In the Zone: Continuities of Time, Memory, and Narrative in Julie Doucet’s Time Zone J

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr. Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Edinburgh Napier University
• Friday 14 November 2025, 15:00-16:30
• Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Joe Sutliff Sanders.

In-person and online. Zoom link available on request.

An enormously influential presence in the alternative comics scene of the 1980s and 1990s, feminist artist Julie Doucet is known for a rough style and taboo-breaking approach to mostly autobiographical subject matter that unsettle and disrupt misogynistic visual transitions associated with the representation of women in comics. After famously retiring from what she called the “boys’ club” of comics in the late 1990s, Doucet returned to graphic memoir in 2022 with Time Zone J, an in every way highly unusual book that is conceived according to a logic that is fundamentally unrooted from existing modes of creating and understanding comics.

In this talk, I argue that Time Zone J is a watershed work that forces us to reassess our understanding not only of the formal poetics and reading practices of the comics medium itself, but also the established conventions of how to represent time, space, and memory in graphic memoir—as well as in lifewriting more generally.

This talk is part of the jcs217's list series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.