comics
Modernism, as the last two decades of criticism have taught us, resides in many places.
Glance at Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel (2017) and you might dismiss it as a lark—albeit a clever one—far removed from modernist concerns. Sikoryak’s book, self-described on the front cover as both “complete and unabridged” as well as an “unauthorized adaptation,” reprints the entire 20,000+ words of the Apple iTunes Terms and Conditions legal agreement as was current in 2017. Each page of this so-called “graphic novel” (more on that label below) takes Apple’s corporate legales
In a discussion of film’s temporality, and specifically of the relationship between the image of the performer onscreen and the viewer’s awareness of time’s passage since that image’s capture, Stanley Cavell offers the above analogy explaining the nostalgic response to an old photograph via the temporal distance between observer and observed. For Cavell, nostalgia results when we know something about the future of the observed subject—in this case, everything contained within the camera frame—that that subject cannot kno
Melvin Van Peebles remembers that it was 1963 or 1964 when his boss at the weekly news magazine France-Observateur assigned him to do a story on someone “who had just won some big French crime writing prize.” That someone happened to be another Black American writer living in Paris, Chester Himes—although he had won the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1958, not recently. The award honored For Love of Imabelle (1957),
In modernist literature, traditional notions of history are famously subject to interrogation. Driven in part by a general post–World War I disillusionment, many modernist authors understood history not as a static thing, but as a concept to be re-examined and reworked. These writers often reconfigured the past in their writing as a means of recontextualizing the present in hopes of a more productive future, such as the fragmentation of history in T. S.
Tove Jansson’s Moomin newspaper comic was one of the most widely distributed daily comics of its time, eventually reaching distribution in around 40 countries and 120 newspapers. Between 1954 and 1957, Jansson wrote and illustrated the comic based on her Moomin series of children’s books, achieving newfound recognition for herself and her characters, while testing themes that would find their way into her later fiction. Jansson’s role in comics history is remarkable not least as a female cartoonist in a male-dominated industry but also as a major innovator of the comics form.
The experimental fiction of Djuna Barnes seems radically removed from the world of comic art. Her early career working in the yellow press is frequently dismissed as the by-product of an understandable if unseemly attraction for mass culture; Barnes, after all, was just a teenager at the time and had just moved to New York City. Others rationalize her early career as hack work done simply to ingratiate herself in New York’s social-intellectual scene and to pay the bills.
For nearly thirty years the new modernist studies have expanded our topics of study along vertical and horizontal axes, embracing archival, historicist, and cultural methodologies and internationalizing the authors, movements, and materials we investigate.[1] Innovative analyses of modernism’s engagements with politics, radio, journalism, film, celebrity, music, and periodicals of every sort, and of modernisms across the globe proliferate.
At the climactic moment of the final chapter of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison and her father Bruce are taking a drive together to watch the 1980 film, Coal Miner’s Daughter (fig. 1). For the first time since she has come out to her family, Alison tries to have a frank conversation with her father about her sexuality—and his. She has recently learned that her father has been sleeping with men for decades. The encounter is tense. Bechdel emphasizes this tension by changing the panel layout of her graphic memoir. Featuring twelv