The Body is Just a Metaphor for the Soul: Performing trauma in the work of Leela Corman and Tom Hart

Abstract

This paper discusses the graphic narrative as a dynamic space in which to re-enact, relive, and re-tell experiences of grief, trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The paper will focus on Tom Hart’s 2016 autobiographical graphic novel Rosalie Lightning and Leela Corman’s 2015 short comic ‘The Wound That Never Heals’, both of which deal with the death of Corman and Hart’s young daughter. About writing the book, Hart has said: ’The attempt to relive was largely through the act of drawing and writing, in that order. The writing was the organizing principle, but the drawing was the reliving.’ This article observes the ways in which narrative repetition, visual metaphor, sequentiality, and ..