Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Cinema

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look"

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)

The Spirit: Short Writing Assignment #1

As already mentioned in class this first writing assignment revolves around Will Eisner's The Spirit. For this short exercise (3-5 pages) you should first of all read a number of The Spirit stories as they appear in The Best of Spirit anthology which is on reserve in the library (below you will also find four more Spirit stories in digital format --however, as I said in class, you should read this particular text 'the old fashioned way', on paper). 

For your actual writing assignment you should first of all offer a historical contextualization of Eisner's work: where does The Spirit fit into the history of sequential art in general and of comics in particular. Secondly, you should choose two pages of your choice in one of the stories (try to choose the two pages that you find are most interesting in terms of their encapsulation and layout --there are plenty of these in Eisner's work and don't be afraid to move deep into The Best of Spirit anthology to the late 40s material) and simply describe the particularities of The Spirit's stylistic features. Please note that I am not necessarily looking for any particularly deep analysis. What your paper should end up being is a simple description of encapsulation, panel to panel relations, full page layout, use of color, line and text, insets, etc. What this should end up being, more than anything, is an exercise for applying and using comics terminology and an excuse to encourage you to look at an example of comic art closely and attentively.
I'm including here, along with the already mentioned extra Spirit stories, an issue each of DC's Action Comics and Detective Comics so that you can use these as comparative texts to Eisner's technique in The Spirit. Included below is also a two page graphic with the basic components of a comics page and spread identified.
Finally, as a conclusion to you short paper remark what, if anything and in your opinion, makes The Spirit such a standout example of comic art. Enjoy.

Will Eisner, The Spirit
DC's Action Comics #1 (1938)
DC's Detective Comics #27 (1939) -- fixed link
Comics Terminology Graphic 1 & Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)

**We will talk about this in class but as you will notice in order to overcome the technical issues we were having with the .cbr extension on the blog I have renamed all linked comic books with a .zip extension. As mentioned in class zip and cbr files are the same thing, the only difference being that the .cbr extension allows your Comic Book Reader application to open and display the images in the zipped folder as a paginated book. All you need to do, after you've downloaded the files to your computer, is change the file extension from .zip to .cbr. Have fun.

Stop the Presses: Big Bird Fired!

Some links and tidbits on the 'debate' following the statements made during the presidential debate by Romney and his 'intention to fire Big Bird'.

Links to the original statement (in context: note that it follows a statement on the need to 'cut the budget'); the response from PBS (official press release + CNN interview and comment by PBS CEO Kerger); an Op-Ed in the NYTimes ("Don't Mess With Big Bird"); a Google image search result page for 'big bird romney'); a couple of 'big bird' meme pages (on Know Your Meme and Quick Meme).

Below is a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC and host of the PBS program NOVA ScienceNOW.

New Media: The Internet as Technology

Jeremy G. Butler, "The Internet and the World Wide Web"
P. David Marshall, "The Internet: The Multi-Media Accessible Universe and the User"
Bolter & Grusin, "The World Wide Web" (from Remediation)

Construction and Performance II: Masculinities

Eminem, Lose Yourself

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"
Brian Locke, "Here Come The Judge: The Dancing Itos and the Televisual Construction of the Enemy Asian Male"
Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

Harold & Kumar

From Superheroes to "Seduction of the Innocent"

Wright, "Confronting Success: Comic Books and Postwar America, 1945-1950"
Wright, "Youth Crisis: Comic Books and Controversy, 1947-1950"


Wertham, "Seduction of the Innocent"
+ Self-Regulating Codes of the Comics Book Industry


from Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comics
Gabilliet, "Calls For Censorship"
Gabilliet, "Production"
Gabilliet, "The Business of Comic Books"

Bonus Read:
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965)
Part1 + Part2

Commercial Break: Submit to The Sheet

This is the only kind of advertisement that will ever run on buythetickets.
From the friendly folk at The Sheet.

New Media: Gaming

Pac-Man Skull

These are two articles on videogames and their history. Use them in conjunction with the screening of Game On: The Unauthorized History of Video Games.

Bolter & Grusin, "Computer Games" (from Remediation)
P. David Marshall, "Playing Game Cultures: Electronic Games"

Super Mario @ 25

Text and Context: Political Economy & Reception

Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"

Jan Nederveen Pitersem, "White Negroes"
David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"

EXTRA READING: Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"

Opening of last year's Emmy Awards: "To men, you're womanish, to women, you're mannish."

Textuality: Semiotics

To complement the other readings, here are three different discussions of 'semiotics' and semiotic analysis and their use for cultural studies and the analysis of media representations. These are not required readings if you have encountered 'media semiotics' before. I would however suggest, to those of you who are encountering 'semiotics' for the first time, to treat these readings as required readings: your work in class, your ability to grapple with the other required readings and your final project would certainly benefit from a familiarity with the concepts presented here.

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

Media and Political Economy

The question we have been discussing in class is: What makes mainstream media mainstream? How does this prevent the media from fulfilling the social roles that liberal democratic theory assigns to it? I am including here readings which should be able to give you a nice understanding of the issues and the problems.

Noam Chomsky, What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
Curran, Mass Media and Democracy Revisited
Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media?
Ed Herman, Media in the US Political Economy

Comics? Comics!

from Sigmund Freud's notebooks: Comics as dream work

Here are a couple of examples of comics that we can use to continue our discussion of what comics are and what they are not. It is also a good excuse to test out your comic book readers (.cbr and .cbz). Let me know if you encounter any problems reading these files.

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy, selected Sunday Comics, 1941

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905-1914

Robert Sergel, "Up Up Down Down" from Eschew 2011

Bonus reading: from Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics Chapter 1: "What Comics Are and What They Aren't"

'New' Media: Impact of Digital Technology on Film and Television

These are the readings for the first weeks of class and discussion. Remember that we are still in the process of investigating the concept of 'new' media and trying to go beyond a mere chronology of new technologies in favor of a more nuanced and specific understanding of the truly 'new' aspects of digital converged media and the social potential/consequences from a politically progressive perspective --the 'what's new for society' question.

The articles here will introduce you to some of the more practical transformations that the appearance of digital technologies have produced in 'old' media like film and television. Please note that as we discussed in class, even in this case, the transformations are both smaller and larger than those one could imagine: on the one hand, the film and televisual experience is for the most part unchanged; on the other, however, the film medium and the specificity of the photo/cinematographic image has been dramatically transformed as it loses its indexicality and the medium goes from a synthetic to an analytic one while television's horizon ceases to be that of a regulated/national context to an open/transnational one.

David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"

Sean Cubitt, "Digital Filming and Special Effects"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Film in the Digital World"
Anne Friedberg, "CD and DVD"
Janet Wasko, "The Future of Film Distribution and Exhibition"

Michele Hilmes, "Cable, Satellite and Digital Technologies"
P. David Marshall, "Rejuvenation: Television"

Cultural Studies and Representation: Race and Gender I

Power, Privilege and Discrimination

Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Cultural Studies & Representation
Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
Sanjukta Gosh, "'Con-Fusing' Exotica: Producing India in US Advertising"

Ideology and Hegemony
Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racing Ideologies and the Media"
James Lull, "Hegemony"

all readings (except the online Peggy McIntosh) are from Dines and Humez (eds), Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader; 2nd Edition(Sage, 2003)

Welcome to Fall 2012