Truth Games: Fact, Fiction, and Performance in British Autobiographical Comics
type: CreativeWork
description: Writing in On Autobiography, theorist Philippe Lejeune defines autobiography as: ‘Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (1989, p.4). On Autobiography built on Lejeune’s earlier writing, particularly his theory of the Autobiographical Pact (1974), in which the author and reader enter an implicit agreement where the author tells the truth of his or her life, and the reader shares with the author the assumption that the author, narrator and protagonist are the same person. Using Lejeune’s definitions, autobiographical comics can, therefore, be described as stories of people’s lives told not through prose but through a sequence of words and pictures. However, the complex relationship between word and image, and the way they simultaneously construct and undermine each other in comics, leads to many questions about how comics communicate these life narratives. This interdisciplinary PhD contains historical chapters, analysis of autobiographical comics texts—including online autobiographical comics workshops—as well as an investigation into comics performances of both fiction and autobiography. The key research questions in this thesis are: •What are the material and social conditions that allowed the production of British autobiographical comics? •How can the theories of games and play, or ludology, be applied to Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact, and what are the consequences? •How much is autobiography a product of the performance of identity? And can we consider theatrical performances as comics? Autobiography has become an increasingly important and critically acclaimed genre of comics since the turn of the 21st Century, and academic work on the subject has grown rapidly over the last ten years. Joseph Witek’s Comics As History (1989) was a significant early work in the historical, biographical, and autobiographical field, and focussed on th…
abstract: Writing in On Autobiography, theorist Philippe Lejeune defines autobiography as: ‘Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (1989, p.4). On Autobiography built on Lejeune’s earlier writing, particularly his theory of the Autobiographical Pact (1974), in which the author and reader enter an implicit agreement where the author tells the truth of his or her life, and the reader shares with the author the assumption that the author, narrator and protagonist are the same person. Using Lejeune’s definitions, autobiographical comics can, therefore, be described as stories of people’s lives told not through prose but through a sequence of words and pictures. However, the complex relationship between word and image, and the way they simultaneously construct and undermine each other in comics, leads to many questions about how comics communicate these life narratives. This interdisciplinary PhD contains historical chapters, analysis of autobiographical comics texts—including online autobiographical comics workshops—as well as an investigation into comics performances of both fiction and autobiography. The key research questions in this thesis are: •What are the material and social conditions that allowed the production of British autobiographical comics? •How can the theories of games and play, or ludology, be applied to Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact, and what are the consequences? •How much is autobiography a product of the performance of identity? And can we consider theatrical performances as comics? Autobiography has become an increasingly important and critically acclaimed genre of comics since the turn of the 21st Century, and academic work on the subject has grown rapidly over the last ten years. Joseph Witek’s Comics As History (1989) was a significant early work in the historical, biographical, and autobiographical field, and focussed on th…
author: Herd, Damon
language: eng
keywords: Comics, Autobiography, British, Truth, Performance, Fact, Fiction
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:08:19Z
provider: University of Dundee
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Dundee