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Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde

2015; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sdn.2015.0036

1934-1512

Charles Acheson,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

The plentitude of comics scholarship concerning the medium’s gutter illustrates the importance of the structural device; however, the foundational explanations of the gutter rarely define the structural element’s more specific capabilities. This article endeavors to expand understanding of the gutter as a mechanism to increase knowledge of traumatic and non-traumatic nonfiction narratives. Analyzing key testimonies in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 , this article explores and demonstrates how Sacco, and the comics medium at large, employs the gutter to create forged memories —memories unique yet also false—of traumatic events to engage witnesses more fully. Through these memories, the reader-witness comes closer to understanding the surreal nature of the survivor’s trauma. As a result, comics provides for greater traumatic understanding through the devices inherent to the medium.