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

Authors

  • Alice Balestrino Sapienza University of Rome

Keywords:

Spacetime as a narrative category, Richard McGuire, Here, The American border

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

Author Biography

Alice Balestrino, Sapienza University of Rome

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.

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Frost, Robert. “Mending Wall.” Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, W.W. Norton & Company, 2003, pp. 1880.

Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Arnold A. Knopf Publishing, 2004.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into The Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishers, 1989.

Martin, Rachel. “Billions of Years Go By, All in the Same Room.” National Public Radio Website, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/12/07/368721852/billions-of-years-go-by-all-in-the-same-room

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1994.

McGuire, Richard. Here. Pantheon Books, 2014.

O’Sullivan, John L. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” The United States Democratic Review, vol. 6, no. 23, 1839, pp. 426-430.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History, Henry Holt and Company, 1921, 1-38.

Ware, Chris. “Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire–a Game-Changing Graphic Novel.” The Guardian, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel

The Borders of the Border

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Published

2018-10-04

How to Cite

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://trrest.vot.pl/ojsus/index.php/RIAS/article/view/7231

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2018): The Borders of the Border—RIAS Vol. 11, Fall–Winter (2/2018)

Section

EMORY ELLIOTT PRIZE

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