The Art of Memoirs: An Exploration of the Dynamic Between the Narrative and Visual in Graphic Memoirs

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growing movement in the study of comics or graphic novels as a literary form. Graphic novels as the contemporary audience understands them are a relatively recent development of sequential art. Within the contemporary genre of literary comics, autobiographical comics are one of the most prominent varieties, Autobiographical graphic novels present an interesting hybrid between different literary traditions as well as between the visual and the textual. This thesis aims to further explore the form of autobiographical graphic novels and what the form of a graphic novel adds to the narrative of an autobiographical coming of age story. The focus will lie on the relation between text and image in the graphic memoir.