Douglas Deutsch
Secondary Source Report:
Citation:
Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 129–140, 10.1353/wsq.0.0051. Accessed 16 Aug. 2019.
Author’s Thesis:
“Fun Home bears witness not only to Bruce Bechdel’s trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist’s effort to claim the authority to represent their story.” (page 1)
Fun Home is more than just an introspection of the relationship between her and her father, but an attempt to validate her perspective of the past.
Lemberg begins by immediately stating Bechdel’s credibility as a skillful storyteller through mentioning her previous comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Lemberg does this to emphasize the nuance that Bechdel explores her familial relationships with. She then explains the main points of conflict in “Fun Home” to use as a basis for her thesis. Lemberg claims that “Fun Home bears witness not only to Bruce Bechdel’s trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist’s effort to claim the authority to represent their story (page 1).” Lemberg is essentially saying that Fun Home is more than just an introspection of the relationship between her and her father, but an attempt to validate her perspective on their story. Lemberg responds to the claims that photographs and literature are valued more in Fun Home than comics themselves by citing from Ann Cverkovich on their usefulness as “documentary evidence.” Lemberg claims that Bechdel backs up the merits of comics by creating a complex relationship between pictures and words. This piece of work, according to Cverkovich, is a “postmemory… a term for how the memory of trauma belonging to one generation can shape the memories of the next,” and Lemberg builds on this by using it as evidence of how Bechdel keeps the authenticity in her story. Lemberg uses this conversation from other essays relevant to this subject to particularize her claims until she can reveal the essence of them. Lemberg begins her essay with an overview of how Bechdel’s cartoon drawing style relates to her perception of her father, and then transitions to a more specific analysis of how Bechdel’s drawings cause the reader to get lost in the image. She explains how the house acted as the fathers presence. Throughout the essay, Lemberg inserts images from Fun Home to supplement her claims, often used in conjunction with analysis explaining how the style of drawing relates to the works central theme. After describing Bechdel’s images and the power they evoke, particularly through the use of detail in detaching someone from the viewer, Lemberg finishes her essay by returning to her thesis that Bechdel was attempting to find validity in her authority to represent the story.
Moves:
- Concluding with “Ultimately
- Simultaneously bringing in two works relevant to the subject and building them off each other
- Seamlessly transition from broad topics to specific topics.
