The historical vocation and ambition de vérité of many recent literary works is returning to the fore the debate about dichotomies (critically useful, yet unescapably aporetic) as true/false, factual/fictional, representation and event, personal memory and collective experiences, drawing the attention on the importance of the process of selection (and suppression) of the narrated events, of the form chosen to recount them, of the choice of the point of view. Graphic novels are no exception; on the contrary, being polisemiotic and intermedial, these works multiply the mediations and the combinations between the aforementioned categories. Moreover, part of the legacy of Maus – celebrated graphic memoir set during WWII, and one of the key texts in the passage from comic strips to the graphic novel format – is the recognition of the comics medium as a form particularly suitable to convey factual stories (auto- and heterobiographical, documentary and so on). That is evident considering the success of the contemporary graphic journalism formula and the growing number of graphic novels dealing with history, and especially with the subject of war. If the relationship between comics and war has always been very tight – one may think of the fundamental role of comics in propaganda and post-war ideology, subjects that have already been widely investigated – the passage to the graphic novel format engendered the diffusion of a new, authorial perspective on war. It is easy to find examples of such more complex approaches to the theme amongst the publications of the last few years – one may recount Kubert’s counterfactual holocaust tale Yossel, 1945, Gipi’s unastoria subplot which shapes a WWI story being both directly and allegorically related to the main one, the multi-authored Vie tranchées and its highly interesting use of archival material. In this presentation, I will draw upon two main examples - Emmanuel Guibert’s La guerre d’Alan and Jacques Tardi’s Moi, Rene Tardi, prisonnier de guerre au Stalag IIB - to reread Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, in order to demonstrate the necessity to take into account the medium-specific elements of historical and biographical testimonies.
Life During Wartime. Storia e (auto)biografia in Emmanuel Guibert e Jacques Tardi
BUSI RIZZI, GIORGIO
2016
Abstract
The historical vocation and ambition de vérité of many recent literary works is returning to the fore the debate about dichotomies (critically useful, yet unescapably aporetic) as true/false, factual/fictional, representation and event, personal memory and collective experiences, drawing the attention on the importance of the process of selection (and suppression) of the narrated events, of the form chosen to recount them, of the choice of the point of view. Graphic novels are no exception; on the contrary, being polisemiotic and intermedial, these works multiply the mediations and the combinations between the aforementioned categories. Moreover, part of the legacy of Maus – celebrated graphic memoir set during WWII, and one of the key texts in the passage from comic strips to the graphic novel format – is the recognition of the comics medium as a form particularly suitable to convey factual stories (auto- and heterobiographical, documentary and so on). That is evident considering the success of the contemporary graphic journalism formula and the growing number of graphic novels dealing with history, and especially with the subject of war. If the relationship between comics and war has always been very tight – one may think of the fundamental role of comics in propaganda and post-war ideology, subjects that have already been widely investigated – the passage to the graphic novel format engendered the diffusion of a new, authorial perspective on war. It is easy to find examples of such more complex approaches to the theme amongst the publications of the last few years – one may recount Kubert’s counterfactual holocaust tale Yossel, 1945, Gipi’s unastoria subplot which shapes a WWI story being both directly and allegorically related to the main one, the multi-authored Vie tranchées and its highly interesting use of archival material. In this presentation, I will draw upon two main examples - Emmanuel Guibert’s La guerre d’Alan and Jacques Tardi’s Moi, Rene Tardi, prisonnier de guerre au Stalag IIB - to reread Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, in order to demonstrate the necessity to take into account the medium-specific elements of historical and biographical testimonies.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
