Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative <i>Here</i>
Abstract
Alice Balestrino
Sapienza University of Rome
Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line
of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here.
This article interrogates the Cartesian understanding of time and space in narratives grounded in memorial endeavors. It focuses on the lines that define the interconnectedness between these two dimensions in relation to the introduction of the phenomenological category of memory as a third element providing a perspective on reality and blurring the borders between present and past; here and there. This composite, operative category is tested in the analysis of Richard McGuire’s graphic narrative Here (2014) that, both on the level of the format and on that of the story, outlines the porosity and the ultimate disappearance of the spatiotemporal borders by means of memories. This work conceives of a historical simultaneity that soaks a particular space in its past and of the margins of contingency that separate what pertains to History, what to individual stories and what gets forgotten instead – a representation which is studied against the background of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s speculations on memory in A Thousand Plateaus.
Keywords: Spacetime as a narrative category, Richard McGuire, Here, The American border
Keywords
Spacetime as a narrative category; Richard McGuire; Here; The American border
References
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Martin, Rachel. “Billions of Years Go By, All in the Same Room.” National Public Radio Website, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/12/07/368721852/billions-of-years-go-by-all-in-the-same-room
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1994.
McGuire, Richard. Here. Pantheon Books, 2014.
O’Sullivan, John L. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” The United States Democratic Review, vol. 6, no. 23, 1839, pp. 426-430.
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Ware, Chris. “Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire–a Game-Changing Graphic Novel.” The Guardian, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel
Sapienza University of Rome Italy
Alice Balestrino is a PhD candidate in American literature at “Sapienza” University of Rome. She holds a BA and an MA in Modern European and American Literatures from the University of Turin. Her research focuses mainly on Holocaust fiction published in the aftermath of 9/11. She has published on Jewish-American Holocaust literature and postmemory: “Living in the Presence of an Absence. The Puzzling Holocaust Legacy of the American Post- Holocaust Generation” in Ricognizioni. Rivista di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne; and “‘Radiant Darkness Leaked out Through Her Crack:’ Cracked Families and Leaking Trauma in Michael Chabon’s Moonglow” in CoSMo – Comparative Studies in Modernism.
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