Autobiographical Comics and Graphic Novels

This book offers philosophical and psychoanalytical reflections on the selfhood shaped in autobiographical graphic narratives, or autographics. These reflections revolve around the autographic gesture . This gesture refers to, firstly, the leaving of graphic traces of an embodied self, which, secondly, transform into a drawn figure that represents this self and acquires a certain autonomy as a character, and which, thirdly, are embedded in a narrative that tells all or part of this self s life story. By combining the semiotic logics of trace, image, and narrative, the book argues, autographics perform this gesture and shape a specific form of selfhood.

The book studies this process by turning to theories about selfhood constructed primarily within the following three intellectual traditions: existential hermeneutics, as developed by Paul Ricoeur; existential phenomenology, as embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre; and psychoanalysis, through the lenses of Jacques Lacan, Marion Milner, and Donald Winnicott. The ideas of these authors, as well as Paul de Man s and Johann Gottlieb Fichte s analyses of subject-constitution, are brought into dialogue with autobiographical graphic narratives by Zoe Thorogood, Katie Green, Peter Pontiac, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Marjane Satrapi, Riad Sattouf, Keiji Nakazawa, Lynda Barry, and others.