The Marvel Cinematic Universe has brought many of the best-known Marvel Comics stories to the big screen. But just because they use these stories it doesn’t mean they reproduce them faithfully. As it has been seen over the years, Marvel Studios’ film projects follow their own storylines that do not correspond to the main narrative of the comics. Starting from this premise, this research aims to study the evolution to Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) from the (...) class='Hi'>comic book series Thor: The Butcher of Gods (Aaron, 2018) on which it is based. Focusing both on what aspects they share and the differences that make Thor: Love and Thunder a standalone project. (shrink)

Discover innovative ways to strengthen your photography business with your iPad Many photographers are turning to the flexible, easy-to-use tools of the iPad and relying on them to wear a variety of hats in their photography business. Whether portable portfolio, editing tool, payment-tracking system, or appointment calendar, the iPad melds together the best attributes of the cell phone and a laptop computer and this unique book highlights them all. With this helpful resource, you'll learn how to get the most (...) out of your iPad to not only improve your business but also enhance your photography. Details how to use your iPad to schedule client appointments, accept payments, sign model releases, track business expenses, and more Teaches you how to take advantage of the hi-res display, cellular and WiFi connectivity, and powerful processor to increase efficiency Covers ways to use the iPad on location with on-the-fly editing techniques Offers suggestions for using the iPad as a backup storage device and how to use it in the studio Features a chapter on shooting movies with your iPad iPad for Digital Photographers shows you how to leverage the strengths of the iPad to enhance your photography and your business. (shrink)

A great deal of the humor that we encounter is narrative in form. This is obviously the case with many, if not most, jokes. But humor also occurs in more expanded narrative frameworks, including plays, novels, films, short stories, TV programs, comic books, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether there are any plot structures—of magnitudes greater than that of the joke—that might be thought of as comic in virtue (...) of their narrative form. (shrink)

This book makes Calhoun's philosophy accessible to contemporary thinkers and shows what Calhoun thought about issues such as world government.Topics discussed ...

This chapter contains sections titled: McCloud's Definition Pictures and Comics Panels, Panels Everywhere Seeing‐in and Closure Pictureless Comics? Wordless Prints, Unprinted Words Spaces Between Words The Air of Non‐Pictures A Continuum of Cases Comic Books and Ideal Books Notes References.

During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier after another—in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee, along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters engaged in a favorite pastime—playfully bragging about their strength, their skill and their exploits—they used animal metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock (...) of the Wilderness to furnish nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real frontiersmen—Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos Bill—and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer—A most vicious fellow—a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests was about the British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. . . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy Jackson—"Old Hickory"—won a like award. Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch. Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His many influential works include Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor. "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different version in the book America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury. (shrink)

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)

This chapter examines the concepts of respect, self‐respect, and mastery and servitude to show that Wong does nothing wrong, and in fact something exceedingly noble, in dedicating his life to the service of Doctor Stephen Strange. Manservants and butlers are a notable element of comic book stories. Batman has Alfred, Iron Man and the Avengers have Jarvis, and of course, Doctor Strange has Wong. Wong's servitude leads to a more robust self‐consciousness and awareness of the world, and (...) self‐consciousness is an important foundation for self‐respect, which defeats any accusation of servility. Through his work for Doctor Strange, Wong better understands himself and the role he plays in protecting the world, which in turn makes him more aware of why he is worthy of respect and why the world is worth saving. (shrink)

Though graphic narratives (or comics) now permeate popular culture, address every conceivable topic including illness and dying, and are used in educational settings from grade school through university, they have not typically been integrated into the medical school curriculum. This paper describes a popular and innovative course on comics and medicine for 4th-year medical students. In this course, students learn to critically read book length comics as well as create their own stories using the comics format. The rationale (...) for the course, its general content and format, and methods for teaching are described. Finally, the author offers some reflections on why this medium resonates so powerfully with medical student learners. (shrink)

The rise in popularity in recent times of dystopian fiction is reflective of contemporary anxieties about law: the inhumanity of judicial-coercive machinery; the influence of corporate power; the lack of democratic imagination despite the desperate need for political reform; and the threat of order imposed through violence and victimisation. These dystopian texts often tell fear-inducing stories of law’s failure to protect; or of law’s unsuccessful struggle against unbridled power; or even sometimes of law’s ‘bastardised’ reconstruction. Indeed comics, with their (...) visual and narrative intricacies, thrive on dystopia as a key vehicle for contributing to collective notions of fear and trembling about the future. Yet, at the same time, these texts also contain within them the blueprints for hope—the idea that with transformation, heroic intervention, and/or faith in ‘justice’, the law will ultimately prevail. Law’s ability to be transformed is thus simultaneously portrayed as society’s downfall, AND as the key to enlivening humanity. This article attempts to understand this schismatic role of law as presented in the recent dystopian comic book series From Above by Australian creator Craig Bruyn. In this series set in futuristic Melbourne, where law has given way to an unaccountable corporate rule, the social divide is made manifest by the absence of ‘order’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in certain segments of society, and yet hope in law’s return is ever-present. The paper will interrogate expectations of law and justice that is mediated through the complex interaction of fear and hope, and contextualise this within current contemporary anxieties. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References.

This chapter contains sections titled: Illustrated Books: A First Step The Image‐Text Complex in Comics The Image The Text How Comics Work An Objection Conclusion Notes References.

We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against (...) a large sample of 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture. (shrink)

Henryk Chmielewski is the author of a historical comic book devoted to the 100th anniversary of Poland regaining its independence. The comic book of Chmielewski is a subjective vision of Polish history, because every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. Artist says about very difficoult moment of Polish history (the 19th century, the early 20th century). He creates original story, argues, that the idea of Poland as an independent state was never (...) not lost. Polish people were formed armyduring the Napoleonic Wars, and Polish organisations started major uprisings (the Polish–Russian War of 1830–1831 and the January Uprising of 1863-64). Chmielewski creates an interesting picture of the world with the use of many varying forms, different codes (e.g. picture, word, photography). He use various means of expression: semantic, linguistic, compositional (see values, compotents: metannaration, digression, opposition "we" - "they", stereotype, appropriate words - freedom, Poland, Poles, relationship: fiction - real world, illusion, colloquial language). (shrink)

A modern form of narrative, comic books are used to communicate, discuss, and critique issues in business ethics and social issues in management. A description of comic books as a legitimate medium is followed by a discussion of the pedagogical uses of comic books and assessment techniques. The strengths of the pedagogy include crossing cultural barriers, understanding the complexity of individual decision-making and organizational influences, and the universality of dilemmas and values. We provide an initial source for (...) educators on the topics, comic books, plotlines, and other commentary for consideration of use in the classroom from high school to graduate business ethics and social issues in management courses. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

What would happen if lightning struck a tree in a swamp and transformed it into The Swampman, or if saving billions of lives required sacrificing millions first? The first is a philosophical thought experiment devised by Donald Davidson, the second a theme from a comic written by Alan Moore. I argue that that comics can be read as containing thought experiments and that such philosophical devises should be shared with students of all ages.

The core of the study is a critical comparison of Nietzsche’s notion of Übermensch, and its transhumanist rewriting into different variants of the posthuman. The first part contextualizes transhumanist thought, primarily in relation to certain evolutionary ideas that, in their totality, exhibit a fundamental anthropological deficit: they speak of the evolutionary overcoming of human, but the limit of sensibility that attempts to imagine a future human being is only the mere negation of what human has been so far. In this (...) way, the posthuman is not removed from the somewhat vague context of the technological “extension” of previous humanity. In this respect, the whole concept is grossly unaesthetic. The second part shows that Nietzsche’s rethinking of the overhuman was intertwined with other anthropological structures, for example, the idea of Mitfreude (‘shared joy’), which is supposed to creatively (in the manner of art) replace the morally misleading notion of compassion. The Übermensch therefore enabled Nietzsche to propose a different conception of intersubjectivity; one that would no longer be reduced to contempt for the human being. The third section traces the causes of the transhumanist failure in productive imagination. It is based on the hypothesis that this failure is driven by an unconscious preference for the figure of the comic book Superman. It postulates, through a Kantian conception of the sublime, that an adequate elaboration of the image of the posthuman cannot do without an affective component that would allow for Bejahung (‘affirmation’). Only the artificial will always appear, to some degree, as alien, and therefore will never transcend the limits of reactive adaptation. A living posthuman could only emerge if he offered anthropological techniques of the art of living. Therefore, transhumanism continuously raises anthropological questions, especially regarding the problem of the extent to which the artificiality of art can be identified with technology. Without proper answers, it will not achieve the complexity of Nietzsche’s overhuman, and will always only dilute him into technological supplements. The posthuman will come into being when he is conceived as a grandiose work of art. (shrink)

“I dare to guarantee [the reader] that from this book he will acquire a clarity about and a deft drilling in individual dogmatic concepts that usually are perhaps not so easily obtained”, writes Kierkegaard at the beginning of this fascinating inquiry into the character of Adolph Peter Adler, a rural pastor and advocate of Hegelian philosophy who asserted in 1843 that he had received a special revelation from Christ but later contradicted himself in a flurry of intellectual prevarication. As (...) Kierkegaard notes, the supposed revelation looks suspiciously like Hegelian metaphysics confusedly combined with half-understood Christian concepts, and the “clarifications” Adler later sent to an ecclesiastical investigator are “evasions”, a way of changing essentially what he had earlier reported. Adler’s ever-changing story about who or what he is, his comical back-and-forth between the incompatible roles of apostle and man of letters, reveals a rootless soul that does not know itself: “he is a private, confused lyrical genius who casually exegetes incidental Bible verses ‘accordingly as these appeal to him’”. Having laid claim to a revelation, however, Adler must be called to account: either he must return to this revelation-fact with the simplicity and fervor of faith, or he must renounce his pretensions and revoke his original statement. For many years Kierkegaard labored over different versions of the book before he abandoned plans for its publication. One can understand his hesitancy. The finished product demolishes Adler’s position with the fury of a worked-up pugilist who keeps hitting his opponent after the knock-out bell has rung. Kierkegaard felt sorry for Adler and feared that his withering critique would “have too strong an effect on him”. (shrink)

One of the more compelling features of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct is its theoretical parsimony. Utilizing what essentially amounts to one explanatory principle—that of Darwinian selection—Dutton advances a theory of aesthetics that is at once general enough to account for cross-cultural variations in artistic production and sufficiently nuanced to promote insights into individual artworks. In doing this, Dutton’s work could not offer a greater contrast to some of the more vocal trends in contemporary aesthetic theory, where ponderous theorizing and (...) rebarbative jargons have violently opposed the idea—otherwise so modest—that aesthetic activities might draw on the evolved capacities of the human imagination. On .. (shrink)

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)

The history of the Wonder Woman comic book character is full of events and personalities as dramatic as the tales detailed in the text. The origins and development of this iconic female superhero demonstrate how competing ideas of what womanhood meant were reflected in popular culture. In this essay, the focus is on a particular issue of the Wonder Woman comic book, with a story by writer and literary critic Samuel R. Delany in 1972. In this (...) issue Wonder Woman takes on the role of a women’s liberation activist in New York City. This chapter in Wonder Woman’s history is either unknown or dismissed as misguided by many fans past and present, but it provides an interesting insight into how American comic books responded to second-wave feminism and Gloria Steinem’s appropriation of the Wonder Woman image. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

The 9/11 attacks in the USA had profound political consequences at both domestic and international levels. Specific and controversial policy developments were pursued requiring substantial legitimation to find acceptance. A prime example was the USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and subsequently received considerable critique due to the sweeping nature of its redefinition of what was acceptable in the cause of ‘fighting terror’. The media, and their construal of events and policies, played a significant (...) role in the necessary process of legitimation. In this paper, we explore how one particular area of the media, the superhero comic book, was also active in this regard. By focusing specifically on the multimodal meaning construction within Marvel's Civil War comics series, we suggest how a close multimodal discourse analysis can shed further light on the mechanisms by which particular discourse contexts of public opinion are propagated. (shrink)

The term gurlesque refers to an aesthetics that mixes feminism, femininity, the grotesque and the cute. This article explores how contemporary Swedish feminist comic books do gurlesque theory with the aim of contributing to the theoretical conversation about feminine aesthetics and gurlesque. The study focuses on two contemporary Swedish comic books, Jag är din flickvän nu by Nina Hemmingsson and Allt kommer bli bra by Lisa Ewald. The article views gurlesque as a queer aesthetics, as a form of (...) wilful misinterpretation and taunting of perceptions of femininity. The word gurlesque draws from the word ‘girl’, and questions the connection between girlhood and young age from a queer perspective. Although the gurlesque is rooted in images of girlhood, it has the potential to grasp femininities of all ages. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

This article argues that to disrupt legal education in a radical sense, students need to become acquainted with the art of worldmaking and the view that law is a “way of worldmaking”. First, I show that law is a cultural semiotic practice that requires decoding and, for that reason, demands a creative intervention by those that want to know, understand, and do things with law. Altogether this amounts to recognizing the different modes in which law creates, and is part of, (...) worlds. Second, I propose that due to different features of their aesthetic form, comics are a particularly effective medium to place students before the myriad ways in which law and lawyers make and reproduce worlds. Third, I illustrate the argument by exploring how the Saga comic series, through its formal multimodality and narrative and cultural complexity, can make good on that challenge. (shrink)

Abū-Hiffān _ c _Abd-Allāh Ibn-Aḥmad Almihzamī was an important transmitter of the Arabic literature of the ninth century AD / III H. The compilation of stories that he recorded about Abū-Nuwās became an authorized reference regarding to the production of this _innovative_ poet. _The Stories of Abū-Nuwās_ contribute to the fabulous tales that are placed in the era of the Abbasid caliphs with themes of wine and eroticism. The following introduction and translation of the narrative _An anecdote of (...) him with three_ intends to transpose into Brazilian Portuguese the fragment of this important moment of the literature in Arabic language, from the first centuries of Islam. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a (...) book in which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Noël Carroll THE PARADOX OFJUNK FICTION Perhaps on your way to some academic conference, if you had no papers to grade, you stopped in die airport gift shop for something to read on the plane. You saw racks of novels authored by die likes of Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Tom Clancy, and so on. (...) These are the kinds of novels that, when you lend them to friends, you don't care, unless you live in Bowling Green, Ohio, whether you ever get them back. They are mass, popular fictions. In another era, they would have been called pulp fictions. Following Thomas Roberts,1 I will call diem junk fictions, under which rubric I will also include things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies. There are a number of interesting philosophical questions diat we may ask aboutjunk fiction. We could, for example, attempt to characterize its essential features. However, for the present, I will assume that the preceding examples are enough to provide you with a rough-andready notion of what I am calling junk fiction, and I will attempt to explore anotiier feature of the phenomenon, viz., what I call the paradox ofjunk fiction. Thejunk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, dieir story dimension is die most important thing about diem. Stephen King, for instance, makes diis point by saying that he is primarily a story teller rather than a writer. Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners—the blurb on the cover of Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark says that it is "designed to be read at breatiitaking speed"—and what motivates turning die page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 225-241 226Philosophy and Literature over Clark's diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor die complexity of her sentence structure, as we do widi Virginia Woolfs. Radier, we read for story. Moreover, junk fictions are die sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which diemselves are typified by tiieir possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. For example, as John Cawelti has pointed out, one such recurring Western narrative is diat of the recendy pacifist gunfighter, like Shane, who is forced by circumstances to take up his pistols again, widi altogedier devastating effect.2 Junk fictions tell diese generic stories again and again with minor variations. Sometimes diese variations may be quite clever and unexpected. Agatiia Christie was the master of this; she was able to use the conventions of the mystery genre in order to "hide" her murderers. In TheMurderofRogerAckroyd, she "secrets" the murderer in the personage of the narrator; in Ten Little Indians, die murderer is a "dead man"; while in Murder on the Orient Express, all the suspects did it. In each of these cases, Christie's brilliance hinges upon her playing (and preying) upon conventional expectations. Neverdieless, even diese surprising variations require a well-established background of narrative forms. That is, in order to appreciate diese variations, die reader must in some sense know die standard story already. And with junk fiction, it is generally fair to say that in some sense, the reader—or, at least, the reader who has read around in die genre before—knows in rough oudine how die story is likely to go. Readers and/or viewers of Jurassic Park surmised, once die dinosaur enclosures were described, diat in fairly short order die dinosaurs would trample them down and go on the rampage—after all we had already seen or read The Lost World, King Kong, and their progeny. So, junk fictions are formulaic. They rehearse certain narrative formats again and again. And, furthermore, in some very general sense, the audience already knows die story in question. But this knowledge on die part of die audience provokes a question, specifically, why if the reader, viewer or listener already... (shrink)

In Brazilian schools, many teachers do not organize their teaching and students’ tasks and actions in a way that facilitates theoretical thinking based on the abstraction and generalization of the work content. Because many students struggle to accomplish the tasks and actions themselves, teachers guide them. Over time, the students begin to have more autonomy in executing the proposed activities, as they completed mental operations while learning. This article aims to investigate how young people’s and adults’ awareness of the countryside (...) is formed based on visual elements and writing, facilitating an understanding of their reality. A didactic–formative experiment was performed based on the cultural–historical theory. The comic books produced by the participants allowed them to develop their overall thinking, moving from the abstract to the concrete. They also formed an awareness of reality, which allowed them to have greater autonomy in the production of these stories as a means of representation and transformation of reality. (shrink)