Foto do autor
6+ Works 71 Membros 2 Reviews

About the Author

Jared Gardner is a professor of English and film studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845.

Includes the name: Professor Jared Gardner

Obras de Jared Gardner

Associated Works

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King (2012) — Introdução — 21 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

There is no Common Knowledge data for this author yet. You can help.

Membros

Resenhas

While this book did drag at points, I did enjoy it. It was great to learn a bit of history of Peanuts because it's just so iconic. Well researched. 3 out of 5 stars.
 
Marcado
Beammey | Jul 6, 2018 |
Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling: Good stuff in every chapter here, even though some of the claims for the uniqueness of comics—as opposed to their prototypicality for new kinds of storytelling—weren’t convincing. (E.g., “[o]nly by allowing past to bleed into history, fact into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other and, more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves…. [T]here is no body of work that is better suited to the task than that of graphic memoir ….”)

Gardner argues that comics, as culturally degraded objects, as works melding text and images, and as works that always require audience engagement to figure out what happens in the “gutter” between panels, model a particular kind of storytelling that is becoming more dominant in a digital, archival world where we can find multiple iterations of the same thing ever more easily. “Comics creators—while faced with an array of choices at every turn—have never had the possibility of developing tools and techniuqes that would allow them (as Hollywood cinema would do after 1920) to efface the gaps (the structural ‘gutters’), to suture the cuts and obscure the apparatus. Such acts of ‘suture’ have never been available to comics.”

There’s a huge gender piece here that Gardner doesn’t really touch on when he gets to comics, given the role of suture in feminist film theory. He does emphasize the role of active women in the early Hollywood serials and the way the serials exploited discontinuities/gaps that feature films “were actively working to close off,” such as the possibility that film reels would arrive out of sequence, or that viewers would miss a week and need to be caught up. Serials, he argues, encouraged active fandom by encouraging viewers to think themselves into the narrative and discuss and speculate with others. “[E]ach reader experiences the temporality of the serial form differently, each reads the serial installments in conjunction with other elements of the serial publication in an order that cannot be predicted or standardized, filling in the gaps between the installments based on individual experience and communal interpretation”—no wonder guardians of taste preferred the more easily corralled book. Audiences loved “flat” characters not because they were well-rounded (as new theorists said was the mark of a good character), but because the audience members had to participate to bring the characters to life. Gardner argues that comics explicitly foregrounded readers’ participation and even partial control over what happened—thus, the vaunted letter columns of the comics. (By contrast, audience participation was decreasing in high culture through the 20th century—no shouted interventions for opera-goers! “[E]arlier audiences who found their responses no longer tolerated wihtin the theater moved to vaudeville and the sports arena where older practices of interactivity were still privileged.”)

One of the serial heroines stated, “I want to sample all kinds of different life, and I want the biggest samples cut.” (A sewing joke!) Gardner concludes: “Such a promise for the predominantly working-class female audiences is what made the film a smash success: sampling as adventure.” Serials also had a transmedia existesnce, encouraging audiences to read related stories in magazines. The producers of that particular film held contests among readers for the best answer to the question of what would happen next. Serials defied the conventional marriage plot/happy ending and also the tragic ending by rejecting endings; they blurred public and private (which linked them to the rise of celebrity culture); and they changed over time as the audience did.

Also, here’s the best trivia: the author of the first full-length academic study of fanzines, in 1973, was none other than Fredric Wertham, who saw in them the possibility of recuperating popular culture through amateurism from sensationalism for the sake of sales. Gardner isn’t seeking to rehabilitate Wertham, but he does argue that Wertham was at least trying to understand how actual comics readers read comics, unlike the Frankfurt School around the same time that was content just to condemn. “[B]oth his 1950s fears and his 1970s fantasies were born from his recognition of the power of this new form to activate readers’ imaginations and from his keen sense, as both a student of popular culture and a Freudian analyst, of the power of images to do much more than simply ‘display.’” The homosexuality he found in Batman and Robin was something one of his informants spoke of with wistful longing—the gay reader saw in them the promise of domestic bliss, otherwise denied him. But it was exactly that openness to interpretation—which Gardner less convincingly sometimes argues was unique to or uniquely heightened in comics—that terrified Wertham and other critics.

Gardner also discusses reasearch from the mid-20th century about the propensity of comics readers to create their own. Comics’ foregrounding of the process of creation promised not that anyone could be “discovered” as a potential Hollywood star, but that anyone could make their own comics—and plenty of people tried, circulating their work among their friends. (Everyone invents fandom.)

Another aspect of comics is their embodiment, in contrast to the rationalized/disembodied aesthetics of high culture. Critics worried about comics’ “capacity to engender bodily and affective responses that humanities criticism was working to relegate to a primitive past and a degenerate present.” Comics were “predatory” because they required viewers’ involvement to complete them; high criticism also denied readers’ rights and needs to insert themselves into the text, and comics were all about that.

Gardner posits that a cultural appetite for texts that don’t require a choice—that include past and present, text and image, creator and reader, and multiple versions of the same story—have led to the growing cultural influence of the comic form in recent years. We move from cause and effect narrative to databases and pluck out what’s attractive or useful. The DVD (and earlier the VCR) allowed even movies to be broken down into individual frames, watched out of order, remixed, and copied, making old rules of film viewing obsolete. “With the power to pause, to rewind, to zoom in, we increasingly seek out texts that allow us to put our newfound powers to use.” Serial cinema rewards interconnections across media and films (e.g., the new Avengers cycle). This speedup and intensification also links to “the fantasy of the plastic body that can withstand any assault and come back for more”—which is fundamentally a cartoon body, “one whose strength and resilience derives form the iconic powers of representation.” Gardner is aware, though, that all these changes are being deliberately deployed by capitalist producers with the intent to control—or at least profit from—the results. Comics are popular because they don’t seem to threaten the studios’ dominance, even as the passive audience becomes an even less plausible concept.
… (mais)
½
1 vote
Marcado
rivkat | Sep 15, 2013 |

Prêmios

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Ian Gordon Reviewer, Editor
Robert C. Harvey Contributor, Reviewer
Will Eisner Contributor
Mark J. Cohen Contributor
Mark D. Winchester Contributor
David Beronä Contributor
Oliver Harrington Contributor
Alan Fried Contributor
Christopher Lamb Contributor
Frank Stack Reviewer
Joseph Witek Reviewer
Amy Kiste Nyberg Contributor
Trina Robbins Contributor
Charles Hatfield Contributor
Roger A. Fischer Contributor
John A. Lent Contributor
M. Thomas Inge Contributor
Julie F. Andrews Contributor

Estatísticas

Obras
6
Also by
1
Membros
71
Popularidade
#245,552
Avaliação
½ 2.6
Resenhas
2
ISBNs
15

Tabelas & Gráficos