‘Is this the real me? What is the real me?’ : deconstructing authenticity in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love

Brauner, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2817-7847 (2023) ‘Is this the real me? What is the real me?’ : deconstructing authenticity in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love. Humanities, 12 (3). 43. ISSN 2076-0787 doi: 10.3390/h12030043

Abstract/Summary

In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of fe-male-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, she was in the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, an iconic figure of the counterculture, and any attention she has received for her own work tended to be marred by condescension or predicated on the naïve assumption that, as Susan Kirtley claims, it ‘showcase[s] a raw, unvarnished authenticity’ (Kirtley 2018, p. 272). It also tended to ignore her writing, focusing almost exclusively on her artwork. In this essay I analyse her anthology, Need More Love, paying particular attention to the nuances of its uses of text, to argue that Kominsky-Crumb’s work might be read as a sustained, self-reflexive interrogation of the idea of authenticity.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/111612
Identification Number/DOI	10.3390/h12030043
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Identities
Publisher	MDPI
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item