The Conversation about Fun Home
This warm-up challenges you to think about—and synthesize—the scholarly conversation surrounding Fun Home. There are two parts to this assignment:
Part I
Using the library’s databases, find an unfamiliar scholarly article about Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I suggest searching Project Muse, JSTOR, and EBSCO (on the library’s home page). Don’t settle for the article at the top of the search results. Browse through the results and find an article that addresses an angle of Fun Home that interests you. Be sure your article is a peer-reviewed scholarly article, and not a book review or news story.
Once you have selected your article, cite it MLA-style at the top of your warm-up. For example (using one of the articles from our syllabus):
Eveleth, K. W. “’A Vast “Network of Transversals”‘: Labyrinthine Aesthetics in Fun Home.” South Central Review, vol. 32, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 88–109.
Then, answer the following questions in no more than 250 words:
- What is the ongoing discussion in which this article is intervening?
- What is the article’s central claim or contribution to that ongoing discussion?
- What methodological and disciplinary approaches does the author take?
- What kinds of evidence does the author rely upon?
Part II
For Part II you’re going to put the article from Part I into conversation with at least two articles about Fun Home from the syllabus (i.e. Warhol, Rohy, and Eveleth). This involves taking some element of Fun Home about which there is a differing opinion (though not necessarily mutually exclusive differences) in the various articles. Then, in no more than 250 words present an abbreviated version of a conversation about that aspect of Fun Home, with the various article authors in dialog with each other.
This assignment rehearses the “They Say” angle of the They Say / I Say guide, so be sure to consult that book. Remember to use signal phrases to introduce quotes, to paraphrase, and to alternate between quoting smaller phrases and longer sentences. Note that there is no “I Say” part of this assignment. Your intellectual work comes from figuring out how to weave these three (at a minimum) voices together, rather from introducing your own critical perspective.
You’ll be evaluated on how well you integrate the different voices in technical, stylistic, and scholarly terms. Be sure to cite your sources properly using the MLA style. Also include a properly formatted Works Cited.
Warm-Up #4 is due via Google Docs by the start of class on Tuesday, April 19.