Davida Pines Presents Lecture on History, Memoir, and Comics
In a lecture series hosted by Boston University College of General Studies, Davida Pines, a CGS associate professor of rhetoric, discusses ways that comics who represent serious historic events, such as the Holocaust, impact current literary culture. In a video of her lecture, Pines examines two graphic novels about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: Art Speigelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Alissa Torres’ memoir American Widow.
Pines stumbled upon Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a two-volume comic book about the Holocaust, while she was in graduate school and has been fascinated by comics ever since.
“We’re used to thinking of comics as funny,” Pines says, citing New Yorker cartoons and the Sunday funnies. “What we’re not used to is thinking of comics in terms of grim historical events, for example, the Holocaust, 9/11, the Iranian Revolution, and the war in Bosnia. Yet each of these events has been the subject of recent, serious, and critically acclaimed works told through the medium of comics.”
She adds, “Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, said it best. He wrote, ‘Comic books are what novels used to be: an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal.’”
A Boston University College of General Studies associate professor of rhetoric, Davida Pines has degrees from Yale, New York University, Oxford, and Brandeis University. She is the author of The Marriage Paradox: Modernist Novels and the Cultural Imperative to Marry.