Comics have great potential to depict an almost infinite range of themes, questions and lives. But what about their ability to express and interpret philosophical concepts? How can we differentiate between the representation of theoretical concepts in and of themselves, and the impact of comics techniques on the legacy of philosophers, their lives and their thought? This book explores the historical and artistic value of representing lives through the medium of bande dessinée (BD), French-language comics. The text analyses three biographical (...) BDs dedicated to the lives of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus as well as a selection of print and online comics that extend the legacy of these philosophers and their historical movement. The work is the first to analyse biographical BD through the lens of Existentialism, offering a new theory of reading biographical comics. The research not only contributes a novel approach to comics but also an enhanced understanding of Existentialism and the Existentialists, including their enduring contemporary relevance. (shrink)

_The Art of Comics_ is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a powerful contribution to the philosophy of art. The first-ever anthology to address the philosophical issues raised by the art of comics Provides an extensive and thorough introduction to the field, and to (...) comics more generally Responds to the increasing philosophical interest in comic art Includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis Many of the chapters are illustrated, and the book carries a stunning cover by the rising young comics star David Heatley. (shrink)

Batman has been one of the world’s most beloved superheroes since his first appearance in issue #27 of Detective Comics in 1939. Clad in his dark cowl and cape, he has captured the imagination of thousands of fans with his acrobatic fighting skills, high-tech crimefighting gadgets, and swift but often violent brand of justice. But why has he enjoyed such long-lived popularity as a character? And why have his actions caused debate among fans and philosophers? Based on four decades of (...) comic book storylines, Batman and Ethics explores the concepts and contradictions of the ethical and moral code of the Dark Knight. From the logic behind his aversion to killing, to the implication of his use of torture, to the moral status of vigilantism in the pursuit of justice, Batman’s ethical precepts are both compelling and deeply flawed. Starting with the character-defining work of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams in the early 1970s, through the revolutionary era of the reimagined superhero comic in the 1980s and 1990s, to the new directions in the modern works of Grant Morrison, Ed Brubaker, Scott McDaniel, and ending with the release of the New 52, Batman and Ethics explores the developments of Batman's most troubling ethical dilemmas. It is a thought-provoking and entertaining journey through four decades of Batman's struggles and triumphs - a perfect way for readers to approach the complex questions of ethics and moral philosophy through one of the most popular canons in comic book history. (shrink)

When the character of Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four no. 52 in July 1966, legendary creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby didn't just write a story about another hero with extraordinary powers, they birthed the first Black superhero. For Lee, "it was a very normal thing," because "A good many of our people here in America are not white. You've got to recognize that and you've got to include them whatever you do." While it might've seemed normal to (...) Lee, Black Panther's (and Wakanda's) significance cannot be overstated. After all, the first Black superhero isn't just a Black superhero, he's the King of an African nation endowed with otherworldly powers, and Wakanda isn't just an African nation, it's the most advanced civilization the Earth has ever seen. Indeed, it shouldn't be lost on us that when Black Panther was introduced (during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s) the thought of a Black President-or an advanced, futuristic African society-would have been, well, unthinkable for too many people. (shrink)

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.

Untangle the complex web of philosophical dilemmas of Spidey and his world—in time for the release of The Amazing Spider-Man movie Since Stan Lee and Marvel introduced Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962, everyone’s favorite webslinger has had a long career in comics, graphic novels, cartoons, movies, and even on Broadway. In this book some of history’s most powerful philosophers help us explore the enduring questions and issues surrounding this beloved superhero: Is Peter Parker to blame for the death (...) of his uncle? Does great power really bring great responsibility? Can Spidey champion justice and be with Mary Jane at the same time? Finding your way through this web of inquiry, you’ll discover answers to these and many other thought-provoking questions. Gives you a fresh perspective and insights on Peter Parker and Spider-Man’s story lines and ideas Examines important philosophical issues and questions, such as: What is it to live a good life? Do our particular talents come with obligations? What role should friendship play in life? Is there any meaning to life? Views Spider-Man through the lens of some of history’s most influential thinkers, from Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant to Nietszche, William James, Ayn Rand, and Alasdair MacIntyre. (shrink)

How Superheroes Model Community examines superheroes as a community engaged in protecting the public sphere. Nathan Miczo highlights and explores the interpersonal and communicative practices that are necessary to being a member of such a community.

_An engaging look at the philosophical underpinnings of Earth's Mightiest Heroes_ Avengers assemble! Tackling intriguing dilemmas and issues that no single great philosopher can withstand, this powerful book enlists the brainpower of an A-list team of history's most prominent thinkers to explore the themes behind the action of Marvel Comics' all-star superhero team. Arms you with new insights into the characters and themes of _The Avengers_ Deepens your appreciation both of _The Avengers_ comics and the Joss Whedon movie adaptation Answers (...) the philosophical questions you've always had about Earth's Mightiest Heroes, including: Can a reformed criminal become a superhero? Can an android love a human? If a hero beats his wife, is he still a hero? Helps you think differently about the members of the superhero team—Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the others This thought-provoking book will help you understand this band of superheroes better, whether you've followed the Avengers for years or are a Joss Whedon fan just getting to know them. (shrink)

A team of philosophical writers examines the startling ideas and arguments of this pundit of persuasion.

In this essay, I take up the question of why so many of the movies made by Hollywood are endless sequels, “prequels,” and remakes of prior blockbuster hits and so many are based on comic books (X-men, Superman, Batman, and so on). I tie the explanation in part to the aforementioned 1950 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting production companies, and in part to broader cultural changes. In particular, I argue that precisely because film producers can no longer make money from (...) the concessions (i.e., the purchases within the theater), but only of the ticket sales, the producers keep producing remakes of known popular movies, rather than make deeply original movies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Boundaries: Writing and DrawingTom ConleyBoundaries: Writing and Drawing, edited by Martine Reid; Yale French Studies, iv & 268 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, $15.95 paper.The fifteen articles of this issue of Yale French Studies discern the limits of meaning and legibility wherever writing and drawing become coextensive. In pondering the origins of writing Henry-Jean Martin (in Le pouvoir et l’histoire de l’écrit) has recently asked if (...) script and print have evolved from pictographic or hieroglyphic writing. If so, he implies, to what degree does visual force animate all writing? How does meaning, otherwise conveyed through writing, get complicated or subverted by the shape or motion of its form? When does the writer engage the illegible to call into question communication in general? Citing Michel Foucault, for whom calligraphy and drawing offer a glimpse of an “immense and unavowable teratology” (p. 12), the editor argues that the visible matter of discourse becomes its repressed or irrecuperable—hence supremely literary—worth.She organizes the contributions under three rubrics. Part one studies the history of the relation of writing to drawing through emphasis on psychogenesis. For Serge Tisseron an “inscriptive gesture” (p. 29), a memory of a manual pleasure, is relayed through the artist’s or writer’s labors. The written trace recalls originary separation, the page becoming a “metaphoric container of one’s own body and the mother’s body” (p. 41). Georges Roque shows how postcartesian ideology associates line with philosophy and relegates color to a lower order of sensation. In a Derridean turn he notes, “color is to drawing as [End Page 410] writing is to speech” (p. 57). Jean-Gérard Lapacherie argues that we are taught to exclude reading from the act of looking at a text, and that contemporary literature forcibly erodes that division.Part two is devoted to close analysis of writers who draw. Jacques Leenhardt brilliantly analyzes visual and aural displacements, even condensations, what he calls “monograms of sensation,” in the sketches and notes in Stendhal’s Journal de Paris. Alain Buisine traces the appeal that drawings of Rimbaud’s face had for the poet’s milieu. Claude Gandelman studies Proust’s manuscript drawings in light of the broader process of dreamwork in A la recherche du temps perdu. Looking at the Cahiers, 1894–1914, Serge Bourjea contends that for Paul Valéry the labors of intellection and writing are a “matter of sketching” (p. 137), or of perpetually “rough” drafting. Jacques Derrida’s “Maddening the Subjectile,” Mary Ann Caws’s limpid translation of an essay on Artaud’s textual drawings (“Forcener le subjectile”), defines a pictogram as what moves ceaselessly and inseparably between painting, drawing, and verbal expression.Part three moves toward artists who write. Bernard Vouilloux rehearses Derrida’s arguments about the “supplement” and the pictogram to themes of painting and painters in Rousseau’s early and later works. Michel Thévoz gives a dazzling reading of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut dans l’écriture, the explosive sketching of discourse that fractures the icons of elegance and control that project the myth of clear and classical French. Jan Baetens calls “latent violence” the marvelous areas where image, geometrical form, typography, and enunciation abut each other in M. C. Escher’s drawings, Régis Franc’s comic strips, and Martin Vaughn-James’s La Cage. Renée Riese Hubert sums up the volume with a study of the double binds that Derrida and Adami project in their collaborations of drawing and writing.This issue of Yale French Studies holds to the theme of writing as drawing. Martine Reid’s introduction and her two interviews with Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy map out an overall itinerary of vicious circularity. Literature is a continuing regression, fraught with pleasure and risk, that takes place when language, writing, and drawing are conflated. All of the essays are of high quality. Tisseron, Leenhardt, Derrida, and Thévoz set a standard to which the others conform. All adepts of art and literature will welcome this fabulous volume.Tom ConleyHarvard UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to have its own (...) aims and methodology. (shrink)

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 1 Gabbay and Woods, eds., The Rise of Modern Logic from Leibniz to Frege, Vol. 3 of the Handbook of the History of Logic (Amsterdam, etc.: North-Holland, 2004). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 29 (winter 2009–10): 167–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 eviews BERTRAND RUSSELL IN RECENT (...) BOOKS ON LOGIC HISTORY Irving Anellis Peirce Edition / Indiana U.–Purdue U. Indianapolis, in 46202–5157, usa [email protected] Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods, eds. Logic from Russell to Church. Vol. 5 of The Handbook of the History of Logic. Amsterdam, etc.: North-Holland, 2009. Pp. xii + 1056. us$260; £157.99; ¤185.95. Leila Haaparanta, ed. The Development of Modern Logic. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2009. Pp. x + 904. us$150.00. The essay “Bertrand Russell’s Logic” by Andrew D. Irvine in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic is one of the shortest in the volume (pp. 1–28). But something of Russell pervades many of the other essays as well, as we might expect given the centrality that Principia Mathematica has occupied in the historiography of logic through much of the twentieth century. This is especially evident in the lengthiest of the essays, Andrea Cantini’s “Paradoxes, Self-reference and Truth in the 20th Century” (pp. 875–1013), and more than tangentially in Dale Jacquette’s “Logic for Meinongian Object Theory Semantics” (pp. 29–76) and Michael Potter’s “The Logic of the Tractatusz” (pp. 255–304). In their preface, the editors of the Handbook explain (p. vii) the rationale for treating Frege and Russell in separate volumes.1 One reason is that it was a matter of simple conveniencez—zto keep the volume covering logic from Leibniz to Frege of manageable size. The other is historical: while admitting that Frege and Russell shared important goals and the philosophical position of logicism, it is noted that Frege’s most important work in logic and foundations was carried out prior to his learning of Russell’s paradox, whereas the entire corpus of Russell’s work, Principiaz included, was designed to a considerable extent in eTorts to deal with the paradox, as was much of the work in logic, set theory, and philosophy of logic that came as a consequence of the discovery of that paradox. Gabbay April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 168 Reviews and Woods also make explicit the philosophical diTerences between Frege and Russell regarding the epistemological status of axioms as one of the signiWcant diTerences between these two. More particularly, the editors assert (p. viii) that, in the very brief period between publication of the second volume of Frege’s Grundgesetze (1903) and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903), there was a pronounced shift initiated in the goals of mathematical logic, away from naïve apriority of axiom systems, towards study of the limits and properties of formal systems.Thecontributors to these metalogical concerns, Herbrand, Hilbert, and Gödel, among others, are the subject of the bulk of the essays included in Volume 5 of the Handbook. The task that Irvine undertakes is initiated by the eTort to understand the unity of Russell’s technical body of work in mathematics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. Thus the discrepancy between the neo-Hegelian concept of relations, inherited from Bradley, with certain types of relationsz—zlogical, spatial, temporal, for examplez—zwith the mathematical understanding of relations, is given as the ground for Russell’s abandonment of idealism in favour of realism (pp. 4–5). For example, there is nothing inherent in two relata, say Abelard and Héloise, which contributes to the relation of love between the pair; rather, its root is found in the mental states of one or the other of the lovers, so that the relation itself is not an intrinsic property of one of the pair. Likewise, Russell reaches this position... (shrink)

Part of the educational system in England has been geared towards the preparation of particular professions, while the identity and status of members of some professions have depended significantly on the general education they have received. Originally published in 1973, this volume explores the interaction between education and the professions. It also looks at the education of the main professions in sixteenth century England and at how twentieth century university teaching is a key profession for the training of new recruits (...) to other professions. (shrink)

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on comics and the anarchist imagination. The curators of the 2014 British Library exhibition, "Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK," noted that "there has always been a certain anarchic streak" in comics. Indeed, since Ralph Chaplin's Black Cat appeared alongside the work of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW's Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist (...) publications, while comic books themselves have often featured anarchist heroes. To take a few more examples: in the 1960s and 70s, Donald Rooum's Wildcat comics strips featured... (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

A patient arrives in the emergency room apparently in a comatose state. But is he really unconscious or just faking? The young doctors on duty are skeptical. Failing to get a reaction with a chest rub, they try a variety of methods that become increasingly sadistic—pressing on the patient's fingernail with a ballpoint pen, spraying his testicles with a skin‐freezing compound, announcing an imminent eye injection to scare the patient awake.I first encountered those chilling pen‐and‐ink images in a 2012 (...) class='Hi'>comic book, Disrepute, authored by Thom Ferrier, the nom de plume for British general practitioner Ian Williams. Disrepute is part of a young but growing genre that Williams helped dub "graphic medicine" when he founded a website by that name in 2007. Using the graphic novel form, doctors, nurses, and patients are producing accounts that often reveal the dark underbelly of the world of medicine. From patients and their families, these include portraits of imperious and insensitive physicians or nurses; from doctors, explorations of the doubt that racks them when their treatment ends in a mistake or a patient's death. While the form is also referred to as “comics,” the work, as in Williams's strip, is bleak just as often as it is humorous. (shrink)

In this close analysis of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment, Dr. Julie N. Books, explains why Kant fails to provide a convincing basis for his desired necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Drawing upon her extensive background in the visual arts, art history, and philosophy, Dr. Books provides a unique discussion of Kant’s supersensible, illuminating how it cannot justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. She uses examples from the history (...) of art, including paintings by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Constable, to support her views. This book will make a significant addition to courses on the philosophy of Kant, aesthetics, philosophy of art, metaphysics, the history of Western philosophy, ethics, psychology, and art history. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

A fun introduction in comics to deep thinking and the history of philosophy -- Back cover.

What exactly are comics? Can they be art, literature, or even pornography? How should we understand the characters, stories, and genres that shape them? Thinking about comics raises a bewildering range of questions about representation, narrative, and value. Philosophy of Comics is an introduction to these philosophical questions. In exploring the history and variety of the comics medium, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray chart a path through the emerging field of the philosophy of comics. Drawing from a diverse range (...) of forms and genres and informed by case studies of classic comics such as Watchmen, Tales from the Crypt, and Fun Home, Cowling and Cray explore ethical, aesthetic, and ontological puzzles, including: -/- - What does it take to create-or destroy-a fictional character like Superman? - Can all comics be adapted into films, or are some comics impossible to adapt? - Is there really a genre of “superhero comics”? - When are comics obscene, pornographic, and why does it matter? -/- At a time of rapidly growing interest in graphic storytelling, this is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of comics and some of its most central and puzzling questions. (shrink)

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. The book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find much to learn and enjoy here.

In this concise text, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the "problems of philosophy". _Plato Etc._ reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy. Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and (...) universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger’s "scandal of philosophy", the nature of moral truth and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism. _Plato Etc._ seeks to revindicate the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that the author’s "dialectical critical realism" has the categorical power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as a critical introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar. (shrink)

As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. Its six chapters discuss, first, certain ancient ideas about truth; secondly, the Aristotelian conception of predication; thirdly, various ideas about connectors which were developed by the ancient logicians and grammarians; fourthly, the notion of logical form, insofar as it may be discovered in the ancient texts; fifthly, the question of the 'justification of deduction'; and sixthly, the (...) attitude which has been called logical utilitarianism and which restricts the scope of logic to those forms of inference which are or might be useful for scientific proofs. In principle, the book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. There is no scholarly apparatus of footnotes, and no bibliography. It can be read in an armchair. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find it interesting. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References.

Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. The book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find much to learn and enjoy here.

“Ambivalence” is the key word in much of this book; “comic” [is the book’s] most obscure and I think absolutely without use value. I don’t know what B[urke] means by “comic,” as a matter of fact. I wonder if he does, and could define it briefly. Readers of Kenneth Burke are well aware of the importance of comedy and its associated cluster of concepts in his work: comic, comic frame, comic attitude, comic corrective. This (...) cluster of terms figures prominently in his 1937 book Attitudes Toward History, most notably in two key passages that scholars turn to time and again. In the first, from the “Poetic Categories” section of the book, Burke explains how different genres serve as guides for how to act in the... (shrink)

The Pythagorean Life is the most extensive surviving source on Pythagoreanism, and has wider interest as an account of the religious aspirations of late antiquity. "...admirably clear translation and sensible introduction"--The Classical...

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)