[UPDATE March 28, 2013: The book is now available; see here for more info]
I am pleased to announce that editorial work on Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads has been completed, and the manuscript has been turned over to the Bloomsbury production department. The book is now scheduled to appear in March 2013.
The above image is an early mock-up of the cover; I will post the final version, along with any further info, as soon as it becomes available.
Just got my copy in the mail today: Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Frank Kelleter and with contributions from members of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice” and others, including Jason Mittell, Oliver Fahle, Lorenz Engell, and more!
I have yet to hear from anyone at the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies, which is going on now (May 31 – June 3, 2012) in Mainz, but the volume pictured above — Transnational American Studies, edited by Udo Hebel — was scheduled to make its debut there. (The Amazon page is up, but currently listing the book as not yet available.) In any case, I look forward to reading the contributions to the volume, which the publisher (Winter) describes thus:
Transnational approaches and theories have reshaped the interdisciplinary trajectory of American Studies since the turn of the millennium. The further extension of perspectives on the United States and North America to prominently include Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, and Pacific Studies has complicated long-standing notions of ‘American Studies’ and problematized concepts such as nation, identity, and American exceptionalism.
The collection gathers thirty original contributions to transnational American Studies from the fields of cultural studies, literature, history, politics, and media studies. Individual essays reassess the global role of the U.S. and its perceptions from within and without, discuss how transnational and comparative explorations emphasize multidirectional processes of cultural exchange and transfer, and show how paradigms of migration and cultural mobility have taken definitions and practices of American Studies beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary limits.
Oh, and did I mention that I have a chapter in the book? (Sorry for the self-promotion, but that’s what blogs are for, right?) Anyway, my piece is called “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective,” and it’s a reworking of a talk by the same title that I gave at last year’s DGfA conference. (In case you missed it but are interested, a screencast video of the full presentation can be viewed here.)
An announcement has just gone up on the publisher’s site for Populäre Serialität: Narration — Evolution — Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert [i.e. Popular Seriality: Narration — Evolution — Distinction. On Serial Storytelling since the 19th Century]. The volume, which is set to appear in August of this year with the German publisher transcript, is edited by Frank Kelleter (speaker for the DFG Research Unit on “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice,” of which I am a part), and it contains — among many other interesting chapters — a piece co-authored by myself and Ruth Mayer, called “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel” [roughly: Border-Crossers: Serial Figures and Media Change].
Here, for readers of German, is the blurb from the publisher’s site:
Wie lässt sich die starke Verbreitung von seriellen Erzählungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert erklären? Welche neuen Erzählformate werden durch Serialisierung geschaffen? Wie beeinflussen populäre Serien unsere Wahrnehmung und Strukturierung sozialer Realität?
Die Beiträge in diesem Band gehen diesen Fragen nach und zeigen u.a., welche Wandlungen Serienfiguren durchlaufen, wenn sie in neue Medien übertragen werden, oder wie bei lang laufenden Serien die Übergänge zwischen Produzenten und Nutzern immer fließender werden. So ergibt sich ein facettenreicher Blick auf einen wesensbestimmenden Erzähltypus der Populärkultur.
Daniel Stein, my indefatigable friend, colleague, and co-editor of Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (forthcoming from Continuum next year), has just published his monograph Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz with the University of Michigan Press. The book is the first extended study of the relation between Louis Armstrong’s writing practices and musical performances and offers a cultural theory of
intermedia and transmedia autobiographics.
On this occasion, Daniel has written a guest blog post on “Armstrong, autobiographics, and a Disney alligator” at the University of Michigan Press blog, which I have been authorized to reproduce here:
The millions of people who went to the movie theaters to watch Disney’s animated film The Princess and the Frog (dir. Ron Clemens and John Musker, 2009) encountered a singing and trumpeting alligator named Louis. Set in a mythologized New Orleans of the 1920s, the movie cooks up a gumbo of popular ingredients ranging from the city’s famous street parades and Mississippi entertainment ships to highly stylized images of Harlem Renaissance dance hall decors. While the anthropomorphic Louis is only one of many side characters, he is especially noteworthy because he pays homage to one of New Orleans’s most famous sons and one of America’s most popular twentieth-century icons: the jazz trumpeter, singer, and actor Louis Armstrong (1901-1971).
For many of Disney’s viewers, connecting the lovable cartoon alligator with the historical Louis Armstrong would have been relatively easy (the trumpet style and speaking voice pretty much give it away). Indeed, ever since Ken Burns’s highly acclaimed PBS documentaryJazz (2001), Armstrong has perhaps been the most visible and readily identifiable figure in American culture. But as I argue in my book, it was not just audiences, journalists, biographers, and documentary filmmakers who contributed to Armstrong’s lasting status as a jazz legend: Armstrong himself actively impacted his public reception and still shapes our understanding of jazz today. How did that happen? Obviously, his recordings from the 1920s (with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band as well as his own Hot Five and Hot Seven) until the very end of his life (with the All Stars), his relentless touring all over the world, and his many film roles and television appearances add up to a vast sonic and visual archive of material that fans and scholars continue to mine for meaning.
Yet Armstrong was also a writer, and a prolific one at that. He enjoyed only minimal formal education and did not receive any specific literary training, but he began to write on a daily basis when he moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922 and did not stop until he passed away almost fifty years later. He did most of his writing on a portable typewriter but wrote in longhand whenever he did not have access to this typewriter. Over the course of his life, he penned thousands of letters and wrote dozens of longer narratives, including two autobiographical books, Swing That Music (partially ghostwritten and published in 1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954), and a variety of magazine articles, several of which are collected in Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings (1999). The Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens houses many of these and other materials, and I was privileged to draw on some of their holdings for my research.
My book is the first scholarly attempt to conduct a comprehensive study of Armstrong as a writer. As such, it traces his evolution as a writer over several decades and pays particular attention to his idiosyncratic autobiographical practice: his tendency to treat all written expression as a spontaneous form of life writing in which the moment of autobiographical performance is determined by the writer’s interaction with his medium – typewriter, pen, paper – and his imagined audiences. Once we understand Armstrong along these lines as a vernacular storyteller whose objective was to communicate his views about his life and his music, we get a better sense of how central the autobiographical mode was to all of his expressive efforts, including his singing, trumpet playing, and film acting, as well as his curious habit of assembling photo-collages and preserving snapshots of his public and private lives on his tape recorders.
In the first half of the book, I argue that Armstrong was actually an intermedia performer whose central mode of communication was autobiography and whose autobiographical performances across media were characterized by many of the principles that also structure jazz: spontaneity, interaction, variation, and humor. Dissatisfied with formalistic approaches to Armstrong’s jazz and with biographical studies that too often take the musician’s words and actions at face value, the second half of the book offers extensive historical and cultural contextualization of what I call Satchmo’s autobiographics: the cultural resonances evoked in and through Armstrong’s performances across media. It is especially the controversial history of blackface minstrelsy and its modern reformulations by twentieth-century jazz performers that infuse Armstrong’s productive ambiguities: the manifold, and often contradictory, cultural contexts and racial discourses that were produced by his performances and that trouble all too easy declarations of Armstrong as either a submissive “Uncle Tom” (as many of his detractors had it during the civil rights movement) or an exceptionally cunning trickster figure who transcended racial boundaries and stereotypes (as many of his present-day followers would have it).
Crucially, these ambiguities continue to be productive almost four decades after Armstrong’s death. They can be seen and heard in Disney’s Princess and the Frog as well. After all, alligator Louis is both a masterful jazz musician of the highest order and a clumsy, bumbling comical character whom students of American racial stereotypes will readily associate with the actual and figurative blackface representations that have “colored” American popular culture for at least two centuries. Whether Armstrong would have been the jazz figure of choice for this Disney movie had he not written so prolifically about his life and his music must, of course, remain a matter of speculation. But that Armstrong’s LP Disney Songs the Satchmo Way(1968) has caused both vitriolic criticism as an alleged pandering to minstrel conventions and glorious praise for its supposedly sublime interpretations of popular songs is indeed instructive. I think that rather than siding with one of these assessments, we should dig even deeper into the musician’s textual, sonic, and visual archive and continue to trace the ambiguities that make Satchmo’s autobiographics so endlessly fascinating.
I am pleased to announce The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real, an essay collection co-edited by two of my colleagues, Wolfgang Funk and Florian Groß, along with Irmtraud Huber from the University of Berne. The book will appear in early May with German publisher Transcript. Here is a short abstract for the collection:
“As a concept that increasingly gains importance in contemporary cultural discourse, authenticity emerges as a site of tearing tensions between the fictional and the real, original and fake, margin and centre, the same and the other.
The essays collected in this volume explore this paradoxical nature of authenticity in the context of various media. They give ample proof of the fact that authenticity, which depends on giving the impression of being inherent or natural, found not created, frequently turns out to be the result of a careful aesthetic construction that depends on the use of identifiable techniques with the aim of achieving certain effects for certain reasons.”
And here is the Table of Contents:
“Exploring the Empty Plinth. The Aesthetics of Authenticity” (Wolfgang Funk, Florian Groß, and Irmtraud Huber)
FRAGMENTATIONS
“Authenticity as an Aesthetic Notion. Normative and Non-Normative Concepts in Modern and Contemporary Poetics” (Susanne Knaller)
“Found Objects. Narrative (as) Reconstruction in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad” (Wolfgang Funk)
“Monolithic Authenticity and Fake News. Stephen Colbert’s Megalomania” (Seth Hulse)
“Authentic Bodies. Genome(s) vs. Gender Norms in Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and BioShock” (Sven Schmalfuß)
CONTESTATIONS
“‘The Real Thing.’ Authenticating Strategies in Hemingway’s Fiction” (Melanie Eis)
“Real Lives – Living Wild. Authenticity, Wilderness, and the Postmodern Robinsonade in James Hawes’s Speak for England and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (Francesca Nadja Palitzsch)
“Monica Ali and the Suspension of Disbelief” (Melanie Mettler)
PERFORMANCES
“Poet and the Roots. Authenticity in the Works of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah” (David Bousquet)
“The Dilettantish Construction of the Extraordinary and the Authenticity of the Artificial. Tracing Strategies for Success in German Popular Entertainment Shows” (Antonius Weixler)
“‘Brooklyn Zack is Real’: Irony and Sincere Authenticity in 30 Rock” (Florian Groß)
“Authentic Simulacra or the Aura of Repetition. Experiencing Authenticity in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder” (Irmtraud Huber and Sophie Seita)
Check this out:
This book is intended to be a time capsule of the passions and emotions driving the movement. We are comic book & graphic novel artists and writers who’ve been inspired by the movement and hope to tell the stories of the people who are out there putting themselves at risk for an idea. What is that idea? Most of the media will tell you the idea is a vague and befuddled mess, but movements don’t coalesce around vague, befuddled messes. We hope that through the medium of comics we can share some of the ideas and experiences driving this movement.
Visit occupycomics.com for more info about the project, and go to their Kickstarter page if you’d like to support them.
[UPDATE March 28, 2013: The book is now available; see here for more info]
[Update: our publisher, Continuum, now has an official announcement, complete with table of contents: here.]
I am excited to announce Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, an essay collection co-edited by Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and myself, which is now officially under contract with Continuum, an international publisher with a strong comics program (you can browse some of their graphic narrative-related titles here). We hope to see the volume appear in 2012; more info will follow before then, but in the meantime here is a short abstract for the collection:
Transnational Approaches to Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads
Editors: Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein
Scholarship on graphic narratives has rarely looked beyond the confines of national borders. While a growing body of studies has turned to different national traditions (Anglo-American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, Japanese manga, etc.), most critics still treat graphic narratives from different cultures as relatively self-contained phenomena. In fact, scholarship in the emerging field of Comics Studies offers very little analysis of what Shelly Fisher Fishkin has called “the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that straddle multiple regional and national traditions.” (“Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 32.)
The overall aim of this collection is to close the gaps in (at least) two major fields of research: 1) in American Studies, broadly defined, where graphic narratives are increasingly accepted as a hybrid, visual-verbal literature that is worthy of critical analysis but where they are frequently placed in an exclusively American context despite the opening of the field towards transcultural and transnational research; and 2) in Comics Studies, which is currently one of the liveliest and most dynamic young fields of critical inquiry but which has, by and large, marginalized the transcultural and transnational dimensions of graphic narratives.
The essays in this collection read graphic narratives as texts that are virtually predisposed towards crossing cultural and national boundaries because their unique visual-verbal interface translates more readily – though not without transformative distortions – across cultures than mono-medial forms of literature, non-narrative artworks, and even film. Our understanding of these texts and their history thus foregrounds the transnational flux of authors and graphic styles as well as the transcultural work that individual works and genres have performed for more than a century. As Paul Williams and James Lyons write: “There are good reasons to understand North American comics in a transnational context: the institutional transaction of texts, creators, and capital across national borders has contributed to observable productive tensions in the comic texts themselves.” (The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010, xiii.) Following this challenge to consider the transnational exchange of creative energies and their transcultural effects, the first aim which all of the essays in our collection pursue is to engage in the study of American graphic narratives as texts that question and potentially transcend the ideological limitations of national borders.
A second aim of this volume is to situate American graphic narratives in a truly interdisciplinary space in which literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, as well as political and sociological approaches may contribute to redefining the fields of American literature as a truly transnational field of inquiry in which graphic narratives are a major, and increasingly prominent, element. Instead of following uni-directional approaches, all of the essays in this volume follow a notion of multi-directional relationality that has shaped the field of American graphic narratives from its inception (from Japanese woodcuts to early American newspaper comics; from the Eastern European origins of Superman’s inventors to the British authors and artists drawing most contemporary superhero characters) and that has always been at the center of this inherently transcultural and transnational literature.
In the future – at least if we believe the big media/tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Google, and the rest – everything will be in “the cloud.” Physical media like records and CDs have already lost significance, but even having a local copy in mp3 format may become less important as we move away from click-wheel iPods to constantly connected devices that pull our music directly from the cloud – wirelessly, effortlessly, and without the need for ever-increasing local storage capacities. We’re not quite there yet, of course, and many of us have reason to believe that we never in fact want to get there. Intellectual property, digital rights management, surveillance, and the marketing of our virtual profiles indicate just a few of the challenges and worries that accompany the move to the cloud. Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, it is increasingly easy to at least imagine a future in which all of “our” media will one day reside in the virtual no-place place of the cloud. Not just music, but also films, games, and even books.
The e-book has of course long been a controversial entity – subject of fantasy but also of scorn. As academics, we have of course learned the advantages of searchable text, and yet many of us insist on the superiority of a physical book in a physical hand. Regardless, though, of what one thinks about efforts to digitize text and to make our primary channel of access to it the computer or some other electronic device, and quite distinct from reservations we may hedge about efforts to put all our books in the cloud, I would like to make a case for another book/cloud relation: in the future, whether or not every book resides in the cloud, a cloud should reside in every book!
What I mean is this: the back cover and/or inside flap of a book’s dusk jacket has long been the place for a short summary, a teaser, for attention-getters, blurbs, and other textual snippets designed to give us an idea of what the book is all about. Why not add a cloud – of the sort we know from blogs as the “tag cloud”? I.e. an automatically generated representation of word or topic frequency which accords a larger font size to words appearing more often and smaller font to less frequently used words. As a machine-generated entity, the book’s cloud is a posthuman textual production – created without regard for what we, as authors or readers believe is most significant about a text, but instead offering an uncensored view of actual practice, based on the words that actually appear on the page, weighted according to their sheer frequency. With virtually all contemporary text “born digital” anyway, there’s nothing to stand in the way of generating this sort of cloud, and the results can be revealing for readers and authors alike.
Inspired by something I saw at Lance Strate’s blog, I decided to put the theory into practice. I opened a PDF file of my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, hit “select all,” “copied,” and “pasted” all 400 pages of it into the free (as in beer) text-cloud making service at wordle.net. What you see here are the results. And, in some cases, these results are surprising to me. The importance (i.e. frequency) of “human” is greater than I would have expected. The size of the word “must” indicates the predominance of an imperative tone that is slightly embarrassing to me. And I would have expected “phenomenology” to appear more prominently in the cloud. But these surprises, I suggest, are significant. And they are the product of a confrontation of my human-centered expectations, values, and beliefs about the significance of my own work with the nonhuman agency of a machine: surprise – and also significance – result from a posthuman or postnatural production that deserves a place next to human-authored summaries and the like on the (virtual) back cover of any book – a postnatural cloud on every book!
And it’s easy to imagine going further, not only putting a cloud on every book, but also setting up a database of text-clouds of this sort for all books available in digital form – which now includes all the classics of literature and philosophy, and nearly any book published today. This would be a postnatural cloud in the postnatural sky.
Regina Schober, who completed her PhD in American Studies in Hannover, has just published her book Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics. Among other things, the book contains important theoretical reflections on intermediality that are relevant quite beyond the scope of her own study.