Why are so many of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels autobiographical? Why do so many of these works contain scenes of mirroring or the trope of mise en abyme , in which the picture has within it an identical miniature picture? This essay probes the formal mechanics of autobiographical graphic novels to show how mirror scenes and their self-conscious play with pictorial identity forge autobiographical subjects. This essay, therefore, analyzes not simply the form of autobiographical graphic novels but their formal unconscious as well. Drawing on comics scholarship, autobiography studies, and psychoanalysis, it investigates Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) and James Kochalka’s American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries (2004) to show that in frequency and function these mirror moments mark “failed encounters with the real.”

Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography

This dissertation reexamines the critical orthodoxies of postmodern American literature by attending to the everyday objects that populate the worlds of narrative texts written from the 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium. Whereas the majority of literary and cultural critics, from Fredric Jameson to Linda Hutcheon to K. Anthony Appiah, argue that postmodernism can be best understood in terms of a commitment to the demystification of social arrangements that seem natural, this project proposes that what makes literature postmodern is a dedication to the ongoing material construction of the social. Beginning with the most mundane items in works of fiction by Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, John Barth, Toni Morrison, and others, "Postmodern Materialism" charts the complex interactions of vast arrays of subjects and objects in the assembly of social groups. The resulting inquiry offers two important benefits: 1) a new approach to postmodernism in general through a rereading of postmodern fiction; 2) a unique methodology for assessing the relationship between things and people that reveals the fluidity of, and thus the possibility for remaking, our social structures. By showcasing the simplest components of the social, the project of postmodernism can be seen, I maintain, as calling our attention not so much away from ourselves and our preoccupations as toward the material world that we all share. Such a shift in consideration does necessitate, however, a theoretical movement away from human essence as the gravitational center of our social relations, thus precluding an overly reductive comparison between people that more often than not results in the exclusion, alienation, or marginalization of individuals and groups based on actual or perceived differences. Along these lines, I conclude that postmodern fiction is especially well-suited for a critical remaking of the social because it is attuned to the ways in which the social is constantly being fashioned by the world of material objects.

Postmodern materialism: things, people, and the remaking of the social in contemporary American narrative

The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.

The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel

Would you like me to stop venting my rage on paper? Is that what you’d like me to do, all you selfrighteous, indignant females? All you poor persecuted downtrodden cunts? Would you rather I went out and raped twelveyearold girls? Would that be an improvement? Well, listen, you dumbassed broads, I’m gonna fucking well draw what I please to draw and if you don’t like it, fuck you! (Crumb 1971)

“A Word to You Feminist Women”: The Parallel Legacies of Feminism and Underground Comics

This is a chapter in a significant new collection of essays which will be a key reference in the field of comics studies. The chapter came about through an invitation from the editors Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey and Stephen E. Tabachnick to explore the impact on Harvey Kurtzman, with a specific emphasis on the development of the graphic novel as a form. This is the first attempt to do so in an academic context.

From the publisher's website:
The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students.

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Harvey Kurtzman and the Influence of Mad Magazine

Novels written about comic books possess a unique representational potential. Although many of these novels treat comics chiefly as sources of readymade metaphors, authors such as Rick Moody and Michael Chabon have expanded their figural lexicon. As serial narratives, comic books present novelists with a form of metonymic combination that can conflate or arrest time; as visual narratives, they offer the possibility of escaping conventional linguistic signification. The novels that translate these figurative strategies to prose use comics to challenge some of the most basic tenets of the linguistic turn of twentieth-century critical theory.

Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel

“Menelaiad,” an experimental short story from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse , consists of a series of multiply nested narratives in which each layer recursively generates the next, chronologically earlier one. The story presents narrative and memory as supplemental processes that look back in time to recover or replace a lost moment of presence and completion. Barth suggests these supplements are imperfect and self-defeating means of recapturing the past, however, as they further separate the narrator from his tale’s irretrievable origins. The story structures human subjectivity along similarly self-deferring lines, portraying the self not as an essential whole but as a sequence of narrative supplements organized around an absence that no supplement can redress. Paralleling contemporary developments in poststructuralist theory yet not inspired by, beholden to, or even necessarily aware of them, “Menelaiad” delivers an original illustration of the recursive and supplemental processes that, Barth believes, define and demarcate the human subject.

Marc Singer

Papers

Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel

Recursion, Supplementarity, and the Limits of Subjectivity in John Barth’s “Menelaiad”