Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative <i>Here</i>

Alice Balestrino

Published: 2018-10-04

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2018)

Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here

Alice Balestrino

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

JEL Codes

Comic Studies, Memory Studies, 21st Century American Literature, Deleuze and Guattari

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Balestrino, A. (2018). Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative <i>Here</i>. Review of International American Studies, 11(2). Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/7231

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Alice Balestrino

alice.balestrino@hotmail.it

Affiliation:

Sapienza University of Rome Italy

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

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.

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2018)
Published: 2019-01-13

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

Publisher

University of Silesia Press

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Placing Time, Timing Space. Memory as Border and Line of (Hi)Stories in Richard McGuire’s Graphic Narrative Here

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Alice Balestrino

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