The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0460 Monday, 9 July 2007
[1] From: Mike Jensen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 10:43:07 -0700
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
[2] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 14:52:02 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
[3] From: Hannibal Hamlin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 15:14:04 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
[4] From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 8 Jul 2007 17:33:05 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mike Jensen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 10:43:07 -0700
Subject: 18.0456 Classical Comics
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
Ah, I should never read SHAKSPER posts except those answering a question
that I have posed, and I should never, ever, go back and read the past
posts of a thread. As usual, too many members comment from the gut,
without citing or perhaps even knowing the literature, which leads to
mere opinion and repetition. Opinions are fine, but they are not "right."
Those who wish to be better informed may want to see the next few issues
on Shakespeare Newsletter, where a series on Shakespeare comics begins
(I believe) in the next issue.
All the best,
Mike Jensen
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 14:52:02 -0400
Subject: 18.0456 Classical Comics
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
>Comic books are not, IMHO, a substitute in a classroom for
>Shakespeare, or Vergil, or Dickens or Woolf, or Rushdie, or ???
No one here said they were. Please re-read what I said. You will find
that I AGREE with you that comic books are not a substitute for the real
thing. They might, however, inspire young children to want to try the
real thing, or at least not be too afraid of it. I don't see that you
disagree with that or think it is a bad thing.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hannibal Hamlin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 06 Jul 2007 15:14:04 -0400
Subject: 18.0456 Classical Comics
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
I suppose I can join those who are fessing up to a youth absorbed in
comics. The Classics Illustrated were especially helpful in
comprehensive exams, though with some exceptions (Michael Strogoff and
Lorna Doone seem to have passed over the horizon). I'm not sure the real
point here is an either/or. To condemn an entire genre even on the basis
of dominant trends is critically narrow, though I do notice that every
time this topic comes up, everyone cites Maus. One brilliant example is
not really enough to make the point, and my (admittedly haphazard)
reading around in the genre hasn't turned up anything else to match
Spiegelman's work, not even Satrapi's Persepolis , a compelling story
that doesn't seem to be much enhanced by the comic form. Most comics
were and remain enjoyable (perhaps) but Literature Lite. Studying them
can reveal much about national (adolescent?) cultural values, to be
sure, and one can chart the development of techniques of drawing and
writing, but the content of most comics is formulaic and superficial.
Of course, that may not prove the case in the future. John Knapp's
responses point to a larger problem, however, and that has to do with
the danger of falling for the trendy and techy simply because they're
there. Since the 60s arguments have been made for the power of images
over texts and the new "literacy," and now there is a whole new
generation of gadgets to support the case for what has been relabeled
"digital media." There is nothing inherently wrong with these media,
but I find most of the arguments for their "content" unconvincing. The
adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is true only if one is
speaking of naturalistic description. If one turns to the development
of complex ideas or the representation of interior psychology, say, the
reverse tends to be true. This is what we risk missing if we rush
uncritically to embrace film or comics versions of great literary works.
Maybe a comic book Proust does appeal to students more than the
novels, but what is the point? It's hardly important to read Proust for
plot (!), and this seems much like the Lambs' tales from Shakespeare.
Maybe they will encourage the reading of the originals, but more likely
not. And the students who do end up reading the originals will have to
spend a good deal of time unlearning before they can really learn. You
know what I mean if you've taught Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer
Night's Dream to undergraduates and have had to spend time at the start
cutting away misconceptions based on early experiences in high school or
the popular media.
Hannibal
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 8 Jul 2007 17:33:05 -0400
Subject: 18.0456 Classical Comics
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0456 Classical Comics
As a sometime academic (but still publishing scholar) who no longer has
the leisure to contemplate, a la MLA, how many gay angels can dance on
the head of a Native American pin, I too have been distant from this
thread. I read Shakespeare (to the extent that one can) at 11; I also
grew up on Superman and Batman and Archie comics in a non-literary
household (my mother--who had completed the English equivalent of high
school--never read, and my Dad, who left school at 13 to help support
his widowed mother, was self-educated, reading mostly what his
generation would call drug-store novels, though he strenuously
encouraged me to do otherwise), and wonder (as Anne Cuneo seems to be
doing) how much of the interest they engendered in story-telling and
plot-lines and a child's general fascination with fantasy contributed to
my later love for literature writ large?
In theory, like most of the respondents, I am too old-school to advocate
what is apparently the recent introduction of the genre of "comics" to
the formal study of literature. But seeing what I see of "literacy" in
the real world (that is, among business and government employees who
have difficulty writing at the tenth-grade level the documents they
produce are supposed to achieve, though they possess what are supposedly
advanced academic degrees), I question if any venue--whether it is
Sesame Street, Marvel comics, or some other unconventional avenue of
inspiration--that induces students to think, to analyze, to care enough
to read Shakespeare or Milton, should not be considered legitimate?
An anecdote: exhausted from studying for my written doctoral
examinations at 4:00 a.m. the night before the 18th century exam (the
area in which I was admittedly least competent), I gave up, and played a
tape one of my students had made for me from something she saw on TV. It
was the "Three-penny opera," which at the time I had no idea was a
reincarnation of Gay's "Beggars' Opera." Cotton-candy for the mind? Yes.
But at that point, exactly what I needed. (I couldn't have read another
word in print if my life had depended on it.) Of course I had already
read the text--but in the muddle that was at that point my assimilation
of eighteenth-century drama, this "comic book" version of the original
was saving grace. When I arrived at the examination, the play (in its
written form) was so fresh in my mind that the words necessary to
respond to one of the major essay questions simply tumbled out of me.
Would I advocate comics in lieu of reading the actual text? No--no more
than I would tell my students to read "Cliff's Notes" in lieu of
_Paradise Lost_ or _Hamlet_.
But that doesn't mean that the comics' version of great literature is
trash, if it inspires them to take on the real thing.
The Demi Moore version of _The Scarlet Letter_ was an atrocity--but it
served, for anyone who had actually read the novel, to emphasize the
ways in which the only thing resembling Hawthorne's work was the title.
Judging from what I've read of this thread, "classic comics" seem to be
doing better than that.
Best to all,
Carol Barton
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