Session Coordinator: Richard Iadonisi
Dept. of Writing,
215 Lake Ontario Hall,
iadonisr@gvsu.edu
Trauma,
History, and September 11:
Art
Spiegelman’s In
the Shadow of No Towers as Visual Witnessing
In
a 2003 NPR interview, Art Spiegelman speaks of his
latest work, In the Shadow of No Towers,
as a return to the way news was covered before photography: he notes that a
photograph is “the equivalent to writing in the third person,” in that it seems
to speak with “a voice of authority.” Spiegelman goes
on to note that fiction has taught us that this seeming authority is simply a
voice, while comics can be a method of “visual witnessing,” an artist declaring
“I saw this.” Spiegelman’s work arises at the
crossroads of personal and world history, both of which are traumatic. No Towers manifests its traumatic
content through a number of innovate formal and structural tactics that differ
greatly from those employed in his earlier work Maus, which has also often been analyzed as historical trauma; these
strategies include the obsessive repetition of the image of the towers,
multiple narrative and visual threads on each page that mimic Spiegelman’s traumatized, fragmented, and disconnected
consciousness, and a collage of different visual styles including digital
paintings and homages to early newspaper cartoons.
The second part
of the book, comprised of reproductions of tricolor Sunday supplements from the
early 1900s that inspired the iconography and layouts of Spiegelman’s
work, creates its historical framework. The deliberate juxtaposition of
representations of 9/11 with early twentieth century newspaper cartoons evokes
the similarities and divergences of our own moment with that of a century ago
and finds many resonances. These strategies make No Towers not just an autobiographical graphic work, but a work of
visual witnessing that represents the workings of an artist attempting to work
through the trauma of September 11 via, in part, historical consciousness.
Laura Beadling
beadling@purdue.edu
"Framing
History"
In
several of her essays on comics, Leslie Scalapino
takes the sequential development of narrative employed by comics as a way of
exploring the "unfolding of phenomena" as it is recorded and
reconstructed to appear cohesive. In my paper, I elaborate on Scalapino's treatment of the frame as both separate and
collective moments as each contributes to a larger text, by examining not only
the content of each frame (as Scalapino does) but the
spaces between them--the "gutter" as Scott McCloud refers to it in Understanding Comics. Building upon
McCloud's theory here, I treat the gutter as an active space in which readers
are required to connect through interpretation a series of discrete moments;
the construction of narrative literally takes place as readers move from one
frame to the next, which has many social and political implications beyond,
though intertwined with, formal narrative concerns. My paper is particularly
interested in these implications as they constitute the construction and
(re)telling of historical events, insofar as I explore the impact of the
sequential frame structure on several comic books concerned with storytelling
an its relationship to history. With a primary emphasis on Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale and In the Shadow of No Towers, I seek to explore these issues of form
and their impact on the historical narratives that Spiegelman
constructs from them. Some of my key concerns are Spiegelman's
explicit interest in the act of writing historical texts; the construction of
history and its complex intertwining of personal and communal concerns; and the
political implications of the writing of history, especially as he develops upon
this issue raised in Maus
in In the Shadow of No Towers, in which he
examines the more malevolent effects of creating historical narratives in
media. Developing from Spiegelman's work, I am also
interested in the connection between comic books and biography/autobiography,
incorporating texts such as Seth's Palookaville, Joe Matt's Peepshow,
and Julie Doucet's My New York Diary. Further questions I will undertake here: What is
the relationship between time and perception and the frame? What does it mean
to represent historical events along a non-linear chronological model? How can
one represent his or her own experience in comics as "true" both
personally and in a larger historical context?
Angela
Szczepaniak
SUNY
Aws4@buffalo.edu
Of
Mice and Men: Collaboration, Post-Memory, and Working Through in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
The
vast majority of critics writing about Art Spiegelman’s
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
occupy themselves with the ethics of representation—both graphical and linguistic—of
the Holocaust, memory, and trauma. To date, Maus as a collaborative
autobiography and the intricacies of the collaborative struggle between Vladek Spiegelman and Art Spiegelman have gone largely unexplored. Thus, this
conference presentation will investigate the collaborative partnership of Vladek and Art—its constitution, its enactment, its
graphical representation—and how, as a site of tension in its own
representation, it not only complicates autobiographical questions, but also
opens the door to as-yet unspoken dialogues concerning Maus. Specifically, since by
definition autobiographical “collaboration” implies varying degrees of
mutuality and (un)co-operation, and since the collaboration between Vladek and Art is distanced, both temporally and
qualitatively across generations, it makes sense to discuss Maus in terms of what, in her
1994 landmark essay, Marianne Hirsch coined “post-memory.” However, I propose
extending this treatment of Maus by triangulating it in conversation with Dominick LaCapra’s readings of “acting out” and “working through,”
not in order to initiate a detailed psycho-analytic reading of Maus, but rather
to allow for a dialectical exploration of both the collaboration and the graphical and linguistic
representations to which it necessarily gives rise, while simultaneously
exploring the extent to which both contribute to, or detract from, memorial and
post-memorial processes of working through of Holocaust traumas. I resist
readings of Maus
which confine it to traditional writer-speaker paradigms and obviate the
multiplicity of Spiegelman identities (Art and Vladek) at work within and without the text. Rather, by
exploring Maus
as a collaborative autobiography and the role of the collaboration itself in
acting out/working through traumas, I will explore the nature of the familial
collaborative partnership as necessarily
without fixity—that is, as an embodiment of the multitude of competing,
struggling intersubjectivities always at work in
collaboration, and certainly in familial collaboration. Indeed, read through
the lenses of post-memory and acting out/working through, Maus offers a chance to rethink
the familial model of collaboration as an embodied performance that necessarily
sets in motion cross-generational constitutive processes of exchange—of memory,
of meaning, and of knowledge—and how these ever-evolving processes cannot be
neatly theorized (or represented) along traditional (auto)biographical lines.
janicemorris@shaw.ca
Visual theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, addressing in these terms the
paradoxical nature of the prescriptive figures of the “Unspeakable” and the
“Unimaginable” in public discourses about trauma, points to a poignant truth
about words and images. Terrorism, atrocity, and genocide seem to take our words and images to
a point of non-return, a place of silence and darkness. Yet in spite of their
inadequacy, verbal and visual representations of traumatic events saturate our
media-driven and highly visual culture. This intricate nesting of visual and
verbal discourses subtly shapes and sustains our collective cultural memory.
Thus understanding the nature of visual/verbal interactions and developing a form
of “word-and-image” literacy are, for our age, something of an ethical
imperative.
I
propose to study one of Joe Sacco’s graphic novels, Safe Area Gorazde (2000), where verbal
and visual narratives intertwine in an effort to represent the utterly traumatic
experiences of Bosnians in a besieged Muslim enclave during the Yugoslav War.
The mixed-media form Sacco adoptsa
combination of drawings with wordsallows the
artist to challenge the figures of the “Unspeakable” and “Unimaginable” by
simultaneously speaking and showing. Asserting the permeability of boundaries
between verbal and visual domains, this work invites reflection on the dynamics
that underlie its aesthetic strategies. How do we process verbal and visual
signs separately and together? How do the verbal and visual dimensions of the
text carry the meaning of the traumatic story? How does multimodal rhetoric
operate? Precisely the interplay, reciprocal framing, and frictions between
words and imagesI will argueallow
Sacco to grapple with all that most resists representation. By relying on
genre-specific formal features such as the interaction of words and images,
narrative economy, visual signification in the gap between frames, and temporal
and spatial compression, this work becomes a powerful vehicle for the
representation of trauma.
Laura
Di Prete
lauradiprete@hotmail.com
Session Coordinator: Richard Iadonisi
Dept. of Writing,
215 Lake Ontario Hall,
iadonisr@gvsu.edu
"The World Doesn't Make Sense Unless
You Force it To": Frank Miller's Dark
Knight and Reaganite Entertainment
Two important influences inform my discussion: the Marxist-leaning critics
of the UK film journal Movie (Andrew
Britton is credited with coining the term) and their analysis of Hollywood
in the late seventies and early eighties; the work of Jane Feuer
on television of the Reagan era, in particular her discussion of the "made-for-tv-
trauma drama." By discussing a framework for how to characterize the
mainstream culture of the 1980s, I will discuss Frank Miller's Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns in that context. Dark Knight, in explicitly evoking the
imagery of the hero riding on a horse, is a very obvious example of Reaganite entertainment (even as it directly satirizes Reagan
himself): the decaying Gotham City, the weakness of liberal social approaches
to the problems, the justification of vigilantism (in this same era is the
notorious Bernie Goetz case). Whatever claims favorable critics made to
the way Miller added "complexity" and "depth" to the
character of Batman/Bruce Wayne, the text remains sympathetic to Batman's
crusade (even the term "holy war," evoked in the narrative, carries
conservative religious implications).
grochoth@shu.edu
“One Should Never Forget”: The Entangling of
History and Memory in Marjane
Satrapi’s
Marjane Satrapi’s
graphic novel
I intend to examine this graphic novel as
a literary representation, in text and image, of the entanglement of history
and memory. By presenting her own images and memories of the Iranian Revolution,
I see Satrapi attempting to disrupt the master-narratives of Iranian
history on two levels, one as told by Islamic historical revisionists of
the Iranian Revolution, and the second as created by dominant Western perceptions
influenced by discourses of secularism and Western feminism. My paper will
examine the ways that Satrapi uses the genre to
negotiate between image and “truth” so that image is re-centered as a form
of truth imbricating historiography, memoir and
the graphic novel.
Richard Iadonisi
iadonisr@gvsu.edu
Despite his objections to the term, Jack
Jackson’s Los Tejanos is
“revisionist history,” seeking to re-insert into