This article has three aims: it first argues that the aesthetics of graphic novels, rarely considered in Humanities dementia research, are especially suited to narratives about traumatic dementia. Second, it argues that, within the graphic narrative genre, both indirection and realism can facilitate dementia representations. Third, it argues that the realism each author uses ‘corrects’ well-meaning, idealising, dementia images aimed at challenging negative stereotypes. In this study of Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s, I show that each benefits from a particular style of realism that I call, for Tangles, ‘abstract realism’, and for Aliceheimer’s ‘adapted’ or ‘fantastic’ realism. Each graphic realism style opens up for viewers the trauma of dementia for both the dementia subject herself and for those caring for her. Images move beyond stereotypes (while not idealising), furthering, via compassion, empathy and resilience, our understanding of this challenging condition so much a part of life today.

How can we renew awareness of the civic value of the arts and humanities? This article responds to this question mainly with reference to music. It notes the rise since the 1990s of extrinsic criteria of value evident in sociological, economic and psychological arguments for the significance of music and the arts, which risk a profound instrumentalisation. In reaction, recent defences of the arts stage a stand-off against sociological perspectives, in particular, returning to older humanistic defences. Recalling the growth of interdisciplinary popular music and cultural studies from the 1980s, which unveiled the multivalent relationships between aesthetic and social dimensions of music, sets this polarisation into relief, productively shifting the debate. Music emerges as a vital medium for living, active in differentiated lives, an environment that may alone proffer meaning, pleasure, hope and a sense of collective imaginative and public life amid intensifying anxiety, desperation and the denial of collectivity. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)