2025/06/12 by Arnaud Schmitt · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.16995/cg.18029
openalex publication_date 2025/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Alison Bechdel’s work might essentially be seen as autobiographical, but one can find various levels of nonfiction in it and some of these levels are openly biographical or biofictional. Indeed, autobiographers enlist multifarious forms of testimonies, unacknowledged most of the time, but in the case of Bechdel’s autobiographical work, it conjures up major cultural figures such as Proust in Fun Home for instance, Virginia Woolf in Are You My Mother? or Jack Kerouac in The Secret of Superhuman Strength. The author’s intent here is not to corroborate any facts about her own life, but to reflect upon it by drawing parallels with the lives of great artists in order to clarify but also complexify aspects of her life narrative. Bechdel’s own approach in Are You My Mother? that I will study in this article offers a different, multifaced form of biography: the life of the Other, Virginia Woolf, as an echo of her own life. Throughout, I will focus both on the textual and the visual dimension of Bechdel’s way of integrating the biographical into the autobiographical.