{"product_id":"9780814349151","title":"Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women's Graphic Narratives","description":"\u003cp\u003eAarons's insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women's literature, memory studies, and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePublisher Marketing\u003c\/strong\u003e: Focusing on six Jewish comics artists across borders, Victoria Aarons adroitly demonstrates how those storytellers variously negotiate memory and identity though their dexterous interplay of text and image. With original insights and writerly aplomb, Aarons has crafted a must-read contribution to the literature on contemporary women graphic novelists. --Samantha Baskind Commendation Quotes : Victoria Aarons's Memory Spaces breaks new ground in the study of graphic novels. Focusing on the work of six twenty-first-century Jewish women graphic novelists, the author brilliantly discusses the distinctive contribution of gendered writing, showing how each of the six writes in the shadow of various periods of the Jewish historical experience, utilizing visual culture to express what it means to be Jewish and a woman, to be shaped by and yet transcend the past. The relationship between memory and identity emerges with crystal clarity. --Alan Berger Brief Description : \"In the graphic novels and memoirs that form the basis of this study, the construction of individual identities and the mutating, mercurial shape of the self are situated in Jewishness, in a past, both remote and proximate, within which these comics artists locate, define, and defend the self, even if in contestation with some of the strictures and limitations embedded in such structures. The voices that we hear in these narratives are Jewish voices, which is to say, self-referential, ironic, combative, at the intersection of understatement and exaggerated self-parody, mixing modes of celebration and lamentation. The works of these Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with the past, with personal histories and mythologies as well as with the larger narratives of Jewish history and tradition-extended and recursive moments of catastrophic loss and survival. As Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman point out, the Jewish graphic novel is a genre \"uniquely suited to the quintessential narrative themes of the Jewish imagination: mobility, flight, adaptation, transformation, disguise, metamorphosis . . . and retells the Jewish story in new and exciting ways\" (Baskind and Omer-Sherman xvii). The graphic narratives I examine here tell the Jewish story from a gendered perspective, one that problematizes notions of identity and self-representation against the itinerant punctuations of time and memory. In the works of the Jewish women graphic novelists that I discuss, the \"themes of the Jewish imagination\" are in conversation with individual and collective histories. These histories inform and contextualize the experiences these graphic novelists and their characters and alter-egos have of living in the world, engaging circumstances of their own making and events shaped by both the traumatic and fortuitous intrusions of chance and history. In these works, the graphic storytellers invoke voices of authority-the influence of the literary \"fathers,\" biblical narratives and injunctions, Holocaust testimony-in conversation with their own contemporary, immediate, and proximate realities. Thus, read in sequence, these graphic novelists talk through their Jewish lives, visualizing and problematizing the worlds they inhabit and the futures they imagine\"-- Promotional Headline : Jewish identity, memory, and place deftly revealed through the lens of Jewish women's graphic narratives. Commendation Quotes : This is a richly textured account of Jewish women graphic novelists who engender traumatic memories in the body. Victoria Aarons's focus on the materiality of graphic narratives revisions the comic medium as a site of bodily exposure. She beautifully captures the anxieties of Jewish identity in graphic form. --Ken Koltun-Fromm Biographical Note : Victoria Aarons is O.R. \u0026amp; Eva Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including Holocaust Graphic Narratives , The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow , Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives , and The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (Wayne State University Press). Publisher Marketing : An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place-that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons argues that Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with embodied memory: the way the body materializes memory. This monograph investigates how memory manifests in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and more. Memory Spaces begins by framing this research within contemporary discourse and reflects upon the choice to explore Jewish women graphic novelists specifically. In the chapters that follow, Aarons relates the nuanced issues of memory, transmission of trauma, Jewish cultural identity, and the gendered self to a series of meaningful and noteworthy graphic novels. Aarons's insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women's literature, memory studies, and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormat:\u003c\/strong\u003e Hardcover | \u003cstrong\u003ePages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 300 | \u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e 2023-05-09\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wayne State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46477926498435,"sku":"9780814349151","price":94.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0564\/6830\/8099\/files\/9780814349151.jpg?v=1770302882","url":"https:\/\/sebink.com\/products\/9780814349151","provider":"Sebink","version":"1.0","type":"link"}