CHAPTER 11 Performative Texts and the Pedagogical Theatre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as Compositional Model William Cordeiro and Season Ellison Alison Bechdel’s text Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a rich, multimodal text we have incorporated into many of our freshman- and sophomore-level Honors composition and general education first-year seminar classes. Depending on the course and audience, we have approached Fun Home from a number of angles: generically in relation to the Bildungsroman, as a memoir, as a Gothic novel, as a graphic novel, and, more specifically, as a model of performativity 1 embedded by and within the text as well as within the writing process. Regardless of our varied approaches to teaching the text, we recognize that Fun Home both performs and is about identity performance; it prompts students and instructors alike to recognize the performed identities of the readers, characters, text, and author. A strength of Bechdel’s novel is her complex and performative layering of alphabetic text, images, and spatial relationships, as well as her inclusion and layering of familial and canonical resources. Each layer adds complexity to the graphic memoir and it quickly becomes clear that a reader must, like W. Cordeiro (*) Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA S. Ellison Bemidji State University, Bemidji, MN, USA 167 © The Author(s) 2018 A. Burger (ed.), Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63459-3_11