The American Graphic Memoir

This volume examines the contribution made to memory, trauma, and autobiography studies by the American graphic memoir, a full-length autobiographical narrative in comic book form. Alternative comics, with their roots in the American underground tradition, manage to communicate the factitiousness of received systems of representation that sponsor the status quo. This makes the graphic memoir an important sub-genre of autobiographical representation, and particularly relevant for those personal narratives whose apparent wholeness is broken by a traumatic episode that lays bare the frames of perception and recognition of the subject.