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Du côté de Fun Home: Alison Bechdel Rewrites Marcel Proust

Date Published:

7 June, 2015

Abstract:

This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home. The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.

 

June 2015: Fiorenzo Iuliano works as a lecturer in American literature at the University of Cagliari (Italy). His research interests include contemporary American fiction and graphic novels, cultural studies and theories of the body and corporeality. In 2012 he authored a book on the representation of the body in American fiction of the 1990s and a monograph on the work of Gayatri Ch. Spivak. He is currently writing a book on the cultural scene of Seattle in the 1990s.

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/14/2020