Dr. Candida Rifkind, photo supplied
UWinnipeg’s Dr. Candida Rifkind co-edited the book Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives with Linda Warley. The book also features essays by Rifkind, and two other UWnnipeg English professors Dr. Kathleen Venema and Dr. Doris Wolf.
The book presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian cartoonists working in graphic life narrative, from confession to memoir to biography.
The contributors draw on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history to show how Canadian cartoonists have become so prominent in the international market for comic books based on real-life experiences. The essays explore the visual styles and storytelling techniques of Canadian cartoonists, as well as their shared concern with the spectacular vulnerability of the self. Canadian Graphic also considers the role of graphic life narratives in reimagining the national past, including Indigenous–settler relations, both world wars, and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
Contributors use a range of approaches to analyze the political, aesthetic, and narrative tensions in these works between self and other, memory and history, individual and collective. An original contribution to the study of auto/biography, alternative comics, and Canadian print culture, Canadian Graphic proposes new ways of reading the intersection of comics and auto/ biography both within and across national boundaries.
Rifkind is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Winnipeg. She published Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and The Left in 1930s Canada (2009) and has chapters on graphic life narratives in Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015), Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014), and the journals Biography, International Journal of Comic Art, and Canadian Review of American Studies.
Linda Warley specializes in Canadian life writing, including texts by First Nations and Métis authors. She has a recent chapter on John Gallant and Seth’s Bannock, Beans and Black Tea in Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014). She is co-editor, with Marlene Kadar,, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan of Tracing the Autobiographical (WLU Press, 2005) and, with Jeanne Perreault and Marlene Kadar, of Photographs, Histories, and Meanings (2009).
