Alison Bechdel | The Psychochronology of Everyday Life

Alison Bechdel will discuss some of the strategies she has used to navigate time in her various graphic memoirs. From the simultaneity of events in the unconscious, to the time-stamped documents of evidence, to the search for patterns in random, unspooling life, to the ultimate problem of mortality, Bechdel shows her work in search of visual solutions to lost time.

About the Speakers

Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. In 2012, she released her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award. Most recently, she published The Secret to Superhuman Strength. She is also known for originating the Bechdel test.

Hillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of six books, including Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (2017), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form(2016), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists(2014), and Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics(2010). She has written for venues including Artforum, Bookforum, the Village Voice, and the New York Review of Books. Her collection Maus Now: Selected Writing, is forthcoming in 2022. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

About the Hauser Forum

Established with the generous gift of Rita E. Hauser, the Rita E. Hauser Forum for the Arts is broadly conceived to address “The State of the Arts” across the globe.