Philip Nel

Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo

Abstract To deepen and expand the study of Don DeLillo, we need to acknowledge the role gender plays in his work. Since William Burkes “Football, Literature and Culture”—the first literary criticism on DeLillo—was published in the Southwest Review twenty-five years ago, scholars of DeLillo have addressed topics as diverse as postmodernity, historiography, systems theory, technology, film, and literary Naturalism. Work in these areas has been and may continue to be necessary, but the field of DeLillo studies should not limit itself to these well-traveled and, arguably, still fertile critical grounds.1 Fortunately, there are signs that critics are beginning to move into other areas of inquiry.

The Disneyfication of Dr Seuss: faithful to profit, one hundred percent?

This essay takes a critical look at the Disneyfication of Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904–1991), examining how a man whose books encourage critical thinking became a brand name, and is increasingly becoming an affirmation of consumer culture. Since his death, Dr Seuss’s name and characters have been used to promote cereal, credit cards, and action figures (among other things); this strategy has led many to cite Suess’s indifference to money and his reluctance to exploit his characters for commercial gain. And, as this article points out, posthumously licensed products are more likely to encourage consumption for its own sake, whereas ones licensed during his lifetime tend to encourage creative or imaginative play. However, the Disneyfication of Dr Seuss is not strictly a posthumous phenomenon. After losing a 1968 case against companies that marketed ‘Dr Seuss’ products based on his 1932 Liberty Magazine cartoons, Dr Seuss accepted his lawyers’ (and the court’s) conclusion that trademark is more powerful than copyright, and approved the production of a vast array of Seussiana. Drawing on legal research, analysis of the products themselves, conversations with Dr Seuss Enterprises and with his biographers, the article concludes that Seuss’s Disneyfication is a symptom of a legal system designed to benefit capitalism more than moral or artistic values.

Re-imagining America: Jeff Smith, Herman Melville, and national dreamscapes

A recurring gag in Jeff Smiths acclaimed graphic novel series Bone (1991–2004) is that Moby-Dick (1851) is a snoozer. But, as we argue, Herman Melvilles masterpiece puts other characters to sleep not because it is dull but because its most ardent advocate – protagonist Fone Bone himself – is a New Critic bent on divorcing the novel from the context in which it was created or might be read. By contrast, Bones frequent invocations of Moby-Dick (Smiths favourite novel) recontextualize Melville, transforming the book from aesthetic artefact into a critical imagining of contemporary America. To borrow Henry Jenkinss assessment of Ricardo Pitts-Wileys theatrical adaptation of Mevilles novel, Smith sees Melville ‘as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity’. The most successful example of the 1990s’ comics artists’ self-publishing movement, Bone samples and remixes high culture and low, the epic and the comic, allegory and adventure in order to transform both the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth-century comic into a complex, contradictory meditation on power, nation, and citizenship in America at the millennium.

The Fall and Rise of Children's Literature

Children’s literature is literature. American critics understood this fact in the nineteenth century but deliberately forgot it during most of the twentieth. As Beverly Lyon Clark details in her brilliant Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, scholars of literature sent “kiddie lit” into exile from the early 1900s until the 1970s. During that period, librarians became its curators, with the unintentional result of further marginalizing children’s literature—placing it beyond the realm of serious consideration, alongside other unfairly neglected art forms, like comics and cartoons. As Clark explains, “the professoriate” treats librarians “more as handmaidens than as fellow scholars and teachers.”1 And so the (male) academy felt justified in continuing to banish the genre: it was popular, “childish,” and, if women took it seriously (librarians tended and still tend to be women), then how important could it be? Those of us who study children’s literature would reply that it is arguably the literary form most worthy of serious attention. These are the books people read before they are fully formed. Their ideas about themselves and the world in which they live are still developing, but so are their ideas about poetry, prose, art, and book design. Children’s books impart not only messages about morals, knowledge, and power but also lessons in aesthetics, humor, and the pleasures of reading and looking. It’s worth knowing that the richly allusive In the Night Kitchen (1970) is Maurice Sendak’s tribute to his own childhood, adopting the style of Winsor McCay’s classic comic Little Nemo in Slumberland, employing bakers who resemble comedian Oliver Hardy and starring a protagonist named for Mickey Mouse. Valuable to know, too, that what Sendak calls an “homage to old times and places” also bears darker themes—one critic suggests that the naked Mickey’s escape from the oven echoes Nazi ovens and Sendak’s childhood consciousness of the Holocaust.2 As Sendak’s work demonstrates, children’s books can be complex, playful, and profound. That its audience may be short in stature does not make children’s literature a lesser art form. For those who share this view, there is some good news. Concurrent with the rise of women’s studies and cultural studies, children’s literature has been making its way back into the halls of academic respectability in the last thirty-five years. The 1970s, for example, saw the launch of Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and, in Britain, Signal—all scholarly journals that examine children’s literature as literature. Eleven universities (eight in the U.S. and three abroad) now offer both the MA and the PhD in English with concentrations in children’s literature. In these programs (all begun since the late 1970s), students can enroll in “Disney and Its Discontents” (University of Florida), “History of Children’s Book Publishing” (Simmons College), “Children’s Book Artists” (Hollins University, Virginia), or “Dr. Seuss” (which I teach, at Kansas State University). In the last decade, the Harry Potter phenomenon has spurred an even greater interest in literature for children. Children’s literature studies happily cross disciplinary lines, looking at how issues like ecology, gender, and class play out in these books for young readers. They also borrow ways of seeing from other disciplines, including history, art history, and design studies. Children’s literature is also art. Picture books require a distinct critical vocabulary, which Perry Nodelman’s Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (first published in 1988) and Molly Bang’s Picture This: How Pictures Work (first published in 1991) have helped to articulate. As Nodelman notes, we learn to read pictures just as we learn to read Philip Nel