"Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women"

Experience the complete proceedings on-line: streaming video of the lecture is now available.
Video (1:24 minutes)

Cosponsored by the Harvard College Women’s Center

Hillary Chute will discuss two memoirs— Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Books, 2003) by Marjane Satrapi and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) by Alison Bechdel—that have brought critical acclaim to women writing in the nonfiction comic genre. Persepolis is Satrapi's account of her upbringing in Tehran in the 1980s, and Fun Home is about Bechdel's experience growing up gay in rural Pennsylvania with a closeted gay father.

Chute will examine the success of these books and address the question: Why comics? Why is this kind of serious nonfiction work so successful and well-suited for the comics medium? Chute will also discuss other talents in the field, including Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

Chute is a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. She earned her PhD in English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where her dissertation focused on graphic narratives' representation of history. At Rutgers, she also developed the first courses on the study of contemporary graphic narratives. She is currently writing a book about nonfiction graphic narratives by women and working as associate editor of MetaMaus (Pantheon, forthcoming 2009), a book by comic creator Art Spiegelman. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Periodicals, Literature and Medicine, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Women's Studies Quarterly. As a freelance journalist, she has written about books and music for numerous publications, including The Believer, Time Out New York, and the Village Voice.

Reception to follow the lecture.