Georgiana Banita

CFP: The Comics of Art Spiegelman [edited volume]

Editors:
Georgiana Banita (University of Bamberg, Germany)
Lee Konstantinou (University of Maryland, College Park)


The importance of Art Spiegelman as a pioneer and theorist of comics is hard to overstate. His work has not only pushed the boundaries of comics (both in terms of form and subject matter) but also convinced many readers and critics of this art form’s inherent aesthetic value. Indeed, the development of the term “graphic novel” in part signaled a burgeoning critical appreciation of the power of comics, an appreciation that Spiegelman’s pen — from his underground comix to his Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS to his tireless critical advocacy of comics and cartooning — helped foster.

The Comics of Art Spiegelman will assess the fundamental contribution of Spiegelman’s work to the development of graphic literature from the 1970s to the present. It will survey and synthesize his versatile projects not only as a cartoonist but also as a magazine founder, editor, comics critic and historian, and mentor to multiple generations of cartoonists. To do justice to the vast range of Spiegelman’s career, this volume proposes to examine it from many perspectives: to demonstrate the centrality of his work to the rise of the graphic novel; to document how he has self-consciously dealt with his own success and engaged in a process of auto-canonization following the publication of his groundbreaking MAUS; to analyze how he has drawn on, worked through, and defied familiar poetic categories of comics art; and to investigate his inventive (sometimes silent) dialogues with other genres and media, such as music, film, theatre, dance, and installation art.

The book has garnered serious interest from the editor of the new series, Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, at the University Press of Mississippi. Accepted abstracts will be used in a formal book proposal to be submitted to the press. The deadline for full-length essays will be negotiated shortly thereafter. Essays on a variety of issues related to Spiegelman’s formative involvement in the rise of graphic literature are welcome. The collection is especially interested in exploring how we might contend with Spiegelman in the twenty-first century, acknowledging but also moving beyond the existing scholarship’s understandable focus on the achievement of MAUS. We are therefore planning to collect essays that discuss Spiegelman’s underground works; that offer new and unexpected readings of MAUS; that study his later illustrations and books (such as In the Shadow of No Towers); and that scrutinize Spiegelman’s public persona. Chapters that address the following questions are particularly welcome:

o What can Spiegelman’s collaborative work in the underground comix scene (at Arcade and later at RAW) teach us about how Spiegelman and his collaborators conceived of comics art, and how did these early collaborations inform his subsequent experimentation?

o What interdisciplinary dialogues does MAUS inaugurate between comics and political history; comics and Jewish history and culture; comics and trauma; comics and narrative theory; comics and memory architectures; as well as comics and autographics or life writing?

o How is the evolution of comics — both as form and as a set of cultural institutions — entwined with Spiegelman’s own biographical trajectory, from his MAD-obsessed childhood to his poignant examination of his parents’ memories of the Holocaust and his mother’s suicide? What larger trends in the history of comics and popular culture do Spiegelman’s life and art participate in?

o How do Spiegelman’s works incorporate early comic strips, newspapers, photography, television, and electronic communication technologies? What might such aesthetic experiments in hybridity reveal more generally about the arts of the present?

o How have Spiegelman’s practices of masking, dual identities, impersonation, ventriloquism, and voice/voiceover devised new forms of performance in comics and cultivated new languages for articulating emergent or conflicted identities (disability, queerness), especially in the comic memoir?

o Though comics has gained legitimacy in the art world, literary culture, and the wider public arena, a sense of shame productively persists among cartoonists and raises important questions about the price of mainstream success. How does Spiegelman walk the tightrope between the growing popularity of the comics medium and the possibility of a more subversive, politically potent grassroots comics-practice designed to serve and speak to the disenfranchised?

o How does Spiegelman’s work negotiate the modernist influence of wordless woodcut novels by Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel on his visual style, and how do these early sources of inspiration, including the historical avant-garde, explain his recent wordless engagement with the comics form?

o Aesthetic and political appreciation for Spiegelman’s work around the world is evidenced by countless accolades garnered over the years. How does his international success help buttress the global appeal and historical validity of comics? How do Spiegelman’s achievements intersect with other graphic art traditions — from Franco-Belgian comics to manga and beyond? And how does this new global respectability of the medium affect national discourses, for instance through the role of MAUS in reshaping Germany’s contemporary struggle with the echoes of the Holocaust?

o How have Spiegelman’s memorable covers for The New Yorker intervened in controversies around racial profiling and police brutality (March 8, 1999), the aftermath of September 11 (the black-on-black collaboration with Françoise Mouly of September 14, 2001), and expanded the role of the political cartoon as a protest vehicle? Moreover, how might Spiegelman’s political cartoons be understood in relation to — or help us understand — debates about socially charged iconoclastic cartoons in Denmark, France, North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere?

o What is Spiegelman’s relationship to what may be called the archival turn in academic and exhibition culture, as evidenced by MetaMaus and Co-Mix, and in what ways does this archival impulse align itself with the completist, multilayered, navigational experiments of other cartoonists (such as Chris Ware in Building Stories or Joe Sacco in The Great War)? How do these material regimes and nonlinear reading experiences engender a new haptic quality in comics (fascinated with B-sides, squiggles, and ephemera)?

o What specific critical and theoretical problems does comics — and Spiegelman’s work in particular — pose for academic inquiry today? How is comics itself a knowledge-producing medium? What sorts of knowledge — historiographic, psychological, political, or economic — might comics in general and Spiegelman’s comics in particular be well-suited to fuse, construct, or dispute?

Please send a 500-1000 word abstract, CV, and contact information to Georgiana Banita and Lee Konstantinou at metaspiegelman@gmail.com by June 15.

Ob sie ihrer Arbeit oder einem anderen Erledigungsdrang nachgeht – zumeist zeugen die entschlossenen Schritte der mobilen Frau auf den Straßen moderner Metropolen von der Anständigkeit ihres Ziels. Doch hält sie nicht genau und erst recht nicht immer an ihrem Kurs fest.
Wo zieht es die mobile Frau hin, wenn sie, vom routinierten Weg abschweifend und oft in geradezu exzentrischer Selbstvergessenheit, die großstädtischen Eindrücke auf sich einströmen lässt? Wo weilt sie, wenn sie keinem bürgerlichen Zwang entgegenschreitet? Welche Bilder unsittlicher Weiblichkeit lässt sie entstehen – und wie unterscheidet sich die Flaneurin vom Flaneur? Diesen und anderen Fragen nachgehend, zielen die Beiträge des Bandes darauf ab, die flanierende Frau durch einschlägige Literatur- und Filmsichtungen als eigenen Wahrnehmungstopos der Moderne zu entdecken.

Presidential elections are central to US culture, shaping the nation’s exceptionalist imagina-tion and global influence. This volume is the first to establish an interdisciplinary platform for a broad investigation of election mechanics and legacies. Exposing a blind spot in the con-tested definitions and periodizations of American cultural history, leading and emerging histo-rians, political scientists, literary critics, and cultural theorists shed light on what separates successful campaigns from electoral failures in the tug of war between fair representation and manipulative tactics.
Beginning with the struggle for voting rights and extending to current representations of candidates and campaigns from Lincoln to Obama, Electoral Cultures examines elections as complex cultural phenomena inseparable from social, economic, and demographic rela-tions. The contributors assemble a vast archive that includes visual narratives and rhetorics of persuasion, life writing, fiction, drama, film, and new media. Taken together, their chapters query assumptions about democracy in the United States that manifest themselves in strate-gies of self-fashioning and decision-making, political partisanship, culture wars, as well as citizen involvement in or apathy toward electoral contests.
The resulting survey breaks down disciplinary boundaries to not only remap the field of American cultural studies, but also significantly alter how we contend with the paradoxical American ideals of equality, individualism, and authenticity in the twenty-first century. Through its sweeping scope and rich detail, the volume opens up an incisive new scholarly agenda concerned with US political culture and its place in the world today. Along with scholars and students of American studies, general readers interested in the impact of elec-tions on US domestic and foreign policy will find here a valuable guide to the machinery and mysteries of electoral campaigns and their representations in mass culture.

Have the terrorist attacks of September 11 shifted the moral coordinates of contemporary fiction? And how might such a shift, reflected in narrative strategies and forms, relate to other themes and trends emerging with the globalization of literature? This book pursues these questions through works written in the wake of 9/11 and examines the complex intersection of ethics and narrative that has defined a significant portion of British and American fiction over the past decade.

Don DeLillo, Pat Barker, Aleksandar Hemon, Lorraine Adams, Michael Cunningham, and Patrick McGrath are among the authors Georgiana Banita considers. Their work illustrates how post-9/11 literature expresses an ethics of equivocation—in formal elements of narrative, in a complex scrutiny of justice, and in tense dialogues linking this fiction with the larger political landscape of the era. Through a broad historical and cultural lens, Plotting Justice reveals links between the narrative ethics of post-9/11 fiction and events preceding and following the terrorist attacks—events that defined the last half of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to the Balkan War, and those that 9/11 precipitated, from war in Afghanistan to the Abu Ghraib scandal. Challenging the rhetoric of the war on terror, the book honors the capacity of literature to articulate ambiguous forms of resistance in ways that reconfigure the imperatives and responsibilities of narrative for the twenty-first century.

This chapter argues that it is through their parallel engagement with the global that American and Canadian literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have opened up bilateral conversations and avenues of cultural exchange. While a continental or hemispheric identity has shaped transnational North American Studies, it is worthwhile to take an even broader perspective and consider the global networks that have brought American and Canadian writing into closer proximity in mutually illuminating ways. The chapter is organized around two related arguments. Firstly, a sustained comparative inquiry into the global remapping of North American literature must begin with an analysis of how transnational reading paradigms in the two countries seem to proceed in somewhat inexplicable ignorance of one another. While Canadian studies of literature and globalization tend to remain under the radar of U.S.-based scholars, Canadian scholars also appear largely unaware of key works in comparative and transnational American Studies that have transformed the field. Secondly, to redress this mutual misrecognition, the chapter circumscribes the question about the global dimensions of U.S. and Canadian literatures to a scrutiny of how they imagine wars on proxy territories in which both countries have become entangled. American and Canadian literatures have been influenced by international conflict to a greater extent than we may have been aware. To make sense of this influence is to redraw the map of globalized North American Studies in ways that take seriously and do justice to the violent tensions from which such synthesis inevitably grows. Specifically, the chapter examines texts that are uncongenial to the dichotomies of nationality and postnationality often proffered in defense of a global reading of literature, suggesting instead triangular modes of thinking by which the laws of contemporary warfare complicate the one-to-one comparison of one North American national literature to another. In triangular texts of different literary genres, such as Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Jane Urquhart's poetic novel Sanctuary Line (2010), we can trace the fraught terrain of global North American Studies not as a field that imposes a choice between the national and the transnational, or a reconciliation of both, but as an opportunity to compare two distinct visions of the global, visions that have been forged by conflicts in an international arena.

This article analyzes the representation of ethics in Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003), exploring the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the communities and individuals aggregated in the novel. In particular, it examines the ways in which an internationalization of empathy (shored up by media representation of global war, especially through the journalism of attachment) dovetails with the failure of the individual to internalize sympathy in its emotional underpinnings. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, which Barker places in the broader historical and geographical context of war atrocities and crimes, thus mark the point where the internationalization of empathy precipitates its domestic failure. By applying to the novel the critical apparatus on the cataleptic condition as proposed by ethicist Martha Nussbaum, this essay reveals the personal risks and benefits associated with the rotation of representational ethics around an international axis.

Informed by trauma theory, recent discussions of post-9/11 literature have vehemently lamented the failure of works by Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney, or Ken Kalfus to incorporate the aesthetic paradigm shift precipitated by the traumatic effects of the terrorist attacks. Through a close reading of Patrick McGrath's novella ‘Ground Zero’ (Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, 2005) from a psychoanalytic and a narratological perspective (converging in the discourse of psychotherapy), this essay proposes the concept of transference as key to the narrativisation of post-9/11 trauma. The argument draws on previously unpublished archival material in 9/11 oral history as well as on psychoanalytic theories of transference and counter-transference (supplemented by René Girard's sociological work on the scapegoat) to recast the crisis of imagination that followed upon the terrorist attacks as primarily a narrative impasse. ‘Ground Zero’ engages both characters and readers in scapegoating games that mobilise discourses as diverse as racial persecution and narrative unreliability. In examining these forms of scapegoating, the essay derives from the transferability of evil (as evinced through scapegoating) a broader statement on the ethical function of narrative in the mediation of world-historical trauma.

Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach, a rarely discussed post-9/11 novel, scrutinizes the ways in which visual engagements with the attacks deepen the sense of self-scrutiny and renewal triggered by the terrorist event on an individual and national level alike. Placing Schulman's text in the tradition of Paula Fox's work on the domestic manifestations of social and political trauma, this essay examines Schulman's attempt to juxtapose vicarious media witnessing (through television) on the one hand and unmediated experience on the other, a distinction that complicates the mandate for self-scrutiny and change articulated by the attacks. Unlike many other writers who have singled out iconic images of World Trade Center jumpers without differentiating among their forms of transmission or probing their entwinement with the posttraumatic dynamics of television aesthetics, Schulman interrogates the concrete, transformative effect of the televised image and the catalytic function of vicarious trauma, highlighting instead a form of resistant mourning as the refusal of resolution, closure, or radical change—both in narrative terms and in the realm of politics.

One of the most important aspects of Barack Obama's political success concerns the transnational makeup of his identity. Taking Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) as case studies, this article examines how Obama's autobiographical self squares with the precepts of American exceptionalism in an era that has witnessed a palpable decline in the centrality and leverage of the US on an international stage.