Thursday, September 27, 2018
Monday, September 24, 2018
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)
**In order to overcome the technical issues we might have with the .cbr extension 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.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Film
Stills from Otto Preminger's Laura, 1944
"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look."
We will discuss Preminger's Laura and Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure" essay after we complete our discussion on 'gendered media spaces' and melodrama/soap opera. We will however also refer to Laura as a 'melodrama' in its own right and include an initial discussion of it's place in media space.
Those who missed the screening on Friday (and the few who had to leave before the thrilling finale of the film) are required to watch it on their own before our class meeting on Tuesday. You can find the DVD on reserve in the library. You could also look for it on some of the streaming services online (even though I have not personally checked to see if it is in fact available).
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Those who missed the screening on Friday (and the few who had to leave before the thrilling finale of the film) are required to watch it on their own before our class meeting on Tuesday. You can find the DVD on reserve in the library. You could also look for it on some of the streaming services online (even though I have not personally checked to see if it is in fact available).
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
‘Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Jill Soloway, the creator of the TV series Transparent and I Love Dick (based on the Chris Kraus novel of the same title about having a crush on cultural critic and author Dick Hebdige which some of you might have read in previous classes). This is a talk she gave on 'The Female Gaze' at the Toronto Film Festival.
Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker
The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross
Even the New Yorker caught up, some 90 years later. This is a good reflection by the premier high brow cultural magazine (Theodore would just call it an ersatz culture publication still a product of the culture industry) on the ideas of the Frankfurt School. It's a nice primer to integrate your readings of Adorno and Benjamin as well as the Situationists and Enzensberger later on.
"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”
These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
The Technology and the Society: A Critique of McLuhan
In order to be done with ol' Marshall (even though you're never done with him).
Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society" from Television: Technology and Cultural Form
Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy
 |
| Eisenstein Diagram |
Thursday, September 13, 2018
From Superheroes to the 'Seduction of the Innocent'
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965)
Part1 + Part2
Action Comics #1
Action Comics #7
from Comics Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
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"
That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams - Genre, Gender and Style
Here's a nice press review of the discourses surrounding the Ryan Adams/Taylor Swift operation. I've also included a few articles from the past past, mainly Taylor Swift profiles from mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Make sure you all read the Tavi Gevinson article linked to at the bottom of the post in .pdf format. Also included is a recent article from The Atlantic about authorship in pop music and the strategies used by record companies to downplay the 'outsourcing' of pop hit manufacturing. Enjoy.
Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift
Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift
No Blank Space, Baby: Taylor Swift Is The Soul Of Ryan Adams
The complete version of this article by then 16-year old Tavi Gevinson published in The Believer in 2013 is below in PDF. Tavi Gevinson started the Style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag below is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations.
Genre and Gendered Media Spaces
The article by Gledhill & Vicky Ball is from the Stuart Hall edited Representation (2nd Ed., Sage, 1997/2013). It's a long chapter but filled with information and notions. You are responsible for pgs. 335-361 -the rest is recommended, up to you, based on your own interests and projects. You don't need to actually do the 'activities' listed in the various sections but they are at the very least good mental exercises and opportunities to think through some of the issues.
Christine Gledhill & Vicky Ball, "Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera"
For an example of a political economic reflection on the media:
David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"
For an example of a political economic reflection on the media:
David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"
EXTRA READINGS:
Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"
Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Monopolies of Knowledge and Space/Time Bias
Harold Innis, "The Bias of Communication" from The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2008; orig. 1951)
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Sunday Newspaper Supplements: Auteurs.
Winsor McCay, Little Sammy Sneeze
As promised here are some of the pages we saw in class. Enjoy.
Richard Outcault, The Yellow Kid
Winsor McCay, Little Nemo In Slumberland
George Herriman, Krazy Kat & Ignatz
Frank King, Gasoline Alley
Textuality: Semiotics
To complement our discussion, the screening of Codes of Gender and the other readings, here are three different takes on '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
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation
Power, Privilege and Discrimination (...or...how I got woke)
Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"
Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
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)
Monday, September 3, 2018
Comics? Comics!
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.
*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
Communications: Ritual vs. Transmission? Works vs. Acts? Message vs. Text?
from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
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