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

Zap! Crumb! Splat!: Underground Comix + Alternative Visions

Sabin, "Going Underground" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
+
Sabin, "Alternative Visions" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
(please note that the images included in this chapter are offensive, crude, anarchic and disturbing as comix are known to be)

Fantagraphics is about to release a 6 volume 'Complete Zap Comics' for the modest price of $500. Good thing for us is that they have also released a 60 page excerpt chock-full of comics by many of the artists that have graced R.Crumb's publication. Included are also an introduction by Crumb himself and an 'For Adults Intellectuals Only: A Zap Oral History' by Patrick Rosenkranz. Find it all here in PDF format (click-through, not 'save as').

Text and Context: Political Economy and 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 the 2011 Emmy Awards: "To men, you're womanish, to women, you're mannish."

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 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.
Finally, as a conclusion to your 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)
Please refer to Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies". Use the illustrated examples as a guideline.
There's also this Comics Terminology Graphic 1 & Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)

**We have already talked about this in class so 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.

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

From Superheroes to the '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

Ritual vs Transmission

from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'

James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?: Media, Political Economy and Communication

Source: Frugal dad (Find full image size infographic here)

An up-to-date infographic on media consolidation. Use this to think through the issues of consumer sovereignty, the illusion of the market as democratic regulator, the media's role in democracy and its social function, etc. as well as the issues raised by Herman and Curran and our discussions in class.

Also, what makes mainstream media mainstream? How does this prevent the media from fulfilling the social roles that liberal democratic theory assigns to it?

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

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

Updated Ownership Chart from WSJ in July 2014

Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation

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: Racist 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)

Comics? Comics!

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 (Click through to Save)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905-1914 (Click through to Save)

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"

*Bonus Bonus: Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies"
nb. At the bottom of the linked post you'll find a link to the illustrations. In any case, here.

from Sigmund Freud's notebooks: Comics as dream work

Welcome To Fall 2014

Post-Classical and Post-Modern

To clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism':

Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"
As you read it relate it to the screening of Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and be prepared to discuss the film in terms of its postmodern qualities.

Towards a Third Cinema

 Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."

--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema
Med Hondo, What is Cinema For Us?
Michael Chanan, "The Changing Geography of Third Cinema"

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Theory, Psychoanalysis and Gender

"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)

Still from Kathryn Bigelow's Zero-Dark Thirty (USA, 2012). Jessica Chastain as subject and image.

Cinematic Specificity, Art and Theory: Montage and Realism

On Montage:
Vsevolod Pudovkin, "On Editing" from Film Technique
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" + "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" from Film Form

On Realism:
André Bazin, What is Cinema, Vol. 1
(nb. please only read the essays at pg. 9 and pg. 41: "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" + "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" (aka Montage Interdit).

On the 'art cinema' and modernism in film:
Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
from Poetics of Cinema