10. The letterless canon

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Comedy Film ◽  
Film Scripts ◽  
The Way

“The letterless canon” argues that Jewish literature from the mid-twentieth century onward is not restricted to fiction, poetry, and theater. The book as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge has undergone a metamorphosis. Along the way, the border between high-brow and popular culture has been erased. Comic strips like Superman and graphic novels can be viewed as literary artifacts. Indeed we should consider the work of Will Eisner (A Contract with God), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Alison Bechdel (Fun House), each of whom offers different contributions. There is also the matter of stand-up comedy, film scripts, and television shows which examine, from a Jewish perspective, gender, racial, and class issues.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Film Scripts ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Introduction” explores the appellation “People of the Book” as it pertains to the Jews, arguing that, theologically as well as culturally, Jews depend on books to exist. The work of Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges is invoked to introduce the concept of aterritoriality. Modern Jewish literature does not have a specific address and is written in multiple languages. There is a connection between Hasidism, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israeli literature, and the work of Jewish writers in other diasporas. Jewish literature should also include graphic novels, film scripts, television shows, and other textual manifestations.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

scholarly journals Mickey’s Trailer and Environmental Thought: Disney Cartoons and Countryside

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Joe Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Land Uses ◽  
Automobile Ownership ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Environmental Cognition ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

The influence of popular cartoons on environmental cognition is explored in this essay through readings of Mickey’s Trailer, a 1938 cartoon directed by Ben Sharpsteen for Walt Disney. Other materials considered include Ford Motor Company’s 1937-38 film coproduced by Wilder Pictures, Glacier International Park, which promotes motor-tourism and automobile ownership, and Ben Sharpsteen’s other work for Walt Disney. The article also examines the ideas of physical and “illusional” zoning in the city, especially the way that they were applied in the mid-twentieth century. Physical zoning involved separating incompatible land uses, whereas illusional zoning entailed seeing what you wanted to see. What does Mickey’s Trailer say about how people can live, and can it inform where people choose to live? The essay muses that appreciations of nature and the environment are influenced by popular culture.

DE AMBIGUÏTEIT VAN DE DINOSAURUS

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-311
Author(s):  
Ilja Nieuwland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sea Snakes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heads Of State ◽  
Plaster Casts ◽  
The Way

THE DINOSAUR’S AMBIGUITY Sea snakes, Iguanodons and why Brussels did not receive its Diplodocus In the opening years of the twentieth century, the Scottish magnate Andrew Carnegie used the donation of plaster casts of the dinosaur Diplodocusas a means to influence European heads of state in favor of his scheme for conflict arbitration. This contribution examines the way in which these casts became a border object between the worlds of science, high and popular culture, and politics, by looking at the history of the public assimilation of dinosaurs. Specifically, it focuses on an earlier example of such donations: the Iguanodons which were given away by the Belgian state and the Belgian king Leopold II personally, after 1890. These developments collided when Carnegie’s donation of a Diplodocus was cancelled after Leopold’s reputation began to suffer when details of the Congolese genocide became known to the public. This illustrates that for Carnegie, despite the cultural and scientific appeal of his donations, politics remained at the center of his campaign.

Defiant Indigeneity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
The Face ◽  
Hawaiian Literature ◽  
The Way

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

Unraveling Myra’s Mysteries

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-149
Author(s):  
Barbara Tepa Lupack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Serial Production ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

This chapter studies The Mysteries of Myra (1916). Although the Wharton brothers apparently abandoned some of the shorter pictures that they had been considering, early in the new year of 1916, they began preparations for The Mysteries of Myra. Pioneering in both subject and execution, The Mysteries of Myra aimed to avoid the hackneyed melodramatic lines of many early serials by offering instead what one contemporary reviewer called “a wonderful new theme that compels attention because of the puzzling thoughts regarding mental telepathy and spirits presented in a manner which follows authenticated scientific discoveries.” In other words, the serial purported to demonstrate the way that science had become powerful enough to “prove” the existence of the unscientific. Myra had other cultural reverberations as well. In addition to reflecting the unconventional “New Woman” type that had come into vogue in the 1910s, Myra Maynard was also emblematic of another early twentieth-century type in America popular culture: the adolescent girl as a liminal figure who, as she comes of age, uncannily mediates between the living and the dead. The scenario for the serial was written by Charles W. Goddard, a veteran of serial pictures who had scripted The Perils of Pauline and whose association with the Whartons dated back to their first Elaine serial production in 1914. On the Myra scripts, Goddard collaborated closely with American investigator of psychic phenomena Hereward Carrington, who supplied most of the occult story lines.

scholarly journals A Pathfinder for Comic Books and Graphic Novels

2016 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh H. Davis ◽  
Ryan M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Alternative Media ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Rich History

Alternative media are becoming more widely accepted as forms of literature.  Comic books and graphic novels are now mainstream, with characters and storylines appearing in movies, cartoons, video games, television shows, and more.  Comics and graphic novels are a billion dollar industry that can often go overlooked in the minds of readers.  The resources in this pathfinder will open readers’ eyes to the universe of stories and characters that are contained in comic books.  It will also give readers an idea of the rich history of the industry and the powerful impact that comic books and graphic novels have had on popular culture.  In addition, it will also provide teachers with a multitude of literary resources that they may otherwise overlook.

Golden-Age Thinking: Updated Stagings of Gianni Schicchi and the Popular Historical Imagination

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Way

AbstractSince 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

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