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This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or inappropriate, this book offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative. These productive strategies include the use of the visual metaphors of the animal and the doll figure and the explicit and excessive depictions of mass violence. The book also analyses where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Furthermore, it explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels will appeal to those working in comics-graphic novel studies, popular culture studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies.
In Holocaust Graphic Narratives, Victoria Aarons demonstrates the range and fluidity of this richly figured genre. Employing memory as her controlling trope, Aarons analyzes the work of the graphic novelists and illustrators, making clear how they extend the traumatic narrative of the Holocaust into the present and, in doing so, give voice to survival in the wake of unrecoverable loss. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, these graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation and establish a new canon of visual memory. The intergenerational dialogue established by Aarons’ reading of these narratives speaks to the on-going obligation to bear witness to the Holocaust. Examined together, these intergenerational works bridge the erosions created by time and distance. As a genre of witnessing, these graphic stories, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow.
"As the Western began to flourish in literature, it also began to appear in illustrations and early comic strips of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William Grady charts the history of the genre in comic strips and books from its origins in this period through its mid-century heyday to its gradual decline in the 60s and 70s, ending with a brief look at the current "afterlife" of Western comics over the last few decades. In doing so, he also argues for the importance of comics in the development of the Western alongside both literature and film/television. He explains how the mythic-historical settings of Western comics allowed the young readers at whom they were aimed to explore diffe...
This book provides both students and scholars with a critical and historical introduction to the graphic novel. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explore this exciting form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyse graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago. Several key questions are addressed: what is the graphic novel? How do we read graphic novels as narrative forms? Why is page design and publishing format so significant? What theories are developing to explain the genre? How is this form blurring the categories of high and popular literature? Why are graphic novelists nostalgic for the old comics? The authors address these and many other questions raised by the genre. Through their analysis of the works of many well-known graphic novelists - including Bechdel, Clowes, Spiegelman and Ware - Baetens and Frey offer significant insights for future teaching and research on the graphic novel.
Beyond MAUS. The Legacy of Holocaust Comics collects 16 contributions that shed new light on the representation of the Holocaust. While MAUS by Art Spiegelman has changed the perspectives, other comics and series of drawings, some produced while the Holocaust happened, are often not recognised by a wider public. A plethora of works still waits to be discovered, like early caricatures and comics referring to the extermination of the Jews, graphic series by survivors or horror stories from 1950s comic books. The volume provides overviews about the depictions of Jews as animals, the representation of prisoner societies in comics as well as in depth studies about distorted traces of the Holocaust in Hergé's Tintin and in Spirou, the Holocaust in Mangas, and Holocaust comics in Poland and Israel, recent graphic novels and the use of these comics in schools. With contributions from different disciplines, the volume also grants new perspectives on comic scholarship.
This book explores the important role of the graphic novel in reflecting American society and in the shaping of the American imagination. It guides readers through the theoretical text-image scholarship to explain the meaning of the complex borderlines between graphic novels, comics, newspaper strips, caricature, literature, and art.
This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.
Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
First runner-up for the 2019 Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture Cultures of War in Graphic Novels examines the representation of small-scale and often less acknowledged conflicts from around the world and throughout history. The contributors look at an array of graphic novels about conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the Irish struggle for national independence (1916-1998), the Falkland War (1982), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Israel-Lebanon War (2006), and the War on Terror (2001-). The book explores the multi-layered relation between the graphic novel as a popular medium and war as a pivotal recurring experience in human history. The focus on largely overlooked small-scale conflicts contributes not only to advance our understanding of graphic novels about war and the cultural aspects of war as reflected in graphic novels, but also our sense of the early twenty-first century, in which popular media and limited conflicts have become closely interrelated.
Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics explores how graphic narratives reframe global crises while also interrogating practices of fact-finding. An analog print phenomenon in an era shaped by digitalization, documentary comics formulates a distinct counterapproach to conventional journalism. In what ways are ‘facts’ being presented and framed? What is documentary honesty in a world of fake news and post-truth politics? How can the stories of marginalized peoples and neglected crises be told? The author investigates documentary comics in its unique relationship to framing: graphic narratives are essentially shaped by a reciprocal relationship between the manifest frames on the page and the attention to the cognitive frames that they generate. To account for both the textuality of comics and its strategic use as rhetoric, the author combines theories of framing analysis and cognitive narratology with comics studies and its attention toward the medium’s visual frames.