
JoAnne Ruvoli
Judith Seaboyer
Rasmus R. Simonsen
Susan Van Dyne
Julia Watson
Preface (xi)
Introduction (1)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Biographical and Historical Time Line for Alison Bechdel (17)
The Instructor’s Library (18)
Literary Allusions in Fun Home (24)
Theoretical Allusions in Fun Home (33)
Interior and Exterior Design in Fun Home (39)
Reading Fun Home Historically: LGBTQ History and Print Culture (46)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Fun Home in the Literature Classroom
“Our Selves Were All We Had”: Parsing the Autobiographical in Fun Home (55)
Teaching Fun Home, Teaching Modernism (66)
Entering the Archives: Reading Fun Home Backward (73)
Self and Identity: A Group Assignment on Intertextuality in Fun Home (79)
Interethnic Space in Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For (84)
Imitating Bechdels in Banned Books and Novel Ideas: An Exercise in Rhetorical Unmastery (91)
Fun Home on the Stage and in the Classroom (97)
Teaching Fun Home as a Graphic Narrative
Narrative and Visual Frames in Fun Home (102)
Why Call Them Graphic Novels If They’re True? Classifying Fun Home’s Mirrors (108)
Don’t Read This: Fun Home as Contemporary Visual Culture (113)
Photo Graft: Revision, Reclamation, and the Graphic Photo (117)
Sexuality and Psychology in Fun Home
Is It Okay to Laugh? Bechdel and the Triumph of Gallows Humor (122)
“Ring of Keys”: Butch Lesbianism, Queer Theory, and the Lessons of Fun Home (126)
Her Father’s Closet: Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home (131)
Witnessing Queer Identities: Teaching Fun Home and Contemporary Memoirs (136)
Rural Space as Queer Space: A Queer-Ecology Reading of Fun Home (141)
Teaching Traumatic Narrative in the English Classroom
Psychoanalysis in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? (146)
Teaching Fun Home as a Disability Memoir (151)
Classroom Contexts and Challenges
Teaching Fun Home Online: Complicating Bechdel’s Memoir through Slippage and Queer Temporalities (155)
Representing Queer Identity: A Blogging Exercise (160)
Teaching Fun Home to Instill Reading Resilience in First-Year Literature Students (163)
Fun Home as Young Adult Literature and the Ethics of Mentoring Teacher Candidates (168)
Afterword (173)
Notes on Contributors (175)
Survey Participants (181)
Works Cited (185)
Index (201)
