Center for European Studies

European Studies Because… Speaker Series – Drawing on the Past: Superheroes, Comics, & Propaganda

Representing the Past Through Comics Language: A Historical-Sociological Analysis

Barbara Gruning, University of Bicocca

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In the talk I will present a comparative analysis between the ways of narrating difficult pasts in Germany and Italy from the second post-war to nowadays. In this regard, comics are neither simply seen as the result of the creativity of a single author, nor as the direct expression of his/her sociocultural context. Rather, my aim is to highlight how memory work through comics language entails to consider three interlaced levels of analysis: the memory culture and politics of a country, its social space, and the place comics occupy in its field of cultural production. As a result, changes concerning the contents of a past, as well as the style and format used to represent it depend on the internal dynamics occurring at each of this level and their interplay over time.