Comics Monsters

2019 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Maaheen Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Contemporary Culture

This concluding chapter traces the forms of rebelliousness discernible in comics monsters by highlighting the rebellious romantic heritage ensconced in the comics medium itself. It summarizes the shared and distinct romantic features embodied by the monstrous protagonists in the previous chapters. This is followed by a brief close reading of Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters to show how many of the romantic features brought out through the other comics reappear in this graphic novel. Drawing links between the prominence of the spectacular and the spectacle in the analyzed stories as well as the medium, the chapter then elaborates on the embedding of romantic features and monstrous inclinations in comics, especially on spectacularity as an inevitable accompaniment to rebelliousness. The chapter ends with a brief coda on the presence of Romanticism through monsters in contemporary culture.

Salsa’s Unruly Audition

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ren Ellis Neyra
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Music Festival

This essay shows how salsa stimulates unruly audition. It responds to that stimulation by performing multi-sensorial poetic listening with the excessive, tender, and queer audio-visual sabores [tastes], gestures, and details of two live performances by the musicians and singers contracted to Fania in the 1970s, one in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1973 and the other in 1974 at Zaire ‘74 in Kinshasa, a music festival of Afro-Latinx, brown, and black sonic solidarity headlining the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle fight. A riot of audience ended the All-Stars’ set at the 1973 Bronx concert. Their insurgent pleasure compels us to think unruliness with salsa’s listeners, and re-imagine Latinx as a riotous movement of brown and black swerving aesthetic convergences. The essay enacts a deviant and sonically oriented close reading of Héctor Lavoe’s vocals in the song “Mi Gente” [My People], in part, for their attunement precisely to audience and playful dynamics with the band. In this song, Lavoe cries out to “anormales” [abnormals], a sign re-imagined here as an off-kilter feeling for salsa and a multi-sensorial opening for more errant ruptures.

The Qizilbāsh and their Shah: The Preservation of Royal Prerogative during the Early Reign of Shah Ṭahmāsp

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
GREGORY ALDOUS
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Historical Literature

Abstract Modern historians of Persia's Safavid period (1501–1722) have long assumed that there was an interregnum between the death of Shah Ismāʿīl I in 1524 and the date when his son Ṭahmāsp came of age and established direct control in the 1530s. This idea of an interregnum takes two forms in the historiography. According to one narrative, during this time the Qizilbāsh amirs were disloyal to the young Ṭahmāsp and tried to seize control of Persia for themselves. According to the other, there was a war of succession in which Qizilbāsh factions supported different sons of Ismāʿīl I. Both of these narratives co-exist in the contemporary historical literature even though they disagree. Based on a close reading of the early Safavid chronicles, this article demonstrates that both narratives are incorrect and there was no interregnum. The Qizilbāsh continued throughout Ṭahmāsp's minority to respect him and treat him as their leader. Unsurprisingly, given his youth and inexperience, he deferred matters of state to his amirs. Nevertheless, his amirs derived their legitimacy to rule from him, and when leadership passed from one amir to another, it did so only with Ṭahmāsp's approval. Moreover, there was no dispute over the succession during Ṭahmāsp's minority.

Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The One

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

Husserl and Levinas

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (51) ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
João Carvalho ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Phenomenology ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Alter Ego

This paper presents two different, although related, approaches to the problem of the experience of the other person: E. Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity and E. Levinas’ ethics. I begin by (1) addressing the transcendental significance of the experience of intersubjectivity in the broader context of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. I then turn to (2) Husserl’s solution to the paradox of constituting the alter ego, identifying and elucidating the key‑concepts of his inquiry. I hold that throughout his analysis there is a dominant underlying meaning in which the alterity of the other person is progressively suppressed and, ultimately, elided. Finally, I discuss (3) the consequences of Husserl’s analysis of the other in light of Levinas’ ethics. I hold that Husserl’s claim that there is a fundamental difference between the experience of myself and my analogical experience of the other is the basis upon which Levinas’ develops a new concept of experience, not as perception but as encounter. Upon close reading, I claim that Levinas’ revision of the topic of alterity is, ultimately, a consequence of Husserl’s transcendental analysis of intersubjectivity.

ON “NARCISSISM“ IN POETRY. ON TWO CONTEMPORARY SLOVAK AUTHORS

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Irena DIMOVA
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Text Generation ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Other Hand

The proposed article examines two problems – the poetic formations (generations and groups) and the manifestations of "narcissism" in poetry. Two Slovak authors, representatives of different literary formations, are analyzed - Michal Habaj of the so-called Text Generation and Katarína Kucbelová of the ANesthetic Generation. Both their affiliation to these creative associations and the nature of the latter is discussed. In order to understand these literary phenomena, we use Karl Mannheim’s concept of generation and Michał Głowiński’s approach to literary groups. The interpretation of selected texts by the two poets is based on the view of contemporary culture as a "culture of narcissism" (Kr. Lash) and on the reflection on this concept, which we find in a literary-critical article by Katarína Kucbelová herself on Michal Habaj. Her reflection on the fragile boundary between narcissism as a theme and narcissism as deficiency of interpreted work we try to apply on her own poetry texts. The selected poems are from her poetry book “Duals” (Duály), which identifies her as part of the so-called ‘new sincerity’ in Slovak literature. In her texts, Katarína Kucbelová thematizes the closure of the lyrical self within its own existence, in which the presence of the other is allowed only as a concept or an idea. Michal Habaj's experimentalism in “Poems for Dead Girls” (Básne pre mŕtve dievčatá), on the other hand, "opens" his textual world, binds him to many discourses and distances him from the self.

Telling refugees’ stories: Testimony and hospitality in graphic novel L’Odyssée d’Hakim by Fabien Toulmé

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-313
Author(s):  
Jennifer Boum Make
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Testing Zone ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

Following the increase in migratory flows since 2015, in the Euro-Mediterranean region, bandes dessinées are mobilized to stir up compassion and prompt engagement with marginalized biographies. It begins with the premise that aesthetic approaches of bandes dessinées reveal a testing zone to juxtapose modalities of representation and expression of refugees and ways to interact with otherness. To interrogate the relationship between aesthetic devices and the formation of solidarity, this article considers the first volume of Fabien Toulmé’s trilogy, L’Odyssée d’Hakim: De la Syrie à la Turquie (2018). How does Toulmé’s use of aesthetic devices make space for the other, in acts of dialogue and exchange? What are the ethical implications for the exercise of bearing witness to migrant and refugee narratives, especially in the transcription and translation in words and drawing of their biographies? This article argues that visual narratives can provide for the creation of a hospitable testimonial space for migrants and refugees’ voices. The article outlines the aesthetic methodology deployed in graphic storytelling, reflects on what it means for the perception of refugees, and questions the use and ethical appeal of visual narratives as a form to curate hospitality.

On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English”

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Rita Raley
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Global English ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Language Question

What does it signify to speak of a World Literature in English? In what ways might diaspora studies and transnationalism be linked to the contemporary phenomenon of global English, with a mode of comprehending the world that holds English at its center? What can diaspora studies and transnationalism learn from the “language question” frequently raised in discussions of both cultural imperialism and postcolonial writing? What can they learn from the question of globalism now so ubiquitous in contemporary criticism? How does the Literature in English concept relate, on the one hand, to Edouard Glissant's outline of the “liberation” that results from compromising major languages with Creoles (250), and, on the other, to Fredric Jameson's implicit yearning for a philosophical universal linguistic standard not circumvented by linguistic heteroglossia (16-7)? These questions outline the conceptual terrain of this article, in which I read the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English” as both symptom and cause of the emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration situated on the line between contemporary culture and the academy. Over the course of this article, I chart this discursive transmutation and its necessary preconditions—the critical investiture in the “global,” the renewed attention to dialects, the abstraction of the “postcolonial”—as a way of articulating profound reservations about the “new universalisms,” of which Literature in English is a primary instance.

The Other, The Same: Towards a Metamodern Poetics with Heddy Honigmann

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelies van Noortwijk
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
The Other ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Real ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
The Subject

Modernism and The Poetics of Sameness and Presence”. The author argues that through a paradigm shift from post-modernism towards what she proposes to refer to as meta-modernism, a new kind of poetic comes to the fore in which senses of ‘sameness’ and ‘presence’ and a drive towards inter-subjective connection and dialogue are pivotal. At the same time a turn to the subject, the real and the private, are the preferred strategies to address the central topics in contemporary culture; that of (often traumatic) memory and identity. The re-evaluation of the subject as an active, embodied and emotional individual is fundamental to such a shift.

Seeing Race in Comics

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Glaser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Police Shootings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter discusses the power of the medium of comics to shed light on discussions of race, racism, and the act of passing. Glaser moves from a close reading of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s recent neo-passing narrative, the graphic novel Incognegro (2008), to a wider look at the history of visual media in representing racial violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter makes the argument that comics provide an arena for thinking both about how we see and interpret race and how visual depictions of racial violence—from photographs of lynchings to recordings of police shootings of unarmed African American men—force us to grapple with complex ethical questions.

Modernist Close Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
Max Saunders
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Academic Practice ◽  
Practical Criticism

Close reading, as it gained prestige from the 1920s in Cambridge Practical Criticism and then the American New Criticism, was not only a product of the modernist period but a product of modernism. Whatever else modernism involved, it advocated what we might call ‘close writing’: a minute attention to the words being used, the word choices being justified by the effects they produced. When I. A. Richards distributed anonymized poems to his students and colleagues for them to analyse, and then analysed their responses in turn, he wrote up his findings in the book that effectively launched close reading as an academic practice, Practical Criticism (1929). This chapter investigates two kinds of context for the attention to close reading exemplified by Richards. One is the network of writers and thinkers around Richards; the other is literary modernism itself

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