Marianne DeKoven

Comic books and graphic novels

The first thing to say about comics – plural in form, used with a singular verb – is that it is a medium, not a genre. While comics has often been understood to be a lowbrow genre it is increasingly recognised as a powerful form of expression and communication in its own right, fashioning words and images, and, crucially, panels and ‘gutters’, on the printed page. In technical terms, panels are the framed moments in which a comics story unfolds, and they are separated by the blank space of the gutter, a space that allows the reader to project causality between frames. As for any medium, such as film, it is now standard to treat comics as singular. And, like other media, comics has given rise to a variety of different formats – including comic strips, comic books and graphic novels – and also a profusion of genres, from superhero and war stories to teen romances. However, while there is a booming commercial (i.e. genre-based) comics market, today the form is remarkably unconstrained by genre expectations. Comics narratives exist in spaces both esoteric, as in the recent growth of the abstract comics movement, and wholly public, such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbonss Watchmen , and Frank Millers Sin City , both recently popularised by Hollywood film adaptations.

Psychoanalysis and Sixties Utopianism

The utopianism of the 1960s, perhaps the last flowering of modern utopianism, called for a total transformation that was simultaneously, even inseparably, psychic, political and cultural. I will discuss some sixties utopian texts which use psychoanalysis along with, and intermeshed with, a variety of political, philosophical, and cultural discourses in order to represent a lifeworld of utter alienation, oppression, and thwarted, stifled authenticity. Although these works are permeated with the pessimism and revulsion engendered by this alienation, their most profound impact comes from a summons to what Herbert Marcuse calls the Great Refusal: a total repudiation of actually existing life at the psychic, social, intellectual, and cultural levels simultaneously, and the institution of a truly liberatory and just alternative—a new reality principle, as Marcuse demands and prophesizes in Eros and Civilization. It is the utopian nature of these projects, I would argue, based on the assumption that only a thoroughgoing, total transformation is capable of producing any significant change whatsoever—change that is meaningful because it is not coopted—that produces the particular, sometimes almost undifferentiated juxtaposition of psychoanalytic with political, philosophical, and cultural discourses that characterizes these works. This undifferentiated juxtaposition, in the seamless form in which we find it in these texts, bespeaking a coherent, universal intellectual project, is no longer available to current psychoanalytic work on culture. Analyzing its dynamics in these Sixties texts, however, can help us retrieve its refunctioned elements in the current conjuncture. In this essay, I will discuss two Sixties texts that were among the most influential and widely read at the time within both the new left and the counterculture, but that have subsequently all but disappeared off the intellectual map: Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, 1964, and, in a briefer discussion, R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, 1967.1 Marcuse is primarily a philosopher and political theorist who, within the Frankfurt School project of linking Marx and Freud, deploys psychoanalytic discourses as indispensable to his project. Laing is a psychoanalyst who employs political, philosophical, and cultural discourses as, similarly, indispensable. There is a sense in both texts of a parallelism, almost an interchangeability among these discourses, as if each treats, in mutually reinforcing and mirroring ways, a crucial component of what is a unified whole. I will also discuss very briefly the ways in which Luce Irigaray, writing at the end of what I would call the long Sixties, produces the same sort of totalizing, utopian project in Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974. For all of these projects, it is the utopian demand for reciprocal, mutually constitutive, total psychic, social, political, intellectual, and cultural change that creates this peculiar additive parallelism or intermeshing of discourses. Herbert Marcuse, one of the most important of the sixties intellectuals, has virtually slipped, with some notable exceptions, out of sight. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, by contrast, remain major presences.2 Benjamin, in particular, is enjoying what amounts to a renaissance, and Adorno is also increasingly widely read. Yet Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, one of the few most influential books of the Sixties, though now rarely studied, makes essentially the same central argument as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has of late become required reading. Horkheimer and Adorno’s “negativity” is always implicated in the affirmative, just as all resistance is subsumed by Marcuse’s one-dimensional society. Horkheimer and Adorno assume the impossibility of enlightenment just as Marcuse assumes that instru-

Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon

In his Introduction to The Yale Gertrude Stein, Richard Kostelanetz says that ‘no other twentieth-century American author had as much influence as Stein’ (YGS, p. xxx). However, outside the growing body of academic Stein criticism, Gertrude Stein’s public presence, her reputation in any segment of the culture which is aware of her at all, seems to have little to do with her work. Unlike the writers and artists with whom she is generally grouped, she is still perceived as not so much a writer as a ‘personality’, the centre of one of those nodes of celebrity which are equated with the avant-garde in highbrow mythology. Moreover, the most widely accepted myth of the history of Stein’s reputation is less interested in her, even as a personality, than in her association with important men: William James, Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wilder, Anderson. This myth begins its narrative with Stein at Harvard, working under James and Hugo Munsterberg. It follows her as she follows brother Leo to Paris and to the early joint purchases of the famous post-impressionist paintings, then to her friendships with Matisse, Picasso, Gris, and the other great male modern painters (Marie Laurencin might also be included these days, last name on the list).

The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf's Novels, and: Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, and: Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury (review)

Virginia Woolf is ideally suited to contemporary critical discourse. A remarkable number of key twentieth-century preoccupations, which remain the preoccupations of literary critics now, converge in her work. It is not just that her texts yield up riches, over and over again, to analysis informed by all current or recent critical orientations. That formulation makes her work seem a passive feeding ground for the publication-hungry critical establishment. Rather, her writing engages in a profound and multifarious way the issues out of which all those critical orientations have arisen.