Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America Bradford W Wright Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001 336 pp $3495 hbk Newcomers to the field of comic book history will find Comic Book Nation a highly readable overview of the history of mainstream comic books, with an emphasis on those of the two leading publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics The book is arranged chronologically and takes the reader from the beginnings of the modern comic book in the late 1930s into the early 1990s Black-and-white illustrations of comic book covers and pages supplement the text Wright approaches comics books as cultural history, modeling his study on the work of William Savage, Comic Books and America 1945-1954, published in 1990 He combines a history of the comic books themselves with a discussion of the business history of comic book publishing, imbedding this survey within the larger context of American history His primary sources are the comic books themselves, and he adds narrative summaries of comic book stories to support his conclusions about the ways in which American society, and particularly youth culture, are reflected in the comic books of the time Most of Wright's history traces the evolution of the superhero comics, examining their origins, the role of superhero comics as World War 11 propaganda, the decline of the genre in postwar America, the rise of the "flawed superhero" in the 1960s, and the changes in the industry in the last two decades that gave rise to a new breed of creators who both deconstructed and revitalized the superhero genre He also devotes considerable time to tracing the rise of crime and horror comics as well, detailing the campaign against comics spearheaded by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham He touches on other genres, including jungle comics, war comics, and romance comics, which he suggests prepared girls for domestic life But it is the superhero that remains central to Wright's history In his epilogue, he writes that comic books will have a place in American culture "so long as they bring out the superhero in us all" Comic book scholars, however, may be somewhat disappointed with Wright's history It is largely derivative, condensing material from the popular histories such as Mike Benton's multivolume work and books by Les Daniels and Ron Goulart Likewise, his history of American culture, even with its focus on consumer and youth culture, draws on secondary sources He spends a third of the book, three overlapping chapters, on the decade following World War II, unarguably the period of comic book history that has attracted the most scholarly attention, and he simply duplicates the findings of these earlier studies …

Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America

The Organization Man

Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film

Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir

This thesis examines the contribution of Jewish artists to American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century and argues that the Jewish imagination contains a peculiar ability to simultaneous articulate the concerns of a specifically ethnic identity and a more universal American character. The thesis posits that by exploring how the Jewish community negotiated the space between ethnic identity and an American paradigm, Jewish artists were able to explore the middle ground between individuality and conformity, selfhood and consensus, liberalism and conservatism, tradition and change, and heritage and progress that held a wider pertinence for a more general American audience.	The thesis argues that the diversity of the Jewish American imagination at this time can be united by a leitmotif that can be best described as the ambivalence of transition. By examining aesthetically dissimilar texts from a variety of artistic fields, in particular comic books, theatre, cinema, television, and literature, the thesis argues that despite the cultural evolutions that occurred throughout the thirties, forties and fifties, the Jewish voice articulated a continuing concern regarding the relationship between ethnic identity, masculine identity, the individual and mass culture. This last point hints at another preoccupation of this thesis; the texts analysed here all share a narrative focus that explores and represents notions of masculine identity and ideality. In this way, the thesis necessarily focuses upon debates about masculinity within the Jewish imagination and American culture, charting the evolution of the Jewish and American male and their relationship towards notions of performed, consensus, individual and paradigm masculinity.Although there has not necessarily been a desire to fully deny the notion of a continuing thematic preoccupation within the Jewish imaginary, previous scholarship has shown a tendency towards accentuating the eclectic nature of Jewish American culture. Whilst scholars like Paul Buhle and Stephen J. Whitfield recognise the importance of popular culture as an arena in which Jewish artists sought to articulate issues at the heart of Jewish identity and community in the US, their studies focus upon the kaleidoscopic eclecticism of Jewish American culture. The intention of this thesis is to harness the diversity inherent in Jewish cultural expression via the prevailing leitmotif of the ambivalence of transition. In this way the thesis will use the multifarious and textured fabric of mid-century Jewish culture, as well as the simultaneous articulation of both ethnic and more general concerns, to illuminate the understanding of both Jewish identity and American culture throughout the mid-century. Thus, the thesis builds upon work by the likes of Julian Levinson and Hana Wirth-Nesher that revisits ideas of assimilation and attempts to complicate the inexorable movement away from Jewish distinctiveness and identity. Similarly, the thesis builds upon studies by the likes of Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Will Brooker that attempt to accentuate the reductive understanding of the mid-century based upon boundless suburbia and unthinking conformity.

Jarrod Homer

Papers

Ethnic peculiarity and universal appeal : the ambivalence of transition in mid-twentieth century Jewish American culture