The 53rd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language
Association
Sessions sponsored by Saving the Day: Accessing Comics in the
Twenty-first Century, a joint outreach effort of the Alliance for the Promotion
of Research on the Matter of Britain and the Association for the Advancement of
Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture. (More information at
https://accessing-comics-in-the-21st-century.blogspot.com/.)
Friday, 11 March 2022 -- Track 9 (11:45 AM - 01:00 PM EST)
9.25 Adaptation and Appropriation in/of Graphic Narratives
Chairs: Nick Katsiadas, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Carl
Sell, Lock Haven University; Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Location: Grand Ballroom (GB) 7 (Media Equipped)
Paper 1
"Illustrating Resistance: A Postcolonial Reading of Bhajju
Shyam’s The London Jungle Book" [REMOTE]
Sayanti Mondal, Illinois State University
Using The London
Jungle Book (2004) by Bhajju Shyam and Gita Wolf as the primary text, this
paper offers a postcolonial reading of the text by highlighting its content and
mode of expression as forms of cultural resistance— a counter-narrative. The
story is a pictorial narration of the artist, Shyam’s, experience of visiting
London for the first time. As a member of the Gond tribe, Shyam uses the
indigenous Gond art form, replete with animal symbolism, to narrate his
experience in a foreign city. His version of London effectively disrupts the
established notion of the cosmopolitan city through the title of the book. He
successfully subverts one of the essentialized traits of India associated with
jungles (Inden, 1) by turning London to a jungle of different kind: a concrete
jungle, where order, mannerism, and style of livelihood does not align with his
known systems. Shyam interrogates the exemplary accounts of the Indian jungles,
recurrent throughout Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), by his use of
indigenous Gond idioms to recreate London as a “strange bestiary”; an
interpretation that upsets the antecedent perception of the civilized city.
Through his animal imageries Shyam returns Kipling’s gaze at the Other with an
equal sense of wonder, humour, and unique personal sense of expression. This
rhetorical shift in the narratorial voice showcases how the ‘jungli-ness’ of a
community or a nation is a variation of perspective; a character attributed to
unfamiliarity. By having an indigenous folk artist as the storyteller, The
London Jungle Book subverts the pre-existing socio-political power dynamic
established between the coloniser and the colonised, through a shift in the
narratorial position.
Additionally, Shyam
narrates his story in an indigenous art style—the Gond art style. He chooses to
paint his experience through Gond symbols/images rather than use the popular
logocentric mode of expression—words. By documenting a personal experience in
an indigenous mode, Shyam constructs his identity that defied the tools imposed
by the outsiders. Shyam’s capitalization of this visual medium allows him to
mobilise indigenous aesthetics not confirmed by the colonial language or wider
cultural order. Hence, taken from a postcolonial perspective, this rhetorical
move hints at not just countering popular stories, but also counters popular
storytelling practices. Said emphasized the act of storytelling as the “method
used by the colonized people to assert their own identity and the existence of
their own history” (Said, xv). According to him, culture was the source of
identity, and by opting for the communal practice of storytelling, Shyam not
only confirms his subjectivity as an artist, but by associating this cultural
practice to his community, the Gond tribe, he also performs his communal
identity.
Work cited:
Inden, Ronald. Imagining
India. Indianapolis: IUP. 1990. Print.
Said, Edward W.
“Introduction”, Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books: New York, 1994.
PDF.
Sayanti Mondal is a Doctoral candidate at Department of English
Studies, Illinois State University. Her doctoral thesis reassesses the genre of
postcolonial Indian graphic narratives and its potential in redefining
Indigenous (collective) identity. Her research interests include South-Asian
literature, Transmedia studies, Postcolonial Museum Studies, and Translations.
She is also currently working on a project of re-imagining the space and place
of museums by re-thinking it through a multimedia textual format, especially in
a pandemic and post-pandemic context.
Paper 2
"The Metaphor of Memories: A Semiotic Reading of the Graphic
Narrative This Side That Side" [REMOTE]
Shivani Sharma, Indian Institute of Technology
This Side, That Side:
Restroying Partition (2013) is an anthology
curated in the medium of a graphic novel by Vishawajyoti Ghosh. It contains a
collection of stories that draws the visual experience of Partition between
India and Pakistan in the year 1947 – the tales of two sides from literary
works and traces of memories. The narrative is weaved through twenty-eight
stories with the collaboration between artists, writers, filmmakers, designers,
and journalists. The multivoicedness of the storytellers into the format of
graphic narrative has brought out the possibilities of analyzing the
experience(s) of Partition from contemporary South Asia. The present study
focuses on two thematic strands: (a) the question of intermediality through the
discourse of Partition in the anthology, and (b) a text-intensive semiotic
analysis of the metaphor of memories through the select experiences in the
narrative. The trope of memory builds a crucial nexus of ‘seeing’ Partition
through the use of “black ink”, collage, panels, and photo-essays. This study
presents the debate on Partition enveloped in the form of memories in the
visual-verbal interface by the storytellers. Through the semiotic reading of This
Side, That Side, the paper attempts to understand the centrality of
metaphors as a narrative technique in weaving the divide of 1947 presented
through the complex art of storytelling.
Shivani Sharma is a
Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of
Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her research interests include Epic Studies,
Semiotics, Comics Studies, and New Media. In her doctoral research, she is developing
an analysis of epic narrative with a particular focus on the Mahābhārata
and media platforms. She has received Shastri Research Student Fellowship from
Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute for her research. She has published articles in
peer reviewed journals such as South Asian Review and The
International Journal of Comic Art.
Paper 3
"The Count in Comics: Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Comics and Comic Art"
Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
is among the most adapted texts of Victorian literature with creative artists,
especially those in the United States, producing versions of the story for
every conceivable medium. Scholarship on
these adaptations has proliferated in recent decades as the academy has become
more welcoming of popular culture, and studies of variants of Dracula in
drama, fiction, film, and television programing now abound in articles, books,
essay collections, and theses and dissertations. However, the comics, an
extremely active medium for adaptation, remain largely ignored by scholars of the
novel, despite the existence—according to a recent search of the Grand
Comics Database—of nearly eight thousand examples of Dracula-inspired
comics and graphic novels (of these, over four thousand were produced for
American readers). The full depth of the
corpus is no doubt much richer when one starts to take into account cartoons
and comic strips not readily indexed by sites like the GCD.
While it is true that
enthusiasts of Count Dracula have long embraced the comics medium and offered
some attempts at describing this rich corpus, there has been, to date, no
sustained academic inquiry into the material, an omission within Dracula
Studies that should not persist. Previous discussions and catalogues of Dracula-based
comics, tools like the Grand Comics Database and the Lone Star Comics
website, and online repositories like Comic Book Plus and comiXology
now allow us to map out a more complete history of the Count’s career in the
comics, and it is time to consider a more systematic approach to these works.
To accomplish this goal, this study will analyze the general trends in
adaptions of Dracula and, using notable examples from the corpus,
classify them as retellings, linked narratives (such as a prequel or sequel),
and recastings. Such formulations will allow the academic community to better
access these texts and begin to use them more profitably in research and
teaching.
Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies program
at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and works as an adjunct instructor in
English in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His research on comics focuses
on the adaptation of literary works from pages to panels, including studies of
the Arthurian legend, Beowulf, Bram Stocker’s Dracula, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the works of H. P. Lovecraft and H. G.
Wells. Michael is also active in the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture
Association and organizes sessions under the Monsters and the Monstrous Area
for their annual conference in the fall.
Saturday, 12 March 2022 -- Track 14 (08:15-09:45 AM EST)
14.7 Classics Illustrated: Adaptation and Appropriation in the Comics
(Part 1)
Chairs: Nick Katsiadas, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Carl
Sell, Lock Haven University; Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Location: Dover C (Media Equipped)
Paper 1
"Illustrating Ys: The Appropriation of Breton Myth in Merlin, the
Graphic Novel"
Karen Casebier, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Although the principal
aim of Soleil Productions’s Légendes Arthuriennes series is to provide graphic
novels that adapt medieval works of Arthurian literature for contemporary
audiences while maintaining a close relationship with their medieval sources,
two series in this collection diverge radically from Arthurian literary
traditions by integrating Breton myth into pre-Arthurian Britain, Ys: La Légende (2011-14)[1] and Merlin (2000-14).[2]
As literary adaptations,
each series represents a different approach to engaging with traditional
literature: Generally speaking, the
Merlin series adapts its sources, following the broad conventions known to the
character in medieval romance, so that it corresponds to Jason Tondro’s Traditional
Tale in his typology of Arthurian comics;[3] whereas Ys: La Légende appropriates its source material
by integrating the character of Ahès, the Princess of Ys whose written legend
began to circulate during the late medieval period, into some of the
less-developed areas of Merlin’s more established and defined presence as
prominent (albeit somewhat mysterious) figure that dates to the earliest known
Arthurian legends. Indeed, Ahès status
as a liminal figure in Breton myth is illustrated in her graphic novel by the
casual use of Arthurian characters who interact with the main characters, as
well as myriad objects and geographic locations that serve as backdrops, so
that Ys: La Légende more closely
conforms to Tondro’s notion of the Arthurian Toybox than as a serious reworking
of literary tradition.
Nonetheless, the grafting
of this figure from late medieval Breton mythology into the established legend
of a prominent Arthurian character constitutes an appropriation of the
character of Ahès that both complements and deviates considerably from her
traditional role in the legend of Ys, so that the Merlin series ultimately
results in an a new tale that appeals to experts and neophytes of both literary
traditions.
[1] Istin, Jean-Luc,
Dejan Nenadov and Alex Gonzalbo, 3 vols. (Strasbourg: Editions Soleil, 2011-14).
[2] Istin, Jean-Luc and
Eric Lambert, 10 vols. (Toulon: Soleil
Productions, 2000-2014).
[3] For a full
explanation of the five categories, see “Camelot in Comics,” in King Arthur in Popular Culture,
Eds. Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002) 169-81, 169-70.
Karen (Casey) Casebier is an Associate Professor of French at the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her principal area of
research is the conflation of the sacred and the profane across different
genres of thirteenth-century French literature, including saints’ lives,
romance and the fabliaux. Her research interests include manuscript
studies, bestiaries and contemporary interpretations of Arthurian
literature. She recently published an article on representations of
gender in Arthurian comics for Synergies as well as an article
on resurrection motifs in Marie de France for Le Cygne. In
her copious free time, she is working on a series of unpublished, unedited
miracle tales in a 14th-century manuscript branch of La Vie
des pères.
Paper 2
"Changing the State of Tragedy: Ronald Wimberly's Prince of
Cats and the Evolution of Shakespeare"
Ciara Fulton, SUNY University at Buffalo
Douglas Lanier has long
argued that Shakespeare adaptation is a rhizomatic phenomenon – branches and
veins of adaptations link, interweave, and connect to one another over the
course of centuries. However, when it comes to comic book adaptation within
Shakespeare, a large swatch of comics are dismissed as remedial tools, or as
Sarah McNicol writes, “stepping stones” to be utilized in secondary level
classrooms to bridge the gap between teaching texts and greater literary works.
This framing of comic book adaptations has led to the belief that these texts are
not independent pieces of literature, and therefore, as Lanier argues, they
must arise from somewhere within the substance of the original text. With this
in mind, Ronald Wimberly’s Prince of Cats may appear as yet another
retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; however, upon closer inspection,
Wimberly’s graphic novel becomes a pictorial, textualized evolution of
Shakespeare and his famed tragedy.
In this paper, I argue
that by linguistically weaving together two languages with the use of African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE) and Shakespearean Elizabethan poetics, Wimberly tells
a new Shakespeare story that is spoken as well as written. In utilizing careful
reflection and analysis of the comic, as well as Lanier’s adaptation theory and
Scott McCloud’s understanding of unified images-and-texts within comics, I show
that the nature of Shakespeare’s tragedy while perennially poignant is not
incapable of change. In this way, I mean not only to draw attention and study
to Wimberly’s text, but also to push forth the idea that while Shakespeare
comic book adaptations may be rhizomatic, they are also capable of radical
evolution, independence, post-Shakespeare-ism, and re-invention.
Ciara Fulton is a PhD
student at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on comics and
graphic novels, adaptation and appropriation of early modern texts alongside
graphic narratives, early modern women writers, and “pop” Shakespeare. Her MA
thesis, completed in May of 2021, proposed that Shakespeare graphic novel adaptations
should be centered as a space for education, independent study, and reflection.
Paper 3
"Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Rereading G. K. Chesterton in a
Greater Literary History"
Nick Katsiadas, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
In Adaptation and
Appropriation, Julie Sanders suggests that the process of adapting classic
literature creates opportunities to explore artists’ personal ideas about
literary works. Where Sanders stops at texts and their relationships with other
texts, Helen Vendler discusses what happens when artists use aesthetic spaces
to reimagine past artists: They often establish personal, intimate
relationships with them. She writes, “The contemporary artist goes to the masterpieces
of the past seeking an intimate presentness of instruction, colloquy,
sympathy.” If we extend Sanders and Vendler’s ideas to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman,
they help us better understand the identities of authors in the story. For
instance, much scholarship on Sandman is wont to read how Gaiman constructs
relationships with William Shakespeare, because the series reimagines the
playwright’s career. What is less obvious and unexplored, however, is the way
that Gaiman constructs the author G. K. Chesterton as “the heart” of the
story—as the heart and center of the title character’s realm of The Dreaming.
This structure, I argue, encourages readers to explore Gaiman’s personal ideas
about Chesterton, and if readers cooperate and follow Gaiman’s initiatives to
construct intimacy with Chesterton, then we can better understand not only
Gaiman’s relationships with literary history but, also, Chesterton’s place in
literary history and his relationship with literary modernism: The importance
in this reading is in the ways that Gaiman’s adaptation of Chesterton’s
identity helps us better understand Chesterton’s identity in literary history;
comics can help us better understand literature.
Nick Katsiadas is a
lecturer in the English Department at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania.
His research focuses on European Romanticism and its echoes in later
experimental narratology. He is the
author of "Mytho-Auto-Bio: Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the Romantics,
and Shakespeare's The Tempest" and "The Unwritten:
Romanticism in Comics?"
Paper 4
"Parable of the Sower: How Graphic Adaptation Contends with
Sociopolitical Predictions of the Past"
Hannah Leonard, SUNY Binghamton University
In 1993, Octavia Butler
published the first book of her Parable duology, Parable of the Sower.
As a staple author in the speculative fiction genre, as well as within our
catalogue of thought-provoking WOC writers, Octavia Butler has founded some of
the world's most prominent critiques of Western patriarchal, capitalist
societies through the science fiction lens. The Parable of the Sower does just
that, critiquing what Butler foresaw for the future of the United States,
following the main character Lauren Olimina as she explores the facets of a
dystopic, post-apocalyptic 2024 US landscape, ridden with theft, disease,
famine, and religious disillusionment. Though written in the 1990s, this book
eerily predicted the volatile political realities we now face today. In 2020,
John Jennings and Damian Duffy adapted Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower
into graphic novel format, elucidating how these predictions from the past have
come to fruition today. This paper will focus on the ways in which the graphic
novel remains faithful to the original prose of the 1993 publication, as well
as how the visuals of the adaptation—color schemes, panel juxtaposition, ethnic
representation, deviations of line art and panel style—incorporate critiques of
the sociopolitical struggles that we face only two years prior to Olimina’s
fictional quest. Points of argument will include intersectional feminist
critique of the science fiction genre as it is adapted into graphic novel
format, and adaptation and appropriation theories as it relates to authorial
intention.
Hannah Leonard is a
graduate student with the Comparative Literature department at SUNY Binghamton.
Her research interests include graphic novel and adaptation, folkloric and
mythological retention, medieval literature and linguistics, digital humanities,
and intersectional feminisms.
Saturday, 12 March 2022 -- Track 16 (11:45 AM - 01:15 PM EST)
16.7 Classics Illustrated: Adaptation and Appropriation in the Comics
(Part 2)
Chairs: Nick Katsiadas, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Carl
Sell, Lock Haven University; Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Location: Dover C (Media Equipped)
Paper 1
"Sampling the Odyssey: Adaptive Revision in Øyvind Torseter’s Mulysses (2017)" [REMOTE]
Mari Nilsen Skogsrud, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
This paper examines
Øyvind Torseter’s comic book Mulysses (2017) and its relationship to Homer’s
Odyssey. As the title Mulysses might suggest, Torseter draws
inspiration from the familiar story of Ulysses (more commonly known by the
Greek variant Odysseus), and similar to the Odyssey, the comic book
tells the story of a hero’s perilous voyage at sea and his encounters with
cyclops and other monsters. However, the comic book is not an adaptation in the
traditional sense, i.e. an announced revisitation of another text (Hutcheon,
2013). Instead, Torseter has created an original text wherein he appropriates,
samples and quotes the Odyssey, and thereby revises and adapts the epic,
albeit in a partial and unannounced manner. While the comic book contains clear
references and parallels to the Odyssey, these are not announced to the
reader. Rather, Mulysses is an example of what John Bryant (2013) has
termed “adaptive revision”.
Through adaptive
revision, Torseter creates a complex web of intermedial references to Homer’s
Odyssey and to other texts (e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Asbjørnsen
and Moe’s Norwegian Folktales). Thus, it serves as an example of how
intermedial references can transform a text and blur the boundaries between
different texts and media. In order to identify such references, the reader
needs prior knowledge of them, and therefore, the reader’s interpretation of
the text is entirely dependent on their context knowledge, or their cultural
memory (Kukkonen, 2008). By exploring the use of intermedial references in Mulysses,
I wish to discuss how adaptive revision contributes to the reader’s
understanding of the text, as well as how the adaptation (re)constructs
cultural memories in the reader.
Mari Nilsen Skogsrud is a
PhD candidate in Norwegian literature at Inland Norway University of Applied
Sciences, where they conduct research on comics and graphic novels.
Paper 2
"Fabricated Historicity in Graphic Appropriations of Edgar Allan
Poe's Classics"
Elizabeth Woock, Palacký University
The pages of many Golden
and Silver Age comics featured appropriations of works of classic literature,
particularly in horror series (Schoell 2014), and publishers such as EC,
Charlton, and Warren, among others, often borrowed from the works of Edgar
Allan Poe (explored in Perry and Sederholm 2012). Through manifesting the short
story in sequential art, a historical setting emerges and can be located
throughout the three communication planes of the integrative multisemiotic model
for comics (Lim 2007). Medievalisms appear within the typography, graphics, and
also at the level of discourse semantics and register, which could be expected
in appropriations of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the
Red Death,” which engage in blurring of historical markers, however other texts
such as “The Raven” are also transported to a medievalist setting, despite no
such specification being made in the original.
This paper will look
specifically at those works explicitly attributed to Poe which are localized in
a medieval setting or feature medievalist simulacra to bolster the horror mode,
and compare how both writers and illustrators insert medievalisms within the
heteroglossic comic. The choice to indicate a medievalist setting for Poe’s
texts both points to the Gothic nature of some stories, but it also suggests
modern media associations with horror (Arnold 1998) and an indication of
historicity and authenticity (Clements 2014). These appropriations will also be
placed in light of Poe's contemporary reaction to graphic realizations of his
writing, which welcomes artistic license.
Straddling two
fields—Medieval Studies and American Literature—E. A. Woock is an assistant
professor at Palacký University, in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her research is
primarily concerned with investigating medievalisms in imagetext and comic
books, and she is eagerly following the development of comics as a form of
scholarly communication with comics based research.
Paper 3
"The Queer Art of Ameliorative Reframing in Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home"
Travis Kurowski, York College of Pennsylvania
Comics are a queer form
of literature, historically diminished for centuries by critics as minor or
merely popular art, and at times condemned for seducing innocent, young minds,
turning them towards deviant, criminal behavior. Allison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic
künstlerroman Fun Home is Bechdel’s coming of age story as a lesbian
comics artist. In Fun Home, Bechdel reframes classical works—from Ancient Greek
myths to the literature, film, and theater of the 19th and 20th centuries—in
order to heal, both personally and for readers, from the destabilizing shame
society has brought upon both queerness and the medium comics. Raised by a
closeted gay father who taught high school English—and who, Gatsby-like, worked
to sculpt their home and family into something approaching the American mythic
ideal—the literary works that stocked the Bechdel home library and her father’s
classroom functioned as a kind of language that Bechdel and her father used to
communicate and, eventually, come to know each their own “erotic truth.”
Through the detteretorialization of works by Camus, Wilde, Joyce, and others,
and reterritorialization of these works within the pages of the comics medium,
Bechdel at one and the same time knits the medium of comics more firmly into
literary history, while also highlighting a queer line running through this
history directly into the lives of readers such as her and her father.
Travis Kurowski is an Associate Professor of English at York College
of Pennsylvania, where he teaches creative writing, literature, and publishing.
He coedited Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed
Editions, 2016) and recently published "The Literary in Theory" in
the Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2021).
