Lee Konstantinou

Bio

Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (2009), the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (2016), and the single-novel study The Last Samurai Reread (2022). With Samuel Cohen, he edited the collection The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012), and with Georgiana Banita he edited Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023).

Contributions

Modernist Funnies

Peer Reviewed

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At the climactic moment of the final chapter of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison and her father Bruce are taking a drive together to watch the 1980 film, Coal Miner’s Daughter (fig. 1). For the first time since she has come out to her family, Alison tries to have a frank conversation with her father about her sexuality—and his. She has recently learned that her father has been sleeping with men for decades. The encounter is tense. Bechdel emphasizes this tension by changing the panel layout of her graphic memoir. Featuring twelv

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comics comedy