A ‘Stain on Silence’: The Registration of Trauma in the Comics Memoirs of Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman

The value of comics as a medium for serious literary expression, despite growing popularity and recognition, is still contested. Two of the most successful examples of the medium, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 & 1992) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), use differing and similar strategies to narrate the transmission of trauma from parent to child. Maus records the testimony of Spiegelman’s survivor father’s experiences in hiding in Poland and in Auschwitz and Dachau, as well as the process of this testimony and the conflicted relationship between father and son. Fun Home’s traumatic history centres on Bechdel’s artistically ambitious father’s closeted affairs with teenage boys, and his overbearing influence on her own artistry and queer sexuality. This thesis tracks the narrative and graphic registration of trauma in these two memoirs, through their use of archival materials, consideration of the ethical problems of the representation of extremity and history, and treatment of narrative time

Viewing postmodernist television : Moonlighting, Twin Peaks and The Simpsons

Summary in English.Bibliography: p. [181]-195.Contemporary life is distinguished by a massive capacity for exchanging information. Increasingly comprehensive, global communication networks allow discrete realities to be linked. These prolific sources of representation generate a "membrane" of mediation, and a formal regime of fragmentation, depthlessness and allusiveness (Chambers, 11). These economic, epistemological and aesthetic conditions constitute postmodernism. This dissertation addresses the theoretical challenge of form by attempting to craft an approach commensurate to such semiotic density (Wollen, 65). Since formalist approaches have been criticised as ahistorical, attention is given to the concept's social dimensions hence the history and production context of communication technology is considered. The inquiry also acknowledges the specificities of its location. The matrix of unfamiliar allusions which characterises the South African experience of American texts, embodies the multi-tiered allusiveness of postmodernist texts. It also illustrates the cult precept that quotation can be appreciated even when its source is not recognized. Cult theorises viewership as active yet ambivalent (Eco, 1988, 454). The initial chapter delineates parameters in postmodernism, narrative, genre and cult theory. Subsequent chapters examine three postmodernist television series: Moonlighting, a detective series, Twin Peaks, a soap opera, and The Simpsons, an animated sitcom. Deploying parody, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, each has a complex relation with genre. Tony Bennett conceives of the latter as zones of sociality which constitute and are constituted by other zones (105). Changes in genre therefore articulate changes in modes of thinking and inscribe different reading strategies

The truth of a madman: the works of Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman is one of the most important figures in the history of American comics. His work Maus (1980 and 1991) is arguably the landmark text in the field of comic book studies. Given the relatively recent reissue of his first collection Breakdowns (2008) and the publication of his interview/essay collection/scrapbook Metamaus (2011), it is likely that his work will continue to be the subject of critical interest. This thesis concerns the collections Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). It represents the first book-length extended study of Spiegelman s three major works. The central argument put forth in this thesis is that the Spiegelman oeuvre articulates and manifests a madness which its author perceives to underlie supposedly rational society. In support of this thesis I will employ critical models from the following fields: Holocaust studies, trauma theory, the anti-psychiatry movement, theories concerning the representation of madness, formalist analyses of comics, and Genette s narratological taxonomy

Reading Narrative Images: Visual Literacy in Medieval Romance Texts and Illuminated Manuscripts

This study examines the instructive aspects of visual material in medieval romance texts and their illuminated manuscripts. Medieval romance contains an extensive array of visual references, and the present discussion focuses on the phenomenology of these episodes: depictions of the aesthetic and intellectual aftereffects of sight, and the imagination at work. Such instances are often related within the text to the act of reading itself, and through them the author encourages correct and effective practices of reading. In romance texts the characters often struggle to interpret such signs, sometimes with disastrous consequences, and their reactions in turn become lessons for the reader. The first section of the discussion focuses on romance texts, and particularly on depictions of image-crafting, the imagination at work, and the recognition and interpretation of visual signs. The discussion in the second section concentrates on illuminated romance manuscripts, and examines the authorial perspectives expressed through narrative illustration. The visual material of medieval romance is largely concerned with communication, and the didactic conversation that occurs between author and reader is implicit within the romance text. This study therefore demonstrates that the visual material in medieval romance narratives often has a practical function: to establish a dialogue between the author and reader, and sometimes the limner and reader, concerning good reading practices

Militarism, Security, and War: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Superheroes

In the fields of political science and international relations, engagement with popular culture has been deemed predominantly un-important and irrelevant as an area of study. This dissertation interrogates one of the most popular cultural icons of the early 21st century, the fictional Hollywood superhero, and asks what it does for us to take seriously that which is often deemed frivolous entertainment. Understanding the superhero as a political entity in and of itself, this project reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between its production, consumption and reproduction and particular ideologies around militarism, security and war. Acknowledging the complexities of superhero characters, narratives, and aesthetics such as subversive and contested elements, this project reveals superheroes as potential sites of political and ideological reflection, articulation, constitution, and transgression. This project demonstrates that a pop cultural/aesthetic approach to IR can enable critical practices that contribute to complicating and enhancing our understandings of war and politics

Implementing non-photorealistic rendreing enhancements with real-time performance

We describe quality and performance enhancements, which work in real-time, to all well-known Non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering styles for use in an interactive context. These include Comic rendering, Sketch rendering, Hatching and Painterly rendering, but we also attempt and justify a widening of the established definition of what is considered NPR. In the individual Chapters, we identify typical stylistic elements of the different NPR styles. We list problems that need to be solved in order to implement the various renderers. Standard solutions available in the literature are introduced and in all cases extended and optimised. In particular, we extend the lighting model of the comic renderer to include a specular component and introduce multiple inter-related but independent geometric approximations which greatly improve rendering performance. We implement two completely different solutions to random perturbation sketching, solve temporal coherence issues for coal sketching and find an unexpected use for 3D textures to implement hatch-shading. Textured brushes of painterly rendering are extended by properties such as stroke-direction and texture, motion, paint capacity, opacity and emission, making them more flexible and versatile. Brushes are also provided with a minimal amount of intelligence, so that they can help in maximising screen coverage of brushes. We furthermore devise a completely new NPR style, which we call super-realistic and show how sample images can be tweened in real-time to produce an image-based six degree-of-freedom renderer performing at roughly 450 frames per second. Performance values for our other renderers all lie between 10 and over 400 frames per second on homePC hardware, justifying our real-time claim. A large number of sample screen-shots, illustrations and animations demonstrate the visual fidelity of our rendered images. In essence, we successfully achieve our attempted goals of increasing the creative, expressive and communicative potential of individual NPR styles, increasing performance of most of them, adding original and interesting visual qualities, and exploring new techniques or existing ones in novel ways.KMBT_363Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-i

Interacting with Horror: Archaeology of the Italian Horror Genre from its Origins until the Eighties. Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava and Dario Argento

This research examines Italian horror cinema from its origins (1957) until the late 1980s, with particular focus on the productions of three Italian directors: Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava and Dario Argento. My research is divided into two distinct parts: theoretical and analytical. By adopting a variety of theories, which mainly follow three hermeneutic traditions – psychoanalytical (Freud, 1919; Abraham & Torok, 1994), pragmatist (Wiley, 1994) and social interactionist (Collins, 2000, 2004) – the first section of my project aims to outline three distinct phases of the circulation of horror symbols. The second part is devoted to a series of case studies, which function as exemplary illustrations of the elaborated theoretical framework. In order to define the field of analysis, my attention focuses on four thematic discourses: spaces, objects, identities and actions. A critical examination of selected films from Freda, Bava and Argento’s productions delineate the directors’ constant and extensive use of intertextual references to symbols already circulated at a first level. The theoretical framework of this thesis, in conjunction with filmic analysis, will contribute to a more exhaustive understanding of the archaeology of the genre. After establishing that singular theories do not supply sufficient information on genre issues, this study aims to address the gap in critical knowledge, reviewing the potentiality of the Italian horror cinema through a multidisciplinary discourse. An interpretation of the Italian horror genre can only exist in relation to a series of interplays with a multitude of factors. Hence, discussing the genre through filmic and extra-filmic schemes (including editing and marketing processes, censorship and spectatorship issues and intertextual references to external and internal archives of horror), this work acknowledges interactionism as a space of debate, which, encompassing several perspectives at a time (psychoanalytic, pragmatist, sociologic, etc.) allows a dialogic and exhaustive investigation of the Italian horror genre