Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge will be published as part of the Purdue Studies in Romance Literature (PSRL) series on August 15, 2024. PSRL publishes books on topics of literary importance that make a significant contribution to Romance scholarship. Books in the series are evaluated, edited, and prepared by the School of Languages and Literatures in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University and cover a wide range of topics and deal with topics in French, Italian, Luso-Brazilian, Spanish, and Spanish American literatures.
About the Book
Santé, intimité, et identité dans la bande dessinée autobiographique de tradition franco-belge examines the ways different autobiographical comic books explore the theme of health, and its influence on identity construction. How do artists represent abstract feelings of pain? How do illnesses influence our sense of self? What is the role of others in our personal history? Our state of health, both physical and mental, has a profound effect on our identity, and how we perceive and tell stories about this dimension of our lives is crucial to forming a sense of self, particularly in a contemporary digitalized world that is now flooded with information and images once considered too private for public consumption. All the works studied exhibit a constant tension between the anxieties of revealing intimacy and vulnerability, and the desire to make suffering meaningful, which is a fundamental aspect of these authors’ quest to recover and to reconstitute a sense of self. Informed by the insights of intimacy studies, psychoanalysis, comics studies, and visual studies, this book shows how these works participate in the process of meaning-making, and how the comics genre allows them to do so in particularly inventive and contemporary ways.
You can read more about this book and its author in Health, Illness, and Autobiography: The Incredible Depth of the Graphic Novel, a Q & A with author Cynthia Laborde.
About the Author
Cynthia Laborde, PhD, is an associate professor of French at the University of Texas at Arlington. She specializes in twentieth-century French studies, and her research focuses exclusively on comics books. She has published various articles and book chapters on French classics, as well as lesser-known works of nonfiction. She also has led several pedagogical workshops related to bandes dessinées.
Advanced Praise
“This book is beautifully written and solidly anchored in bande dessinée theory, the medical humanities, and life writing. Laborde breaks new ground in both the medical humanities and the bande dessinée in that she is the first to focus entirely on autobiographical explorations of graphic medicine. With this book, Laborde makes an important contribution to the study of comics and the bande dessinée that focuses less on why this medium is worthy of our attention and more on what it has the potential to achieve. —Jennifer Howell, Illinois State University
Read the Book
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Note for Media and Book Reviewers
A digital review copy of this book is available via Edelweiss for librarians, book review bloggers, and journalists. Additional questions about this book may be directed to sales and marketing manager Bryan Shaffer.
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