Commemoration, modernism and self-identity in contemporary graphic memoir

This essay focuses on two texts, Mary M. Talbot’s and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012) and Sarah Laing’s Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir (2016). Both texts are in a direct line of influence from modernist authors such as James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, but also from an earlier appropriation of modernism to support a life narrative within the graphic novel form, Alison Bechdel’s celebrated text Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). As I will show by responding to the critical background from both modernist studies and comics studies, these more recent graphic memoirs, which I term ‘auto/biographics’, use comparative memory to register historical changes between our generation and the modernist generation in order to fully develop their memory narratives. Talbot’s and Laing’s combination of words and images, memoir and biography, combine difficulties of identity and resemblance in hybrid forms that both seek to commemorate modernism as a historical period and attempt to render the ambiguities of memory through modernist techniques.