- Select one panel that captures the significance of Chapter 5, then provide the page number here _______ and below write a brief description of that panel:
- Provide an analysis or close reading of the panel by discussing its significance in relation to this chapter and also the text as a whole. Please also include how the author is challenging the reader’s experience of reading? See examples below.
Below are two paragraphs from a co-written book review of Fun Home with Dr. Sara Cooper and yours truly. For the writing assignment above, I am asking you to attempt the writerly moves below in your own paragraph. Notice structure, presentation, and style. Try borrowing sentences as templates.
- Notice how the opening and ending sentence introduce and conclude the argument.
- Notice how the graphic novel is discussed versus the summary provided of a secondary text, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (allusion in graphic novel).
- Notice the questions proposed to complicate the representation of Bruce’s character in graphic novel yet in relation to Mr. Antolini in The Catcher in the Rye.
- Finally, notice how my voice weaves in and out of quotations, but I always have a hold on the sources discussed.
- (You might begin by re-reading each of the paragraphs below, marking with your pencil the moves made from one sentence to the next – the task is mainly to think about paragraphs at the sentence level, or imagine them as mini-essays and how to best capture one scene and remain with it).
Paragraph 1
Storytelling in this graphic novel takes on a range of exciting techniques, as in the class discussion about J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, where Bruce’s simple question to his students of “Who is Mr. Antolini?” carries underling implications (198). The irony is doubled when Bruce adds, “He makes a pass at Holden. Did any of you twits read this?” (199). In Salinger’s novel, Mr. Antolini is Holden’s English teacher and the only character who reaches the boy. Yet when Mr. Antolini touches Holden’s forehead while he is sleeping, Holden thus interprets Mr. Antolini’s intentions, later regretting ever judging him. As a seasoned romancer of his own students, how clearly does the narrator’s father see the parallels? Is he hoping for the forgiveness and acceptance of the boys? Is he wishing, however in vain, that his own intentions are more innocent than they seem? Again, the ability to include images allows for yet another twist, because above a male student in the class is a square bubble that reads, “Preternaturally handsome football player who was currently helping dad haul junk out of our basement” (199). The literary mirror shows the complexity of the author’s own feelings and musings on the matter in very few words.
Paragraph 2
Illustrations, Bechdel says, “enabled me to move my text around on the page […] to make segues and associations that I couldn’t in prose, but that I could when I added strands of images” (Bat Segundo). Earlier in Fun Home, the movie It’s A Wonderful Life is playing on TV while in the background Bruce is chasing and yelling at his son around the house—an almost exact reproduction of a scene from the movie. The side panel reads: “It could have been a romantic story, like in It’s A Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fix up that big old house and raise their family there” (10). Although Bruce is also restoring their “Gothic Revival” house, the author shows clearly that any other correlation is lost, and indeed in the “true” story of Fun Home the father surrenders to death rather than to happiness (8). When the author depicts her mother’s role as Ms. Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, one immediately sees the link between the two domineering women who struggle to control at least the appearances of convention, the basis of Oscar Wilde’s satirical critique of the living of lies.
Paragraphs 1 & 2 are used with permission and courtesy of Dr. Sara E. Cooper and Rosa A. Martinez. Source:
Cooper, Sara E. and Rosa A. Martinez. “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” Book Review. Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 12, Issue 2-3, 2008.
