I want to use this space to consider the question Wysocki ends her chapter with: “How might we encourage people in our classes to work across words and pictures in order that they too might question the identities available to them” (42)? I’m drawn to graphic texts like Fun Home and Maus mostly, I think, for their formal experimentation. In this way, I suppose, I’m drawn to them for the same reasons I was drawn to the hypertext poetry of Stephanie Strickland (and others?) when I was studying poetry as an undergraduate. At that point in my life, I was just beginning to realize poetry’s potential as a tool for, not self-making, but self-realization, as Wysocki illustrates at the beginning of this chapter (“It is not that we find our selves in our work because there was a unified self that preceded the work and that only needed being made present somehow in the work; it is rather that what the work is–its status as a shaped object in front of us–makes visible to us ‘what we are'” [25]). For me, tensions between form and formlessness can create the necessary conditions for the kinds of identity-question composing work that Wysocki calls for. The academic essay, as is traditionally conceived, is woefully inadequate; however, I do believe that verbal language is capable of so much more than we reveal to our students. I believe that writing which earnestly probes identity possibilities must (can can) appeal to our senses, our bodies, our emotions, and our intellects.
